Students in Lisa Ruehlow’s Media Literacy class at Amery High School in Wisconsin combined creativity and their Checkology® lessons to create public service announcements about the importance of news literacy for young people. And two of them took top honors for the national PSA contest sponsored by the News Literacy Project (NLP) and The E.W. Scripps Company. The new contest was part of National News Literacy Week (Jan. 25-29.) One of Ruehlow’s students won first prize, and another was selected as runner-up.

The winners are:

First prize: Nicholas Hahn, senior

His video featured clips from current events to demonstrate the real — and often harmful — impacts of misinformation. Watch Nicholas’ PSA.

Runner-up: Mary Mallum, senior

She used animated graphics to provide tips for parsing the false from the factual. Watch Mary’s PSA.

NLP and Scripps, sponsors of National News Literacy Week, asked students taking Checkology virtual classroom lessons to submit a 30-second video PSA related to the week’s theme: Get NewsLit fit. The PSA contest aimed to encourage young people to promote news literacy to their peers.

The winning students took a new course that Ruehlow created and taught for the first time last  fall. The class of 20 included mostly seniors, plus a few juniors and sophomores. All completed the PSA assignment for class. Throughout the semester the students enthusiastically embraced the topic of news literacy, Ruehlow says.

“I am exceedingly happy that students see the value of the tools they have learned — they are sharing their insights with others, and are quite passionate about it,” she says. “Many have told me that they think this class should be required of every high school student since this topic is so incredibly important to their daily lives.”

The importance of media literacy

When she asked students why they thought media literacy was important, they offered thoughtful responses.

• “Media Literacy is more critical than ever as people spend so much time on social media, where anyone can post something and claim it as ‘news.’”
• “It’s important to know what’s true and how to verify or debunk it for ourselves. With people spending so much time-consuming media, it can help our relationships, our country, and our digital communities by knowing what’s real and not allowing it to evoke such a severe emotional response.”
• “Media literacy is important because being misled by false information can result in harmful or incomplete understandings. That can result in action being taken, such as storming the Capitol.”

Her students clearly grasp the significance and urgency of becoming more news-literate.  Ruehlow — and other educators like her — who are dedicated to this work — make that possible.

Opinion: Urge un consumo responsable de información entre la comunidad latinx
 en Estados Unidos

In Texas, an air conditioning repairman is run off the road and assaulted by a former police captain trying to find forged presidential election ballots. Closer to home, you learn your cousin is convinced of widespread voter fraud. A suicide bomber detonates a massive explosion in downtown Nashville, possibly targeting the AT&T building over 5G technology paranoia.

Meanwhile, your college roommate frequently posts about 5G causing coronavirus. A Wisconsin pharmacist is accused of deliberately ruining doses of the COVID-19 vaccine because he believed it would alter human DNA; your spouse is worried the vaccine contains a microchip.

Conspiratorial beliefs are seemingly everywhere, and they’re being shared by friends, family and loved ones.

Talking to conspiracy believers

You might be struggling with how to talk to these otherwise rational people about obviously irrational beliefs — and you’re not alone. According to the Pew Research Center, 71% of U.S. adults have heard one or more conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak and 25% see at least some truth in them. You may feel like there’s nothing you can say or do to persuade friends or family from beliefs like these that are thoroughly and credibly proven false. You might feel too discouraged to even try, but you’re not powerless to confront this.

Addressing a person with entrenched false beliefs requires what I call an ongoing “PEP” talk – an approach based on patience, empathy and persistence. It’s more than just one difficult conversation. You’ll need to understand the feelings and emotions that motivate people to dive deeper into these false narratives. You’ll have to recognize that these are genuine beliefs that “feel” true to the people who share them. Do not criticize or attack. This causes a “backfire effect,” making the person reject contradictory information and hold tighter to anything that reinforces their belief.  You need a base level of respect and a genuine desire to commit to a shared set of facts to succeed.

Start with patience, then empathy

The person you care about did not develop these beliefs overnight. Your friend or relative may have joined an online community of believers and soon become immersed in their echo chamber.  You must listen to how and why they formed their beliefs and understand the sources of their information. This can be frustrating. Take a deep breath and pause before getting angry and shutting down any conversation.

