A judge has allowed the auction of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars media outlet to compensate victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, and the news platform Semafor reports that some of his opponents hope to bid on his properties.  

News Literacy Project President and CEO Charles Salter noted that, “selling InfoWars won’t end the misinformation that Jones has platformed.” 

“But it is gratifying to see some accountability,” he added.  

In a podcast series marking the 10th anniversary of the school shooting, NLP explored the rise of conspiracy theories pushed by Jones – including the false claim that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a hoax – as well as progress in the fight against disinformation in the decade following the shooting.  

Read the Semafor piece here.   

The News Literacy Project President and CEO Charles Salter recently joined entrepreneur Steve Harper’s podcast, The Ripple Effect, to talk about his professional journey and NLP’s mission.  

Salter talked about the people who most impacted his career and why his social media algorithm serves up cat videos. He also explained why ending misinformation is not NLP’s goal. Rather, it’s working to ensure all students practice news literacy.  

“Our ultimate goal as an organization is to solve this problem at a systemic level,” Salter said. “We want to see every student in the United States graduate high school skilled in news literacy. We think it’s a fundamental life skill for the 21st century.” 

Watch the podcast episode here. Or listen on Apple, Spotify or Amazon Audible and Alexa.  

In a recent episode of The Strategerist podcast, presented by the George W. Bush Presidential Center, NLP president and CEO Charles Salter discussed why news literacy is a critical life skill, how to help young people navigate information on social media and evidence supporting the efficacy of news literacy instruction.

“We’re empowering the individual to apply these skills and this kind of analysis to any news and information — even their preferred news and information — and make the choice themselves,” Salter said.

Listen to the full episode here.

In an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Charles Salter, NLP’s president and CEO, calls for donors to support advocacy efforts for more news literacy education.  “To effectively address the misinformation crisis and build a future founded on facts, more states and school districts need to make media-literacy instruction a requirement,” he wrote.

Citing misinformation around the latest Israel-Hamas war and the rise of artificial intelligence, Salter argues that it is more important than ever to teach students how to recognize credible news and sort fact from fiction.  

“This work is urgent. Misinformation threatens all of us,” he wrote. “Without a shared set of facts, our health, our lives, and our democracy are at risk.” 

Read the full piece here. 

From a mission to a movement

Friends of NLP:

You are part of a community of tens of thousands of people who have, in some way, supported the News Literacy Project. You might be an educator, a concerned citizen or an advocate of news literacy education. Many of you also support our work financially. I’m grateful our paths have crossed, and I want to thank you for your partnership and reintroduce myself.

I’m Chuck Salter, and after serving for the past four years as president and COO of NLP, I had the honor of becoming president and CEO on July 1, succeeding our visionary founder, Alan Miller.  While I hope to meet many of you in the months and years ahead, if you’d like to know a bit about me now, you can check out this Q&A, read my bio or watch this video, and please follow me on Twitter @saltercrs.

This is an exciting time at NLP. We are turning our mission into a movement to create a future founded on facts. In addition to new leadership, we have a new strategic plan with a redoubled commitment to not only expand our work in schools across the country through new programs and resources but also to reach out to the public as well. We are helping everyone become more discerning consumers of news and other information and better engaged — and more equal — participants in our democracy.

The need for this movement has never been greater. American democracy is under attack, along with the rights and freedoms it promises for all people.  While their motives vary, merchants of chaos advance their agendas by taking advantage of our complex and quickly moving information landscape to sow doubt, confusion, fear and even anger and hatred among all of us. No democratic society can endure this type of division — it destroys the foundation of the shared reality that’s required for honest debate and eventual consensus.

But there is hope, and you are part of that hope. I thank you for your support of our work, and I look forward to more people joining all of us in the years ahead to help strengthen our democratic discourse and create a more news-literate America.

My best,

Charles “Chuck”  Salter