Washington (CNN) CNN's Jake Tapper urged graduating students to be kind to one another and to be critical and independent thinkers in a commencement speech at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In his address on Friday, Tapper described the United States as a country where some people are "only listening to the politicians or the news media, and in some cases, the members of their family or their friends with whom they agree," and warned that "the very notion of empirical fact is being attacked and corroded." Against that backdrop, Tapper implored graduates to instead "use the critical thinking skills" they have learned in the classroom and "resist the temptation to subject yourself only to that which re-affirms what you already think." "People decide about an article's validity based only on its headline or the language in the tweet linking to it. They judge books by their covers," Tapper said.

Source: CNN May 13, 2018 00:11 UTC