Confronting someone to tell them they may be wrong about something they firmly believe in is uncomfortable – for both sides involved. That’s why empathy is so important. Respect that this person genuinely believes their thinking is accurate and recognize how they arrived at it.  Many had fears and anxieties that they sought to alleviate, leading them to these new beliefs. This likely led to conflicting and contradictory ideas and cognitive dissonance, a form of psychological and emotional stress created by those conflicted feelings. They engaged in motivated reasoning, or the active searching for any and all information that reinforces the belief and eases the stress. The belief was reinforced in their new community and eventually became part of their identity, making it significantly more difficult to dissuade them. Understanding this will help you to be empathetic about their feelings.

Be persistent

Finally, use persistence. Regularly share new, verified information in a way that encourages the person to evaluate that information for themselves and to begin questioning their existing beliefs. Ask them, politely, to read new articles, consider new sources and tell you what they think. Express your feelings about their sources as skepticism, not outright rejection, and ask them to explain how and why they trust them. Using their criteria for a trustworthy source, share more reputable sources that might meet them and discuss why you trust them. Make this a dialogue, focusing on sharing ideas, beliefs and information.

Resolve to not give up on your friend or relative. Consider including other friends or loved ones who share your approach. The News Literacy Project has created a new Checkology® lesson to help people understand how conspiratorial thinking works; be sure to share it. Try to keep an the conversation going, without pestering. The goal is to ensure that your friend or relative gradually will accept your guidance and recognize your effort is out of love, respect and friendship, not derision and mockery.

Many of us are dealing with deep rifts among friends, family and loved ones, which are only likely to expand with persistent conspiracy theories, like recent false claims about COVID-19 vaccines. We can stop this from tearing us apart, if we devote the effort to trying. That’s at least one thing we can all agree on.

The Jan. 27 editorial in the Hutchinson Leader of Minnesota, This National News Literacy Week, pledge to be a more discerning consumer of media, makes the case for news literacy and offers readers advice on how to become more news-literate.

Now is no time to let down our guard on fact-checking, Darragh Worland, NLP’s vice president of creative services, tells Bob Oswald of The Daily Herald, a newspaper outside of Chicago.

“It would be a mistake to go too easy on Biden because (fact checkers) are fatigued from Trump fact checking,” she says in the Jan. 27 piece The News Literacy Project keeps pressure on fact checking. “People need to know what their leaders are doing.”

In his column, Oswald notes: “Although misinformation has been flowing since the beginning of time, Worland admits that fact checking over the past four years has been even more exhausting for news consumers and journalists.”

Getting to the facts is not easy for anyone, she notes. “With the opposing narratives, it has been hard for anybody to wrap their head around the truth,” Worland says. “But we’re not going to stop until every American is news literate.”

Darragh Worland lays out the urgent need for news literacy education to readers of The San Francisco Chronicle in the Jan. 27 piece We need news literacy education in our schools — now! (Please note: Article is behind a paywall.)

She opens the piece by noting the role of conspiracy theories and misinformation in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “Dear reader: By now you likely know that the shocking Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was largely the result of millions of Americans believing in an alternative reality (that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even though it wasn’t). The attack was a terrifying example of the destructive, harmful impact of disinformation.”

“The reality that an alternative information ecosystem can come dangerously to life provides even more urgency to the need for news literacy education as a national priority, taught in schools across the spectrum, from Bangor, Maine, to San Diego, Miami and Seattle. Failing to provide our children with the knowledge and skills needed to recognize credible and accurate information is more than a disservice — it’s disempowering, putting them at a significant civic disadvantage as they face a more complex information environment than ever before.

“If a student doesn’t understand the difference between a news story and an opinion column or how to spot dangerously misleading disinformation, the consequences can be dire. Those who believe falsehoods about COVID-19 have flouted public health guidelines, endangering family members and friends. Some have been sickened by ingesting bleach, touted falsely as a COVID-19 treatment; others have died as a result of taking false cures (one example).”

Worland also explains how the loss of standards-based sources of news is only worsening the problem.

“The number of quality, standards-based news organizations — especially at the local level — is shrinking. As news consumers let newspaper subscriptions lapse, gravitating instead to free online sources (many of which are not standards-based), advertisers follow. One in five newspapers across the country has closed, leaving communities across the country with little to no coverage and stripping them of their local watchdogs. By some estimates, 1,300 communities across the country lack any local news outlet, leaving them with no independent oversight of local government and business.

