Silva is senior director of professional and community learning at the News Literacy Project. He is a former classroom teacher.
In the weeks following the 2020 presidential election, many of us watched from the sidelines as misinformation from political figures, social media feeds, podcasts and pundits stoked anger and suspicion that someone had tampered with ballots and voting machines. These false beliefs about a “stolen election” took root, spread and grew into a movement that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. Despite overwhelming, verifiable evidence to the contrary, those beliefs persist today.
With another presidential contest likely featuring the same two candidates, it’s hardly surprising that election rumors and misinformation already are spreading, with former President Donald Trump urging crowds to “guard the vote” at polling places in Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta.
Ahead of the elections and during National News Literacy Week, we can each take important steps to ensure our emotions and beliefs are not being manipulated by misinformation. If we are aware of and practice news literacy skills, we can ensure our information is credible and comes from reputable sources. By doing so, we can take action to avoid a repeat of Jan. 6.
News literacy is the ability to identify what information you can trust, share, and act on to become a better-informed and more engaged participant in the civic life of your community and our country. It teaches you how to navigate our challenging and complex information landscape, helping you learn how to think about the information you consume, not what to think about it. News literacy gives you the tools and skills to evaluate the credibility of news and other information and determine the quality and reliability of what you consume. It also explores the processes and standards that journalists follow to report the news as fairly and accurately as possible.
News is meant to inform you; credible, standards-based news does not take a stance on issues. It gives you the who, what, when, where and why and provides that information from multiple, credible sources with an emphasis on fairness and accuracy. Unfortunately, a great deal of information out there might look like news but, instead, is meant to persuade or influence you, such as punditry. Opinion journalism should follow ethical standards, like providing evidence for claims, presenting logical arguments and frequently acknowledging conflicting views. Opinion pieces that cherry-pick data, leave out important context or use logical fallacies are not quality journalism — they are misleading and unfair.
No one wants to be misled. To make sure the news we are getting shows the full story, consider the following:
- Does the story include multiple sources or experts who can provide the relevant details about what took place?
- When possible, are there links to related reports, studies, data, video or audio that can add context?
- Is the story reported fully, including all key information, and with the proper context to provide a clear understanding?
- Have the details in the story been fact-checked and verified?
- Are multiple sides of the issue reported to ensure fairness without giving undue weight to one side or the other?
- Was the piece reported in a dispassionate manner that avoids bias?
- Is the newsroom transparent about past errors, and does it note corrections on its stories?
All of these are essential factors to consider before acting on information.
Differences of opinion are valuable and essential to the marketplace of ideas (which the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University says, “refers to the belief that the test of the truth or acceptance of ideas depends on their competition with one another and not on the opinion of a censor.”) But truth is supported by facts, and facts are supported by evidence.
Ordinary voters can’t control what politicians and pundits say, but we don’t have to subject ourselves to another election cycle marred by misinformation meant to confuse and anger us. We can use news literacy skills to find credible information and discern facts from fiction. We can push back on falsehoods and fake claims. With news literacy, we can reclaim our power to determine the truth.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.