As a teacher, my dad had a few hard and fast rules his students had to follow.
Kids couldn’t chew gum in class, talk when he was teaching or be disrespectful to other students.
As a dad, he taught us four kids some other hard and fast rules.
We had to be on time (that meant 10-15 minutes early). We had to help around the house. And we had to get our news information from more than one source.
What does more than one source mean?
Well, I remember watching the CBS Evening News with him one night in the late 1960s and the great anchor Walter Cronkite reported that more than 1,700 Viet Cong soldiers had been killed, while U.S. casualties were only 17. Night after night, this huge disparity in numbers was reported.
So I said to my dad, “Geez, then why haven’t we wrapped up this Vietnam war and come home. Listen to the difference in the number of soldiers killed again today.”
As a government teacher and a World War II veteran, he knew all about dealing with government numbers.
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe those numbers aren’t accurate?” he asked with a smile.
I had never questioned what I had seen on TV, heard on the radio or read in the newspaper before. And that was ironic, since I ended up spending 24 years working for a daily newspaper.
So I didn’t really know what my dad was getting at.
“Are you saying those numbers aren’t right?” I asked him.
In my naïve way, I had assumed that other countries and other news agencies outside of the U.S. produced tons of propaganda. But not our country.
So when I told my dad that, he laughed to himself.
“It works both ways,” he said. “We’re a great country, but propaganda is used for both good and bad reasons. What I want you to do as you get older is listen to more than one news source and then make a decision about what is right and what is wrong for yourself.”
I never forgot our conversation that night in front of the TV. It made me think about propaganda and journalism the way I never had before.
As a news anchor, Walter Cronkite was known as “the most trusted man in America.” So when he recited the huge disparity in number of deaths in Vietnam, he must have believed it himself.
But later, when he actually went to Vietnam and saw what was happening, Cronkite abruptly changed his tune. He began to advocate for getting our troops out of Vietnam. Other news sources soon joined in.
The lesson my dad taught me and my siblings was not to accept just one news source as gospel. Collect all the information you can before deciding where you come down on issues.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
But when I hear people spouting off about a certain subject and then ask them where they got their information, they look at me like I’m crazy… because they have only one source of information. It’s the one that feeds into their beliefs.
It’s kind of like comparison shopping, except there is no comparing going on. They are just blindly taking what is handed to them.
Somewhere in that lesson from my dad was the one about being responsible for things like what you feed your body and, just as important, what you feed your mind.
Weighing Both Sides of an Issue
Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!
About the Author: Cherryland
Very interesting and a great lesson to remember.
Thanks, Anne. It’s interesting that the best lessons we learned long ago still come into play today.
Anytime numbers are cited in support of an argument, I immediately bristle. The ease with which figures can be framed to support or attack any subject is too often exploited.
Bill, you’re absolutely right. It was the huge difference in numbers that even sparked my questions to my dad.
Totally agree. You can’t bank on information being legit from the internet or any news media. Makes it hard to make informed decisions
Good lessons to have learned as a child to take with you into adulthood. This is one lesson we frequently discuss with our children as well.
Outstanding! I could’t agree more about the value of checking more than one news source. Let me add fact checking. With an internet search it’s easy to do so.
We have minds and the freedom of our own opinion. Let’s use our minds to research our own factually informed opinion.
Great article!
It is so hard for most of us to keep an open mind. We may even read or view sources with different viewpoints, but still accept or reject according to our ideology. What students don’t consider is that their textbooks don’t contain just ‘facts,’ but also viewpoint. I taught middle school History for a time, and was sometimes stunned by parts of our history that was left out, as well as the spin on other parts. We need to teach –and practice –discernment.
Marianne, you hit the nail on the head. Keeping an open mind is the lesson I really learned.
I have been doming that for years since an interview on CBS 60 Minutes. They only put out the information they wanted to present. It had some element of truth, however, the end product was far from what had beeen related in the interview.
The content of this is excellent! Having studied History in college, I was fortunate to have professors who required us ask the one question about the information we read: WHY? Only when we take a look at the background of the data presented, asking why the author wrote it and why they used only certain information, is the viewpoint of the author revealed. In these times, students are expected to just regurgitate back what they have read or been lectured on with little to no room for questioning what the professors or teachers want their students to believe. This has been reflected in the grades of the students; myriad stories popping up about students getting low scores when they deign to debate or disagree with said information.