“Why should we care? that the loss of local news outlets results in greater polarization in voting, as residents retreat to those echo chambers online where their biases are encouraged and left unchallenged.

“Add to that a lack of appreciation for the role of a free press in a democracy and growing public disdain for journalists, and you have a recipe for what we saw on display at the Capitol.

“If we don’t teach the next generation of Americans what sets quality journalism apart, give them an appreciation for the central watchdog role journalists play in holding the powerful to account, or help them understand why democracy can’t function without a working independent news media, then we have no hope of turning this dangerous situation around.”

A student’s poster depicting the information ecosystem as the solar system using InfoZone categories.

During a news literacy unit, seventh-graders in Jeff Rosen’s history class learned about different categories of information and the dangers of misinformation. They also learned about themselves and their place in the information ecosystem.

“They began to identify some of the harmful things they were seeing,” says Rosen, a social studies teacher at The Joseph Sears School in Kenilworth, Illinois. “I don’t think the kids knew they were being exposed to misinformation.”

An educator for 14 years, Rosen led his history class through a two-week unit on media literacy using NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom. He focused on the “InfoZones” and “Misinformation” lessons and COVID-19 misinformation resources. But the learning didn’t end there.

“I try to find ways for the kids to apply the skills they learn to their everyday lives through tracking documents and reflection,” he says. “There’s a really urgent need to learn this now. They’re consuming information every day from a variety of sources and are not equipped with skills to differentiate what they are seeing.”

Measuring behavior

To accomplish this, students connected what they learned to their own lives by tracking information they consumed over two days. They categorized content by primary purpose — news, opinion, entertainment, advertising, raw information and propaganda/misinformation. Students then illustrated their findings in pie charts and reflected on what they found.

Examples of student work tracking their media consumption and reflecting on their habits.

Here is one student’s honest insight.

“I spent 90% of my time watching entertainment. One positive is that I read the news and saw some respectful opinions on the internet, which shows that not all opinions are bad propaganda. However, I only read one news article. This was disappointing to me because if I don’t read articles or watch TV, the only news I will see is the posts on Instagram. I want to be more aware of all the problems in the world, not just the ones that make it onto people’s stories.”

Recognizing dangers of misinformation

The students also discovered that so-called “fake news” is actually part of the information they see and engage with every day, underscoring the dangers of misinformation.

To reinforce this, Rosen had his class delve deeper by creating posters that describe a system with symbols for the “InfoZones” categories. They then demonstrated how misinformation poses a threat to a healthy system. One student represented misinformation as an asteroid in the solar system. Another labeled misinformation as pollution in a marine ecosystem.

“This shows that the kids have a deep understanding of these kinds of information. Applying symbols to them requires abstract thinking,” Rosen says. “It’s not just a surface skill they’re learning. They’re starting to internalize it and put it into practice.”

Rosen has also learned a good deal over the four years that he has been teaching Checkology. Originally, students simply enjoyed Checkology’s use of examples they could relate to — familiar YouTube stars or advertisements for favorite products.

“Now kids really recognize the importance of being able to identify what they’re seeing, and it’s an important skill to them. I’ve seen a change in their attitudes toward the media. Kids recognize the importance and urgency of being able to do this,” he says.

And that urgency and importance are never going away, Rosen notes. “We’re never going back. We’re never going to be able to say ‘don’t use these platforms.’ There’s so much good information out there but so much that’s bad. We need to teach them how to navigate it.”

With his creative approach, Rosen is doing just that.

KATC participates in second annual News Literacy Week, the television station based in Lafayette, Louisiana, reports on Jan. 25. The station will premiere stories related to the topic of news literacy on-air and online at katc.com.

In the piece Facts over PACs: How corporate America can fight political misinformation for Fortune magazine on Jan. 19, NLP board member Tucker Eskew calls on executives to take a stand against misinformation. He cites NLP’s work and urges business leaders to use their voices to promote facts over fiction during National News Literacy Week (Jan, 25-29).

