Month: December 2017

Enlarge (credit: Flickr user Jon S.)

Conspiracy theories, like the world being flat or the Moon landings faked, have proven notoriously difficult to stomp out. Add a partisan twist to the issue, and the challenge becomes even harder. Even near the end of his second term, barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the US.

If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem. But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy. This isn't knowledge of the news, per se, but knowledge of the companies and processes that help create the news. While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism.

Literate

News media literacy is the catch-all term for understanding how bias, unconscious or otherwise, influences the creation and consumption of news. This includes an awareness of the priorities of news organizations as businesses and the influence that ownership can have on the slant of news articles. But it also comes down to issues like recognizing that we bring our own biases in to the news we consume, allowing two people to come away from the same article with very different information.

Enlarge (credit: Fursov Aleksey?Getty Images)

Wow. That's 2017, though. Quite a year. Let's grab a Juicero and take a moment to reflect on the utter dumpster fires that we've witnessed over the past 12 months. No, we're not talking about the political scene, though that certainly factors in here somewhere. But even in times with a somewhat upward economic trajectory, there are those in the tech industry that seemed to have existed solely to be a cautionary tale to others.

Some of the companies previously on our Deathwatch radar didn't survive long enough to even make our final 2018 list. Pour out one for Radio Shack, which died even faster the second time around after what looked like a brave reboot. Others have been circling the drain for some time and are by this time old friends of the 'Watch, comforting in their continual plummet despite all other forces of nature. And some… well, some just halted and caught fire this year in a way that promises to provide years of Schadenfreude to come.

Now, before we introduce our candidates, it's time for the patented Deathwatch disclaimer.