These are dizzying times for anyone seeking accurate information about the world around us. We’ve never had more ways to get information. But many of us lack the time or the tools to separate what’s accurate from what’s not.
News, in particular, has become a fraught landscape. Careful reporters jockey for the attention of a highly distracted public with pundits and influencers, many of whom have agendas at odds with accuracy, including personal profit and political aims. Fact-checking has been eliminated from major social media platforms. Algorithms send us down bias-confirming rabbit holes. And AI chatbots further muddy the waters with their inaccuracies and “hallucinations”.
Look no further than the tragic collision last week of an American Eagle jet and a Black Hawk helicopter for evidence of this problem. Loud voices proclaiming who was at fault and blaming specific individuals are, at best, running far ahead of what we really know, and at worst, capitalizing on the incident to score political points. But many people seeking answers are falling for their speculations and outright fabrications rather than the careful fact-finding and reporting that will eventually bring us reliable answers.
People need accurate information. Without factual information about what’s going on around us — locally, nationally, internationally — we can’t make good decisions at any level, from neighborhood safety to choices at the ballot box.
That’s why National News Literacy Week, Feb. 3-7, is so important, not just for the work being done this week, but for calling attention to the urgency of promoting the critical thinking skills that help people discern whether what they are seeing, hearing and reading is accurate.
Now in its sixth year, the nonpartisan News Literacy Project addresses this need by promoting news literacy — defined as “the ability to determine the credibility of news and other information and recognize the standards of fact-based journalism” — in American K-12 education.
The goal? To ensure all students who graduate high school are able “to participate in civic society as well-informed, critical thinkers.”
Students learn to analyze for bias, cross-check accuracy
Illinois is actually ahead of the curve. For the past three years, our state has required a unit of media literacy (of which news literacy is a part) in all public high schools. The law defines media literacy as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate using a variety of objective forms, including, but not limited to, print, visual, audio, interactive, and digital texts.” For support in teaching these crucial skills, the Illinois Board of Education refers educators to resources provided by several organizations, including the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition, which has created curricular materials available to educators as well as anyone seeking to improve their own news and media literacy.
What does teaching media and news literacy in a classroom look like? It begins with taking a media text — a broadcast segment, written piece or even a social media post — and asking who created and/or shared it and for what purposes: What biases and profit motives are behind the media text? Then, the class identifies the techniques the media text uses to persuade and engage an audience, and brainstorms how various audiences might react to the same text, including themselves and their own community members. Finally, based on what they have discerned about motives and techniques, students gauge the accuracy of the media text by cross-referencing the information it presents with other reliable information sources. This becomes a strategy they can use throughout their lives as media consumers.
Since Illinois began requiring media literacy in public schools, Delaware, New Jersey and California have adopted media literacy requirements, too. But let’s not fool ourselves; one unit in high school won’t remedy our pervasive problem recognizing misinformation and disinformation. To really achieve media and news literacy, we need a cultural shift away from our attention economy, and accountability for tech companies that benefit financially from our data and attention.
News Literacy Week reminds us that we need strategies for, and a commitment to, making sense of the fire hose of media texts aimed at us every moment. To accomplish this, we need to support teachers and schools that help young people become discerning media consumers. This means adding media specialists in schools, supporting public libraries to provide workshops on media and news literacy for all members of the community, and promoting regulation of online platforms to hold them accountable for content shared online.
Combined, these efforts could provide us the tools we need for the crucial work of recognizing accuracy and propaganda in our overwhelming media landscape. The challenge is large, but the problem couldn’t be more urgent.
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin is a professor of journalism at Columbia College Chicago. Yonty Friesem is an associate professor of communication at Columbia College Chicago and the executive director of the Media Education Lab.
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