Event Details:
Event Description:Attention Valued Community Leaders, Parents, Educators, Journalists, and Students. This may be the most important hour you spend this year! You are invited to attend the highly acclaimed “Trust Me” documentary about the importance of Media and Information Literacy to build trust and resilience, lessen polarization, and preserve democracy. There are several opportunities for you to watch the one-hour film, produced by Oscar-nominated ® Roko Belic, and engage with “Trust Me’s” Impact Producer, Rosemary Smith and Grinnell College Professor of Sociology Karla Erickson, and JR Paulson, M.D.
“TRUST ME” shows how an avalanche of biased news and misinformation is undermining trust in society. This drives fear, which promotes racism, political polarization and mental health disorders. When fear goes up it erodes trust. When people don't trust each other, they don't help each other and progress stalls. Sensational media take advantage of our survival instincts to earn more clicks and ad revenue with shocking headlines that we enable each time we share. “TRUST ME” uses compelling human stories, facts and expert voices to show empirical realities and the right way to consume media. This topic is important, timely and relevant due to the volume of mis and disinformation, cyber-bullying, anti-depressant prescriptions, opioid addictions and the climbing suicide rate in the United States. We’ll explore how these symptoms are due, in large part, to a lack of ability to properly consume the avalanche of negativity thrown at people each day. We review the history of mass media, from its beginning to hyper-paced present-day technologies. We use scientific facts from sources like Our World In Data, FBI crime statistics and UNESCO to reveal the empirical truth about this being the best possible time to be alive. We will show how, due to an onslaught of scandalous headlines and misinformation, few people believe it. In 2015 Joe Phelps founded the Getting Better Foundation (GBF), and they produced the documentary in 2020. The Foundation has adopted media literacy as its weapon of choice to treat the perception gap. GBF is helping launch media literacy curricula in schools, amplifying the positive messages and the empirical truth about this being the best possible time to be alive. We will show how, due to an onslaught of scandalous headlines and misinformation, few people believe it. Please consider attending or sending a representative from your community, to view and contemplate this program which aims to build bridges and foster civil discourse surrounding the problems of our time. The film’s trailer, film crew, stories, experts featured, and press details can be found at www.trustmedocumentary.com. We invite interviews through rosemary.smith@gettingbetterfoundation.org |
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