“Corporate leaders don’t need to be Clark Kent—much less ignore the global aspects of this infodemic—to see how every worthy business goal, from profit-making in a stable nation to the social cohesion that is essential to freedom and prosperity, is at risk.” he writes. “This is a fight we cannot afford to lose. As we say at NLP, we must have a future founded on facts.”

With information – and misinformation – surging around recent national events, the News Literacy Project and The E.W. Scripps Company are teaming up for National News Literacy Week 2021, which begins with a national public awareness campaign to promote news literacy and the role of a free press in American democracy.

This second annual National News Literacy Week (Jan. 25-29) aims to promote news literacy as a fundamental life skill and to provide the public with the tools needed to be an informed and empowered populace.

The public service announcement, an animated video that challenges people to test their “news literacy fitness” and to resolve to be healthier news consumers, will run in both Spanish and English across Scripps’ social, digital and broadcast channels including its 60 local broadcast television stations; national networks Newsy, Court TV, Bounce, Laff, Grit and Court TV Mystery; and promotions from the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Simplemost and Triton Digital.

Media partners large and small are offering pro bono ad space to further amplify the campaign’s message: The Associated Press, BuzzFeed News, the Los Angeles Times, NPR, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Pro Publica, Vox Media, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and members of the Local Media Association and Local Media Consortium are among the organizations committing space to the effort.

Engagement with students, educators, public

The News Literacy Project (NLP) will engage educators, students and the public throughout the week with quizzes, tips and tools featured through its social media channels and on the NewsLiteracyWeek.org landing page. A national professional development event, NewsLitCamp®, will be held on Jan. 26 in partnership with CNN, as well as a #NewsLiteracyWeek Twitter chat on Jan. 25 at 3 p.m. ET and an edWeb session on conspiratorial thinking with NLP’s education team on Jan. 27 at 4 p.m. ET. NLP will also formally launch its NewsLit Nation educator network, which will support local ambassadors advocating for news literacy to be taught in their local schools.

Consequences for democracy

“In today’s complex information and media ecosystem, the proliferation of rumors, lies and the deliberate spread of misinformation has devastating consequences for our democracy,” said Scripps President and CEO Adam Symson. “At the same time, it’s harder than ever to distinguish verified facts and objective journalism from opinion, propaganda and even total fiction. It is our urgent responsibility – as friends, coworkers, teachers, parents and fellow citizens – to equip ourselves and younger generations with the tools necessary to discern truth from misinformation. With our partners at the News Literacy Project, Scripps is committed to bringing discussions about what it means to be news-literate into newsrooms, classrooms and living rooms across the country to empower the public to be stronger news consumers.”

“The corrosive threat of misinformation now permeates every aspect of our civic life,” said Alan C. Miller, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project. “We’ve seen it surge in the past year around the global pandemic, racial justice protests and during the presidential election. As the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol demonstrated, this contagion of viral rumors and conspiracy theories can have deadly consequences. It’s time to confront this rising tide that threatens our democracy. Together, we must take personal responsibility for the news and other information we consume and share to assure a future founded on facts.”

During National News Literacy Week 2021, Scripps’ news teams will premiere stories related to the topic of news literacy on-air and online across Scripps’ platforms, with a selection available at the campaign landing page, NewsLiteracyWeek.org.

National News Literacy Week 2021: How to get involved

The public can get involved with National News Literacy Week, Jan. 25-29, in a number of ways:

• Visit NewsLiteracyWeek.org to test your “news literacy fitness” and take the pledge to be news-literate.

• Watch NLP’s new Checkology® virtual classroom lesson “Conspiratorial Thinking” to learn how and why conspiracy theories develop and how to prevent people from falling for them.

• Join the conversation on social media at #NewsLiteracyWeek.

National News Literacy Week is part of an ongoing partnership between Scripps and NLP to advance awareness of news literacy.

Ken Wood, a former journalist and director of communications for Boys & Girls Clubs of Northeast Ohio, writes about the importance of NLP’s work in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Dec. 20. In Empower yourself to stop the spread of false information, he tells of learning about NLP after meeting Director of Communications Carol McCarthy at a conference last year and notes that the ability to sort fact from fiction is an “evident and urgent” need not limited by age.

“”So what is at stake here? Why is this important?

“A healthy democracy depends on a free press — warts and all — and whether people have the ability to determine whether information is credible,” Wood says.

