Gillen stops by South Side High School's Political Awareness Club

Discusses her road to politics, first months as Hempstead Town Supervisor and media bias

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Laura Gillen stopped by South Side High School last week to meet with students in the Political Awareness Club, to whom she discussed her path to running for office, her first few months as supervisor of the Town of Hempstead and how to navigate the media maze that results from a politically-charged environment.

Students learned that Gillen went to acting school once upon a time, and that the Town of Hempstead doesn’t have Microsoft Office. Among other fun tidbits of the talk included that Gillen, a Democrat, reads magazines with different political slants, including the progressive “Mother Jones” as well as “The Weekly Standard’ for conservative opinions, in order to get both sides’ take of important issues.

“There’s so much information overload from so many different sources,” Gillen told the teenagers, “and it’s hard to distinguish what is actually real news and what isn’t.”

Her input on how to consume news came after Assistant Principal Ben Moss asked for advice on how students can shape political beliefs free of the pressures around them.

“I think it’s so difficult for students, especially at this age, to form their own opinions and their own ideas,” Moss told Gillen.

Gillen, who worked as a litigator for years, said she has taken the skills of finding common ground with an opposing party into politics. “There’s always good ideas on both sides of the aisle,” she said.

She added that news sources and people often present opinion as fact, and urged the dozen or so students in the room to not accept everything they hear or read, but to dig deeper.

Katie Clarke, a Spanish teacher at South Side that supervises the Political Awareness Club, said the members often pick hot topics and see how Fox News and CNN cover them.

Trent Davis, president of the club, said that he and his schoolmates recently analyzed how different media outlets were covering the recent legal dispute between President Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, who claimed that he paid her to not publicize an alleged affair she had with him in 2006.

“Each news source is so biased in its own way,” Davis said. “Fox News portrayed Trump as being attacked, while CNN focuses on the law and how they’re accusing him of breaking every law possible to try to get people to see him in a negative light.”

Often, Davis added, you can guess the positions certain news outlets will take on issues before even watching or reading their reports.

“You kind of don’t know what to believe at some points,” he noted, “but like Ms. Gillen said, you kind of have to look for that middle ground.”