The Mesa County Central Library will hold a very important 90 minute class Monday, June 24 from 3:00-4:30 p.m. on how to evaluate online sources for credibility and authoritativeness to help boost internet users’ ability to tell fact from fiction.
This class is sorely needed in Mesa County, especially by Republican local elected officials who have demonstrated a lack in the ability to tell credible sources of information from websites that peddle lies and false information to readers.
In 2020, Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland displayed a chilling inability to tell fact from fiction after she publicly promoted the Infowars conspiracy theory that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control was intentionally inflating the number of Covid deaths. Rowland wrote on her her social media that hospitals were being pressured to inflate the numbers of Covid deaths because it meant they would get more funding. The truth is that hospitals make money by treating people, not by listing specific causes of deaths on death certificates. At the time, Rowland’s false theory was being promoted by Laura Ingraham of Fox News — one of Rowland’s most frequently-cited news sources. Fox News has a reputation for knowingly
Stephen D. Daniels, Janet Rowland-appointed Chair of the Mesa County Board of Public Health, is a prodigious spreader of disinformation on social media, including about vaccines and gender issues, without citing credible sources. (Photo: Mesa County)
telling lies to the public.
Rowland’s new Director of the Mesa County Board of Public Health, Stephen D. Daniels, is also prodigious spreader of lies and disinformation on his social media. His posts target a wide range of subjects including the U.S. Department of Justice, gender issues, religion and the efficacy and safety of vaccines, including ideas spread by anti-vaxx presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claimed that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack caucasians and Black people, and to spare Jews.
Janet Rowland, whose college degree is a bachelor in Bible studies, is running for a 4th term as County Commissioner, after lying to the public on her social media about Covid topics and never apologizing to the public for spreading disinformation. (Photo: Janet Rowland campaign website)
In 2019, while still a State Senator, Ray Scott cited a full-on wacko nutbag information source in a tweet about climate change in which he wrote “NASA admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth’s solar orbit, and NOT because of SUVs and fossil fuels.” To support his claim, Scott cited an article published on a website called “NaturalNews.com.” NaturalNews.com had been discredited as an off-the-wall, full-on wacko conspiracy website and was rated #1 on the list of the Top Ten Worst Anti-Science Websites. Scott also said that studies about climate change made no sense and that we “have better things to do” than to address the crisis.
Let’s hope some of these Republican elected officials attend this talk.
Former State Senator Ray Scott cited a full-on wacko website as a source of information on climate change in 2019. The site was rated #1 on a list of the top ten worst anti-science websites.
