PBS Books, in collaboration with PBS Newshour Student Reporting Labs, is pleased to present a conversation with Emmy-winning journalist Seema Yasmin, author of What The Fact, in connection with The US and the Holocaust: A film by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, and in celebration of National Media Literacy Week. Yasmin’s book is an accessible guide that traces the spread of misinformation and disinformation through our fast-moving media landscape and teaches readers of all ages about the skills that will help them identify and counter poorly-sourced clickbait and misleading headlines. Seema Yasmin will be interviewed by PBS Newshour Student Reporting Labs’ Isaac Harte, who is a 10th-grade student at the Shipley School and a MediaWise Teen Fact-Checker. In addition, a PBS Newshour Student Reporting Labs story, created by Thais Giraudet, about misinformation and activism will be shared and discussed as connections are made to US history and the Holocaust.
About the Author: Seema Yasmin
Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award–winning journalist who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, medical doctor, professor, and poet. She attended medical school at Cambridge University and worked as a disease detective for the US federal government’s Epidemic Intelligence Service. She currently teaches storytelling at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is a regular contributor to CNN, Self, and Scientific American, among others.
About the Film
The U.S. and the Holocaust: A film by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein is a three-part, six hour series that examines America’s response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twentieth century. Americans consider themselves a “nation of immigrants,” but as the catastrophe of the Holocaust unfolded in Europe, the United States proved unwilling to open its doors to more than a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of desperate people seeking refuge. Through riveting firsthand testimony of witnesses and survivors who as children endured persecution, violence and flight as their families tried to escape Hitler, this series delves deeply into the tragic human consequences of public indifference, bureaucratic red tape and restrictive quota laws in America. Did the nation fail to live up to its ideals? This is a history to be reckoned with.
