Given all of the impeachment hubbub back in January, it is entirely possible that some of us missed the launch of News Literacy Week, a nationwide effort to promote news literacy education, spearheaded by the News Literacy Project and the E.W. Scripps Co.
Why was this initiative undertaken? Because, in the words of Alan Miller, founder of the News Literacy Project and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “The ultimate goal is to get news literacy programs incorporated into civics education in as many schools as possible.”
The authors of a 2015 Stanford University research study would agree that promoting news literacy should be a national imperative. After surveying middle school, high school and college students across 12 states, the researchers were “taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” especially “when it comes to evaluating information that flows across social channels or pops up in a Google search.”
Their conclusion: “Despite their fluency with social media, many students are unaware of basic conventions for indicating verified digital information.” Translated, this means the majority of students surveyed were unable to distinguish advertisements from news articles, or credible sources from unreliable ones.
Miller’s sense of urgency is shared by many journalists, especially at a time when “almost two-thirds of people say they trust traditional media less because of fake news.” United in their belief that the public could use a hand, more journalists are heeding the call for volunteers to teach news literacy, in person or online, to middle school and high school students. One is Lyme resident Dennis Stern, who brings 28 years of experience as a journalist and news executive at The New York Times. Although Stern hasn’t yet found any takers through the News Literacy Project’s Newsroom to Classroom program, he has garnered an annual invitation to speak to a Hanover High School social studies class. Still, even before the new coronavirus put life as we know it on hold in the Upper Valley, Stern was hardly surprised that his phone was not ringing off the hook. As he points out, according to a report recently issued by Media Literacy Now, only 14 states have “taken substantial legislative action for media literacy education.” And, sad to say, neither Vermont nor New Hampshire are among them.
In contrast, Stern’s course “News Literacy: How to Fact-Check Today’s Media” has been wildly popular among participants in Osher@Dartmouth’s Lifelong Learning Institute. In this four-part offering, participants are shown how to debunk falsehoods, how to distinguish between news and “noise,” how to verify news sources and more.
Working the other side of the street, so to speak, a fellow New Hampshire journalist has found equal success by visiting a number of town libraries to deliver his presentation, “Fake News: What’s The Real Story?” Inspired by the Stanford study, Randall Mikkelsen, a managing editor at Thomson Reuters and former White House correspondent, originally offered to make his presentation at a school in the Seacoast region. The school didn’t bite, but his offer was snapped up by his local library and then by a succession of New Hampshire libraries, including Lyme’s Converse Free Library, where he spoke in January 2018.
In his presentation, Mikkelsen strives to tell his audiences how “what was once the realm of urban legends and supermarket tabloids is now called fake news.” By his definition, fake news is deliberately false information, spread by social media and dressed up to look legitimate.
When he has attempted to provide specific examples of fake news, he has on occasion encountered “confirmation bias,” what Stern defines as “selecting facts that confirm our beliefs.” At one library gathering, an attendee actually stormed out after Mikkelsen challenged her acceptance of “Pizzagate,” the notorious conspiracy theory alleging the existence of a human trafficking and child-sex ring run by high-ranking Democratic officials from the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor.
Mostly, however, both Mikkelsen and Stern focus their efforts on teaching New Hampshire and Upper Valley residents how to become our own information gatekeepers. They do so, in part, by sharing news evaluation “cheat sheets” detailing reputable and disreputable information sources. And they also encourage us, in Mikkelsen’s words, to “be selective in our media diets” and “set limits on how much news we want to let in.”
Let’s hope, for the sake of our republic, that their efforts will be increasingly successful. After all, as Alan Miller of the News Literacy Project reminds us, “misinformation is threatening to undermine the civic life of our country.”
Skip Sturman, of Thetford, is director emeritus of Dartmouth Career Services.