The Death of Critical Thinking

Someone I frequently run into at the coffee shop where I do most of my writing recently asked me where I get my news.

Over 30 years ago, it was an easy question to answer. We had NBC, CBS and ABC on television. The local newspaper came every morning.

There weren’t thousands of so-called sources. No memes. No TikTok videos. No Instagram Stories. And there weren’t news outlets with extreme political bents.

Sure, there’s always bias when humans are making decisions, even back then, but there wasn’t as much top-down political direction on what and how to report.

My answer on where I get the news has changed drastically since then.

“I try to read multiple sources from across the spectrum and then search for the truth between the cracks,” I responded.

That’s true whether it comes to racism, the Israel-Hamas war, the migrant crisis at our borders or any other issue.

I’ve noticed that if you only get your news from one source or one type of source, you won’t ever get the whole truth on any issue. It’ll all just be one big echo chamber.

I’ve tested this theory out.

The day after the news of Hunter Biden’s wrongdoings broke, CNN had a small story I had to scroll down many pages on my iPhone to find. Fox, on the other hand, had two of its top three main stories about the president’s son.

Once I sifted through the stories, I got a sense of what he did and didn’t do. How big of a deal it was or wasn’t. And whether there was any evidence that his father had a role.

Even after a recent Republican presidential debate, in which Trump again didn’t participate, CNN had three articles on its main news page about what transpired and some offensive things the candidates said. Fox had nothing; it was as if the debates never happened. An Elon Musk billionaire spat with Mark Cuban was higher-ranking news on Fox.

In the aftermaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and even Michael Brown in Ferguson, I recall quite vividly the vastly different ways that right-wing and left-wing media reported on the events.

One side focused on the victims’ histories and lives, and the other focused on the police actions that killed them. CNN reported on the all-white police force patrolling almost-all-Black Ferguson. Fox focused on whether 18-year-old Michael Brown had stolen a pack of cigarillos .

It’s almost as if there are two separate worlds out there.

If you only watch or read Fox, you’d think that nothing awful is happening to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, that the Israeli military doesn’t punish everyday Palestinians in the West Bank, or that Israeli settlers aren’t abusing and intimidating Palestinians in the West Bank daily. You’d think Israel is a saint among nations. Everything is geared toward justifying whatever Israel does with no hand brakes.

CNN and MSNBC, on the other hand, mostly would have you think that Israel should do nothing about Hamas and that it’s just dropping a bunch of bombs willy-nilly to see how many people can suffer. That Hamas’ raping of men and women and the kidnapping of toddlers and elderly, barely even acknowledged most of the time, are not grounds enough for any response. Or that Hamas operating out of Palestinian schools, hospitals and mosques isn’t itself a war crime.

The result is that people who only watch Fox become more rigid and firm in their unwavering support for the war without considering its impact. And people who only watch CNN become thoroughly convinced that Hamas is a resistance movement, Israel has no right to respond at all — maybe not even exist, and Israel is akin to Iran.

But when you digest both sources and add in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Saudi Arabia’s Arab News, Al-Jazeera, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications, you’re able to get a broader sense of what’s taking place, what’s false, what’s not backed by evidence, and how complex things really are.

Instead of “Israel is committing genocide” versus “there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian in Gaza,” we could have an intelligent conversation. Rather than one side trying to claim Jews have no right to be in the region of their ancestors and the other side claiming the Palestinians aren’t even a real people, we could begin to find paths to peace.

When it comes to Critical Race Theory and systemic racism, rather than read any books or take in more than a narrow window of information, most people rely on three-second sound spots and Instagram memes to form opinions. If we’re being honest, most people with an opinion on the topic have no idea what CRT even is.

Lately, there’s been a flurry of social media posts blasting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and so-called “wokeness” with no real effort to understand their meaning.

For the declining number of people who read more than Instagram Stories, critical thinking also doesn’t mean picking a side and then watching and reading as many things as possible to support your ideas. It involves taking in more and broader information and being smart enough to weed through truth, half-truths, lies and propaganda.

Critical thinking for many is more challenging because the algorithms on our social media are designed to keep feeding us the so-called facts that support our preexisting ideas even more. In turn, that causes us to think less and less and get angrier and angrier.

We then become so convinced that our side holds all the truth that we lash out at, insult and name-call anyone with a different view. Unable to learn any new information that might impact our thinking.

I’m all for rigorous debate and disagreement. It’s important to get to the best solutions.

But when we engage on any topic without critical thinking, all we do is contribute to a more divided world rotating on an axis of misinformation.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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