Civil debates and discussions have gone by the wayside over the last 50 to 60 years as this style of teaching has continued to invade the American educational system on all levels. If the next generations are going to stop being stifled mentally – because unethical regurgitation is not teaching but brainwashing and ‘dumbing down’ our society – Americans have to demand a return to a classical educational system which allows for all viewpoints to be examined. Only then will teaching be truly teaching; training students how to think – and decide – for themselves.
N.M., I liked your example. In fact, to double down on what you’re saying, my column next month in Country Lines and here on our website will be about those kinds of lessons learned from a college journalism instructor of mine.
Good thing cherry land doesn’t use propaganda.
It is amazing what many people will believe as the truth if they hear about it on TV or read about it on the internet. I believe that we, as a society, has gotten progressively worse at taking time to check facts to make sure they are correct before we share what we have heard. It is far easier to just take whatever you hear as the gospel and be good with it.
I think one reason why we do this is because it is not that easy to check such facts on what we hear & read. The internet has become a breeding ground of bad information and without the know-how to double check that information, we are kind of left hanging. It takes time to learn which places are good resources of information and which ones are not.
I hope people realize that you can’t believe everything you hear and read (especially on the internet) and to be a value resource of information on the world around us … we definitely need to take the time to research information and make sure that it is accurate.
Technology and the internet has made sharing & getting information much easier for us, but it has also made it just as easy for giving bad information as well.
Cathy, I agree with you 100%. It does take extra work to find responsible news sources sometimes. But it’s worth the effort!
Good advice, especially in today’s world of smear campaigns and fake news websites. I see people sharing links all the time about “this new scary thing you should know!” And they never bother to verify the accuracy of the source!
Kristina, you framed it perfectly when you tied it back to “the accuracy of the source.”
Great article! I wish more people read and watched the news with a healthy dose of skepticism. It encourages critical thinking, which people tend to want others to do for them.
I feel that with the move to 24-hour news networks, more and more of the news is exaggerated for shock value, debates are created where there is little to actually debate, and the quality of news has decreased. I think nowadays that your primary source or at least your secondary source should be a news source that doesn’t need to fill 24 hours every day with something exciting to attract viewers and ad revenue.
I agree, Sabrina. Shock value and distorting facts seem to sometimes win out over the truth.
Back in the day when we all trusted our government. Boy how times have changed.
My father once told me ” don’t believe anything you read and only believe half of what you see”.
Yes, and I would add, don’t rely on just news sources. Go to public meetings where the issue is being debated to hear both sides. Talk to industry, environmental, and field experts as well as individual citizens involved. When it comes to global issues, go international lectures at local universities and meet and host foreign visitors to our country to get their perspectives and “insider” stories.
Nothing you read, or listen to, no matter how objective the source, will be totally impartial.
Well put, Sonia. As long as we take the effort to gather the facts, then each individual can decide what they think is best.
Real nice bkog. Keep up the good work
Everyone should have a shortcut to Snopes.com for starters. All too often it seems news and social media are a little too concerned with getting the scoop and a little less worried about verifying all the facts. I also find it a little disconcerting that so many of the newspapers and television stations are owned by just a few big companies. It’s up to the news consumer to do the fact checking ….. even if you, like me, loved Uncle Walter….
I agree, Patty. And, yes, as a nation we all loved Uncle Walter, the most trusted man in America. The story goes that after Uncle Walter changed his mind about Vietnam and announced it on-air one night, President Johnson turned to his aides and said, “Well, if I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
Great article and comments.
Interesting…
I appreciate your comments, Allison. You are a talented writer that I read all the time.
Often ( maybe especially during election season!) fear and emotion are used to influence us~ unlike other posters on this blog, I think it’s very possible to fact- check statements we question. Credible sources ARE available if we choose to seek them. Snopes. com and factcheck.org are but two; certainly there are also scientific, educational, and governmental sources also.
I totally agree, Julee.
Great information to remember and share. Really like being able to read the stories on-line. Save a tree and let us opt out of receiving the mailed version – thanks!!
