Don't Worry: News About Teachers and Teachers Unions Will Now Be Rated for Accuracy and Reliability By... 1.7 Million Teachers, Using NewsGuard Memberships Purchased by the Teachers Unions

More bad news for Brandon in that NBC poll: Parents have had enough of teachers shutting down schools:

Amy Walter @amyewalter

Lotta interesting data in the new NBC poll, most of it quite grim for Biden and Dems. This also jumped out: by a margin of 65% to 35%, parents more concerned about their child missing out on education than getting COVID at in-person school.

By the way, Bad News for Brandon was XTC's most underrated album. It had the singles, "Wot's Rupert Got Up to Now?" and "Fancy a Go" if you remember those.

Have the teachers been getting bad press lately? Are they demanding so much and making parents so angry that they might cause a widespread revolt and force the Democrats to start telling them "no"?

As Democrats worry more about their increasingly unpopular allies the teachers unions, teachers unions must be worrying about how to win back their position of unquestioned power.

For many parents and teachers, the pandemic has become a slog of anxiety over the risk of infection, child care crises, the tedium of school-through-a-screen and, most of all, chronic instability.

And for Democrats, the revival of tensions over remote schooling is a distinctly unwelcome development.

Because they have close ties to the unions, Democrats are concerned that additional closures like those in Chicago could lead to a possible replay of the party's recent loss in Virginia's governor race. Polling showed that school disruptions were an important issue for swing voters who broke Republican -- particularly suburban white women.

"It's a big deal in most state polling we do," said Brian Stryker, a partner at the polling firm ALG Research whose work in Virginia indicated that school closures hurt Democrats.

"Anyone who thinks this is a political problem that stops at the Chicago city line is kidding themselves," added Mr. Stryker, whose firm polled for President Biden's 2020 campaign. "This is going to resonate all across Illinois, across the country."
More than one million of the country's 50 million public school students were affected by districtwide shutdowns in the first week of January, many of which were announced abruptly and triggered a wave of frustration among parents.

"The kids are not the ones that are seriously ill by and large, but we know kids are the ones suffering from remote learning," said Dan Kirk, whose son attends Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, which was closed amid the district's standoff this week.

So what are the teachers unions to do? Their political patrons might be forced to turn on them if they don't stop being so toxic and so openly hateful towards parents and especially towards the children.

So, one thing they could do is re-orient their priorities back to the kids they're supposedly All About.

LOL. Fat chance, right?

The other thing they could do is simply censor the news so there aren't as many politically harmful stories about what teachers and teachers unions are up to.

But how could teachers do that?

Don't worry, there's an app for that. Specifically, the teachers unions will just buy NewsGuard memberships for 1.7 million teachers, which will allow them to "fact-check" stories which they believe depict teachers in a bad light and get them censored and demonitized.

Problem solved! Teachers will continue doing what teachers have been doing, but now, people won't be allowed to publicly talk about it!

NewsGuard, the establishment "news-rating" project that presents itself as a source of expert knowledge on which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot, will be rolling out to millions of American schoolchildren due to a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Per Axios, the AFT will purchase NewsGuard licenses for all of its 1.7 million teachers, in a major deal for the news-rating project.

"The hope is that students with the skills to spot disinformation will grow into more thoughtful and better-informed citizens and voters," writes Axios.

NewsGuard has had a reputation as a project of the political establishment since its inception. Formerly prominent neoconservative Bill Kristol, who is seen as an archetypal establishment conservative, said of Newsguard in 2019: "I guess the counter-argument to what you're doing is, well, this is a bunch of establishment people deciding they like establishment websites."

NewsGuard maintains a list of news outlets it considers "trustworthy" and "untrustworthy," data which it uses in a browser extension that users can add on to various mainstream browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

When the extension is installed, it displays red warning labels alongside links to websites NewsGuard considers untrustworthy, and green labels next to links to websites it considers trustworthy.

In 2019, NewsGuard partnered with Microsoft in a deal that made it a default extension on Edge Mobile browsers.

NewsGuard gives a "green" rating to websites like Rolling Stone, which has repeatedly published high-profile hoax stories. The magazine was responsible for one of the biggest media scandals in recent memory, when it published fraudulent rape claims against a fraternity at the University of Virginia in 2014.

So that's how this works:

NewsGuard, a a for-profit, money-making enterprise, which was essentially created to be patronized by large legacy establishment media and social media corporations by telling them that big establishment media outlets are reliable and all of their upstart competitors are unreliable and should be deplatformed and eliminated from competing, sells memberships to highly-politically-invested parties to rate stories and websites as reliable or not, which are then used by media and social media companies for purposes of "rating" their reliability.

NewsGuard makes money from the teachers unions by selling them tickets to censor their critics, and the teachers unions get to censor their critics.

Everyone wins.

Or, I mean: everyone who's part of the establishment wins. Everyone who counts wins.

The way it's supposed to work, right?

By the way: It's news to me that people pay to be able to essentially control what news is deemed by social media to be "reliable" or not.

That's a scam. NewsGuard is selling people the right to elevate some media (Rolling Stone, NBC, CNN) and denigrate others (Breitbart).

Now, in theory, we could all rush in and buy NewsGuard subscriptions... but they'd quickly set up some internal hurdles that would segregate our votes as "trollish" and ignore them.

Only leftwing voices can be heard. Period.

It's so Soviet. Straight-up Soviet, except that those at the top are making millions off it.

Wait a sec-- that's exactly how the Soviet Union worked too...

posted by Ace at 05:15 PM

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