He ends with a call to action for readers. “Let’s all get better at separating fact from fiction. There is a lot more at stake here than you might think.”

KXLY-TV, serving the Spokane, Washington, and Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, region built a segment around NLP’s infographic Seven Steps for Staying Sharp Online. The Dec. 14 segment, Is this true? Here are some tips to fight off misinformation you see online, featured the full graphic and described its contents. “The tips include not letting feelings getting in the way of finding the real information. It also suggests not confusing memes with actual news. The checklist also says “remember that credible information doesn’t ask you to trust it – it shows why you should by clearly attributing the facts it provides to reliable sources.”

“There is a solution, and it’s a matter of restoring something we chose to abandon not very long ago: comprehensive, robust civics education,” NLP’s President and Chief Operations Officer Charles Salter says of the public’s lack of understanding and distrust in American institutions.

His commentary piece, We Americans Risk Losing the Ability to Govern Ourselves. Better Civics Education Can Help, appeared in EdWeek on Nov. 25.

NLP’s Darragh Worland was a guest on a segment of the show Causepods. “I think it’s a fundamental life skill,” Worland says of news literacy. “It’s essential that all schools be teaching some form of news literacy.” The segment Misinformation with Darragh Worland of the Is That a Fact Podcast  aired on Nov. 23.

The misinformation generation gap closes, NLP’s Carol McCarthy writes in a Nov. 20 commentary for the Florida Sun-Sentinel.  “While we may never know which generation is best at recognizing fact from fiction, it’s pretty clear to me that no age group is immune to misinformation, she writes.

“Adopted early in life, the skills and mindset of becoming more news-literate will last a lifetime. But the learning must extend beyond the classroom, too,” McCarthy writes in the piece Neither youth nor maturity makes you immune to misinformation.

If 2020 has made anything clear, it’s that the future of our democracy depends on our collective ability to sort fact from fiction — and teaching students news literacy skills is crucial to this. To build our local footprint through community organizing efforts in the fight against misinformation, we have launched a News Literacy Ambassador Program.

Through this regional model for news literacy education, we can create a sense of belonging and community among educators. We know that if this movement is to be successful, it must be inclusive and local. These paid local organizers serve as our thought leadership partners, helping to identify the unique needs of educators in their school districts. These efforts will further help to combat misinformation and create a more news-literate generation of news consumers.

Thanks to news literacy leaders like you we have been able to make significant achievements during this challenging year. With our News Literacy Ambassador Program, we can do even more.

We welcome the following group of ambassadors:

Should schools require news literacy? NLP’s Peter Adams joined Jaclyn Siegel, New York State chapter leader for Media Literacy Now, and Mike Johansson, principal lecturer in the School of Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology, to discuss that question in a pubic radio segment Should news and media literacy be required courses in schools?

The program aired Nov. 9 on Connections, a program on WXXI in Rochester, New York.

“We cannot afford to delay in providing young people with the ability and confidence to navigate our complex information landscape,” says California educator and NLP board member in the Nov. 7 op-ed for EdSurge, The U.S. Election Underscores the Need for Teaching News Literacy in Our Schools.

“News literacy … is a fundamental life skill, as essential to success in the classroom and in life as reading or math,” Ramos says.

In the Oct. 30 piece for Real Simple, How to Spot Fake News and Fact-Check the Internet, NLP’s Hannah Covington advises readers to look out for common red flags. First, ask yourself if this is a news report or something else, the article reads. “Be cautious of anything user-generated,” she tells readers, such as social media posts or memes.

NLP’s John Silva highlights some of the “red flag phrases” to look out for online in Jimmy Rhoades’ irreverent take on The List. The human need for togetherness and an “us vs. them” framework are triggers that allow red flags to enter our psyche and fuel the spread of misinformation, Silva says in the Oct 29 piece How to Spot Red Flag Phrases in Online Content.

This Media Literacy Week activity created by NLP’s Peter Adams pushes students to ask such questions as, “Am I sure enough about this that I should share it?” “If everybody did that, we’d see a dramatic reduction of misinformation online,” Adams says

It was included in the The New York Times Oct. 26 Tech Fix column, Lesson of the Day: ‘How to Deal With a Crisis of Misinformation.’