Interesting! Always enjoy your articles.
I wish that people would practice the same on the subject of global warming.
I recently called the Climate Scientist for the National Resource Defense Council
and asked if their commercial with children wearing oxygen masks and encouraging viewers to all congress and support the EPA regulations against carbon pollution. I asked if the commercial is referring to carbon dioxide pollution. She then went into a 10 minute speech on the evils of CO2.
After, I said ” since you feel so strongly about CO2 pollution could you tell me, approximately, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere”. There was dead silence for 30 seconds. I asked if she was still there and she responded “yes”. I asked “do you have an answer”. She responded ” I really don’t know”. I then gave her my 15 minute lecture informing her that CO2 is actually relatively low in the history of the earth and that it was 20-25 times higher 500 million years ago at the start of the giant fern forests and 5-6 times higher at the start of the dinosaur s 60 million years ago.
The above was a sad but honest answer but consistent with some 40 energy staffers in congress that I have surveyed but less honest. They offered many answers with none being close. The worst was Senator Levin’s energy staffer who said very affirmatively “40%” . I informed her that we all died at about 25%.
The NRDC climate scientist above stated that she had not heard these things before. I encouraged her to use Google and read both sides of the issue and then make up her mind.
I was amazed by Dr Niel Degrass Tyson in his global warming issue of Cosmos where he opened with Venus being the hottest planet in the solar system with “most of it’s atmosphere carbon dioxide” and earth possibly headed toward the conditions on Venus. Dr Tyson failed to provide the important facts that Venus has 94% of it’s atmosphere as CO2 while earth has a MERE 0.039%( yes, much less then 1/10th of 1%. I liked Cosmos but not the deception in this episode by an expert who has to have known better!
I confronted a GT county recently elected official who has supported GW issues/actions while on county boards and he had to admit that he was ignorant on the particulars of GW.
I offered a recommendation for a GW book by Prof. Ian Plimer (the preeminent Geologist in Australia)
titled “Heaven and Earth” to all the above. I hope that some read it for a different prospective.
When we were younger, we could go to the library where we knew that the information available had been vetted by reliable professional sources. Today many of us senior citizens have maintained that mindset “that just because we read it, it must be true.” Having taught young people with total internet access how to critically evaluate online material for validity, I am heartened by their ability to reference a number of views on the same subject and to search out views opposing their own. In today’s anti-intellectual, anti-science mindset, perhaps we could learn a lot from them. BTW, I tought physics, engineering design, and sci/tech/soc for 32 years.
You are so right, Will. I do feel very proud when my own kids (now in their 30s) tell me they weighed both sides of an issue they felt strongly about and researched, before they came down on one side.
That is one of the most important political lessons we can all keep in mind. Always try to listen to more than one news source. Whether you’re conservative, liberal, or in between, you get complacent when you only hear one news source, believing that it is correct all the time. Even Walter Cronkite could be tricked…so can you.
It’s true, Bruce. We all have to keep checking and weighing our sources.
This is a great reminder. Thanks for posting.
How true. Seems like today today’s news reporters give us their opinions instead of just the facts.
Good article. ( :
I enjoy reading about Nick’s remembrances.
Thanks, Karen. I was lucky enough to be raised by parents who taught me the value of being a good listener. So I do remember a lot of good lessons I learned while growing up in a small town (Mancelona).
I am also framing this up in my mind in how our kids want to believe the “facts” that they, well, what they want to believe, particularly as it relates to parents’ boundaries. It is so easy on the internet to find any answer you want….
Wow, a lot of comments on this post. I wonder if it has anything to do with the $25 drawing? Nick, I loved your article, but couldn’t help feeling a little cynical as I read it because our cooperative seems more biased than our government. Can you get CEC to share both sides of current issues like affordability of renewable energy, EPA regulation, etc.?
Good advise, that’s not right that things should be so skewed, tricking people.
Don’t believe everything you hear…seeing is believing…now you know the rest of the story…fact or fiction… We should all be like a jury and weigh all evidence before casting our decision!
I thought that this article was a good one. Lessons learned and carried on. Nick’s Dad taught him a valuable way to approach ideas.