“For the last three years I have been making extensive use of Democracy Now! in teaching two of my courses. I teach a large lecture course in our humanities program called Interpretation and Values. In the course I discuss with students where they have gotten their interpretations of events. We discuss mainstream commercial media and contrast it with the best of independent, non-commercial media. I require them to keep a media journal and to tune into DN! and other non-commercial media sources. They are also required to write a paper in which they compare the coverage of some topic of current importance in commercial mass vs. non-commercial media. I also use DN! in Critical Thinking courses, asking students to keep a media journal noting what they are learning as we discuss such topics as logical fallacies, doublespeak, suppressed evidence and emotional appeals as they occur in such media as Fox and our local talk radio (KFI). Democracy Now! has made an incredible difference in the lives of so many students (I teach the course to around 100-150 students per quarter) who had previously only obtained their news from the mainstream, and thus had no idea what was going on. So, thank you so much for all you do!”
–Susan Finsen, Ph.D., Philosophy Department: California State University, San Bernardino