NLP in the news this spring

Between our leadership transition, op-eds and interviews, NLP has had quite a few media hits recently. Here are a few of the highlights.

EdSurge recently reported on NLP’s leadership transition. Our founder and CEO, Alan Miller, will step down and hand the reins to our president and COO, Charles Salter, as the next CEO. Reporter Emily Tate spoke to both about our plans for the future. “As NLP evolves, it will continue its work in education and build out more programming on that side,” wrote Tate. “One effort is to help more states adopt media literacy requirements, as Texas and Illinois have done. Others include plans to develop a graduate-level course that trains educators to teach news literacy and a national news literacy conference for educators and students.” Read the full story here.

NLP’s soon-to-be CEO, Charles Salter, wrote the third in his trilogy of opinion pieces about why news literacy is an essential part of civics education. In an article in School Administrator, Salter notes, “The idea that public education must play a central role in sustaining our democratic system is older than the republic itself.” He adds that “democracy cannot survive with a people uninformed – or worse, ill-informed. Today, the work to renew civic education with news literacy as a fundamental skill is not about perpetuating our democratic system. It is about saving it.” Read the full piece, “Teaching Fact from Fiction,” here.

Peter Adams was joined by NewsGuard’s Jim Warren as a guest on WBEZ Chicago’s Reset with Sasha-Ann Simons to talk about how misinformation spreads online and what people can do to protect themselves from it. When asked about what people should think about when controversial issues arise in the news, Adams told listeners, “Anytime you have a highly polarizing, contentious social issue, purveyors of misinformation and bad actors and hyperpartisans really glom on to those issues and push a lot of falsehoods…As consumers, we see a lot of information and we see a lot of posts from people we don’t know and to really gravitate toward and focus on straight news reports from credible, standards-based outlets. We’re going to see a lot of punditry, we’re going to see opinion pieces and those sometimes get the most engagement in our feeds, so they can rise to the top. But we have to be really deliberate and seek out straight coverage.” Listen to the complete interview here.

And TVNewsCheck’s Michael Depp spoke with Alan Miller about how and why we’re educating the public to become news-literate. Alan told Depp, “We do teach people not what to think, but how to think. We don’t steer them to any particular platform or outlet, or away from any. We want to give people the tools to make the judgments about everything that they encounter. Should I trust this? Should I share this? Should I act on it?…We want people to be able to have the tools to look at anything they see and ask themselves basic questions before they decide what to do with that information.” Watch the full interview here.