It’s been a year since George Floyd was killed in the custody of Minneapolis police. In the hours and days following his death, social media was flooded with video and photos of his final moments while protests calling for an end to police violence against people of color began to sweep the country. Just as quickly, rumors, misinformation and conspiracy theories began to spread, causing confusion and fueling hate and anger.
Unfortunately, a surge of misinformation in the aftermath of a major news event is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Falsehoods, hoaxes and lies regularly pollute our newsfeeds and drown out fact-based news and information.
No one has innate technology skills
Adults struggle to navigate this overload of information, yet we assume young people, incorrectly called “digital natives,” somehow know how to do so from birth. The fact is, no one is born with innate technology skills; they must be taught and reinforced through practice. We are failing young people by not preparing them for the problematic information ecosystem they are growing up with and inheriting.
This is why young people have a right to news literacy.
At a time when misinformation threatens both our civic life and our public health, we endanger the futures of the next generation and the viability of our democracy overall if we don’t provide young people with the knowledge and skills to find fair, vetted information and reliable sources. By not teaching them how to sift through all the information available to determine what’s accurate and what is not we have done them a serious disservice. We’ve made them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, setting them back on the path to becoming a well-informed and engaged adult.
[image_caption]John Silva[/image_caption]We can prevent this. We must integrate news literacy education across subject areas and grade levels, mandating it as a high school graduation requirement. We must actively teach students to determine the credibility of information and its source, to differentiate types of information and misinformation, and to use the standards of authoritative, fact-based journalism to decide what to trust, share and act on.
An essential skill
Knowing the difference between fact and opinion-based statements and false or manipulated content empowers young people beyond the classroom. It is an essential skill for evaluating issues that have real-life consequences, such as the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and the security of our elections.
We are at a critical junction for civil discourse in America. It is impossible to have a rational, measured discussion of social and political issues if one portion of the population bases its beliefs on emotion-based reasoning and conspiratorial thinking. We must deepen young people’s understanding of the advantages and drawbacks of social platforms and educate them to understand that misinformation comes in many forms and can be communicated in different ways, depending on the platform. News literacy emphasizes the skills and knowledge to check that information, evaluate sources and recognize quality, standards-based news regardless of which platform is being used.
And cultivating a healthy, informed civic dialogue isn’t an end in itself — it’s a means of solving the greater problems that young people are inheriting. For example, making progress on issues like climate change, racial injustice, sexual violence and economic inequality is impossible without first being able to recognize credible information and establish a shared set of facts.
The tools exist to empower educators
Failing to give today’s young people access to news literacy education is not passive — it’s actively disempowering and it puts students at a significant civic disadvantage. If we want to ensure that young people are prepared to function in and carry on our democracy, we must help them exercise their right to news literacy education. The need is urgent, and the tools, lessons and programs exist to empower educators to develop in their students the habits of mind that will last a lifetime. In a rapidly changing news cycle, we have little time to waste.
Anything less would be a fundamental failure of our responsibility — to them and to ourselves.
John Silva is the senior director of education and training for the News Literacy Project and a National Board Certified teacher. He’ll be leading a free, news literacy day of professional learning for all educators in Minnesota at a NewsLitCamp® in partnership with the Star Tribune, Minneapolis Public Radio and Sourcewell Technology on June 15.
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Mr. Silva is absolutely correct: news literacy, or more generally the ability to think critically, is the absolute fundament of any society that aspires to democracy. No doctrine of a society free to govern itself – from free speech to voting – makes sense if the citizenry are unable to think critically. Unfortunately, there are three grand layers of opposition to Mr. Silva’s proposition.
First, for the past 50 years, the singular method by which the Republican party has maintained the illusion of democratic legitimacy has been to form a base from those most susceptible to manipulation. Aside from the much smaller group of folks who thoughtfully favor lawless autocracy, each person who thinks critically is one more person who will not vote Republican. The Republican party has relabeled critical thinking as “cultural Marxism” specifically to scare folks away from the notion of thinking for themselves. Republican state legislatures across the great land are right now legislating against the teaching of “critical race theory”; they have no idea what it is, but they know it involves folks questioning what they’ve been told. Tooth and nail resistance to any deprogramming attempt will continue.
Second, since the retrenchment of the 1970’s, the economic clientele of both major parties have taken care to administer a social discourse that presents itself as democratic debate, but the boundaries of which are carefully policed to ensure that the prerogatives of concentrated private wealth are not disturbed. And of course the mainstream media are the principal means by which the boundaries of the discourse are maintained: the left is excluded, the Right is normalized, the model of symmetry around an ideal middle is vigilantly preserved, and the salacious and sensational are given pride of place. If news literacy efforts aim at OAN and Fox, but stop short of NPR and the New York Times, we haven’t gotten very far.
Finally, as media technology continues to rule our lives, market imperatives ensure that new products will encourage a common discourse that is even more truncated and less thoughtful. We can expect that soon social media devices will allow us to select from insults to hurl at each other, and nothing else.
While “news literacy” isn’t a bad idea, Mr. Silva misses the mark here just a tad.
This isn’t a problem with technology, it’s an intellectual problem. Critical thinking is a skill set that has been in decline in the US for decades, and that’s a trend that began long before social media it’s technology became so ubiquitous. Furthermore, historically, large numbers of people and societies have been prone to misinformation for thousands of years. The Recent attack on the Capital pales by comparison to WWII, Jim Crowe, the Inquisition, etc. etc. You don’t need twitter to assemble large groups of misinformed people and launch a really bad idea or program.
I don’t know anyone who assumed that technology made young people smarter and more informed… that assumption itself actually appears ignorant to me. Sure, young people are always more proficient using new technology, but the idea that such proficiency would confer intellectual prowess looks like an abdication of reason. The assumptions Silva is describing may not be as universal as he thinks.
Trying to teach news literacy as if it’s an independent subject matter, as a separate course, doesn’t really make sense. News from any quarter is just one of many sources of information that responsible people need to be able to process intelligently, and “news” isn’t a special source. The ability to identify credible sources and evaluate the logic and rationales behind any given claim, analysis, or proposition, is part of intellectual skill set generally described as critical thinking.
My counter proposal to Mr. Silva would be to create specific coursework that teaches critical thinking skills. All information needs to be evaluated, whether it’s in a National news paper or on twitter, a tool box of intellectual skills that is used to evaluate any information, proposal, or opinion, is far more useful than a narrowly focused attempt to teach news “literacy”.
Furthermore, the fact vs. opinion etc. etc. model Mr. Silva seems to be promoting is a defunct model of pseudo objectivity that promotes style over substance and ultimately sabotages credibility and decision making. The ability to distinguish fact from opinion isn’t terribly critical, nor difficult. More critical is the ability to evaluate the credibility and expertise of a source. Responsible intellect isn’t merely a process of absorbing “facts”, as often as not we must evaluate and choose the best recommendation among a number of different recommendations (i.e. opinions). Critical thinking isn’t a matter of simply distinguishing fact from opinion, it’s a matter of evaluating the credibility of some opinion or recommendation compared to another. After all, the same set of facts can be used to assemble completely different recommendations, narratives, and mentalities.
“News literacy” starts with the news, not the student. Young people and all of us need to be able to trust our legacy institutions, the AP, NYT, BBC, etc. The fad for redefining journalism’s bedrock principles isn’t helping.
Trust in our “news” media is what got us here. As others have written, the key is critical thinking, a skill our schools claim to have been teaching for generations. Making it a subject is unlikely to make a difference.
It’s taught, but to a small number of students. Critical thinking is debate. Debate is offered in high schools, or should be. It’s a fun class. I had it.
Debate is sport, it’s a game, it’s not real intellectual work. We see that here all the time, people play debate games devoid of critical substance all the time. If anything we should ban debates games and develop real coursework in critical thinking.
No, debate has rules governed by critical thinking (logic), with judges. And yes, “people play debate games devoid of critical substance all the time.” That’s because they don’t like rules.