In its story headlined “How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News,” Time magazine asks, “Why are even the smartest among us so bad at making judgments about what to trust on the web? And how can we get better?” It also quotes our founder and CEO: “It’s the equivalent of a public-health crisis.”

The piece explores issues familiar to those who know about news literacy, including what’s behind “our online gullibility” and the steps people can take not to be fooled (lessons, not so incidentally, that educators apply in their classes through our Checkology® virtual classroom).

The Rotarian — the official magazine of Rotary International, with a circulation of more than 400,000 — interviews a sixth-grade teacher in Chicago who discovered our Checkology virtual classroom last year. The article shows exactly how she uses the platform to teach news literacy skills. It also quotes Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education: “We’re living in the most overwhelming information landscape in human history.”

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, was one of two experts interviewed by Courthouse News Service in its story about a recent Pew Research Center study. The study examined the difficulty people have in distinguishing between factual and opinion statements in the news.* One reason, said Adams: “Confirmation bias is front and center in everything we do online.”

* July 13, 2018: An earlier version of this post mischaracterized the results of the Pew Research Center study. It did not show how poorly the public performs in separating fact from fiction: it examined the difficulty people have in determining what statements are factual and what are opinion.

The president and CEO of the PR agency CooperKatz writes that public relations professionals should help fight the threat to our access to accurate news. She credits our CEO, Alan Miller, and NLP with treating the situation as a public health crisis.

Late last month, our director of partnerships, Damaso Reyes, took the NLP message to three cities in the United Kingdom, where he addressed more than 300 students in hands-on lessons that left the teens “enthused and inspired.”

The stops in Newcastle, Birmingham and Belfast were sponsored by the U.S. Embassy and Shout Out UK, an independent youth news and media platform.

https://www.shoutoutuk.org/2018/05/14/media-literacy-roadtour-2018/

“Misinformation and disinformation are the equivalent of a public health threat” and news literacy is a “survival skill,” says NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller in an After the Fact podcast. Listen to the Pew Charitable Trusts interview.

The News Literacy Project and the PR Council have announced a new partnership.

NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller told The Holmes Report, an industry newsletter, that NLP will train public relations agency staff how to spot “disruptive information” so they can in turn teach those lessons to their fellow PR professionals. The PR Council — a trade association comprising more than 100 agencies — will do its part to support the mission of news literacy by raising awareness of, and support for, NLP.

Said PR Council board member Anne Green: “We as PR professionals have a critical responsibility to speak up and act in building better literacy about the news, and all information. It’s critical to our industry and democracy.”

The Voice of America visits a high school in Virginia where students are being pushed to think critically about what they watch, read and hear. The social studies teacher is using NLP’s Checkology® platform to teach them to ask smart questions. Her goal, she says in a video and the news report, is that “the class will help them to identify quality journalism when they see it, as well as unfair, unbalanced and fake news, and propaganda.”

“Organizations for $400, Alex!” This popular TV program featured NLP on April 5. (Please phrase your response in the form of a question!)

We’re happy to note that contestant Jack Dickey — a staff writer with Sports Illustrated — answered this Jeopardy! clue correctly.

NLP on Jeopardy! from The News Literacy Project on Vimeo.

Erika Beras of public radio’s Marketplace looked at the changing social media landscape and heard from NLP’s Alan C. Miller about what teens need to know.

Tom Martin, the host of Eastern Standard on WEKU, an NPR affiliate near Lexington, Kentucky, spent an hour talking with NLP’s Alan C. Miller and others about news literacy in the digital age. Miller offered guidance on discerning fact from fiction and called news literacy “a matter of personal responsibility. … People need to say ‘Fake news stops with me.’”

Why news literacy? One reason, says NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller, is “the need to restore a fact-based middle ground to the national conversation.” He talks with Valerie Strauss, author of The Washington Post’s education blog, Answer Sheet, about NLP’s first 10 years and its growth as educators search for resources “to teach their students how to evaluate the credibility of information.”

The upside to the rise of the phrase “fake news” and what it stands for is the broader recognition of the threat — and greater demand for media and news literacy lessons in schools, according to panelists at a recent Education Writers Association seminar.

“There is a cure — or perhaps better put, there’s a vaccine to fake news. That vaccine actually is news literacy education,” said Damaso Reyes of the News Literacy Project. Reyes, who is in charge of NLP’s partnerships, was one of the experts talking about educating for character and citizenship.

Read more.

“The Internet — fueled by social media — has deeply divided us,” writes NLP journalist fellow Alicia Shepard in a USA Today opinion piece. Shepard, who helped to produce PEN America’s recent study of “fraudulent news and the fight for truth,” offers long-term solutions, including the perspective of Alan C. Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO.

Last week, New York’s education policymakers heard about the urgent need for news literacy in schools, and what is at stake in its absence, reports Newsday in a story that referred to the News Literacy Project and its reach into schools.

The piece, which features the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism and its trainings, highlights the News Literacy Project as a force helping students “distinguish between fact and fiction, verified information and spin.”

The article notes that according to Media Literacy Now, at least 11 states have passed or considered legislation on news literacy.

NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller discussed news literacy with a class at Hanover (New Hampshire) High School on Feb. 5, and reporter Tom Blinkhorn of the Valley News was there.

Miller gave the class of 30 students examples of viral fake photos and said that he believes that “fake news” is an oxymoron.

“If it’s genuine news, how can it be fake?” he asked.

While in New Hampshire, Miller also visited a class at Lebanon High School and gave a public lecture at Dartmouth College.

Reuters’ Pavritha George recently visited an Arlington, Virginia, high school where seniors are learning how to discern fact from fiction by using NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom.

NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller was also interviewed for George’s report and explained why the need for news literacy is particularly important today.

“This is an equivalent of a public health crisis, and it’s been brewing more beneath the surface for a long time now,” he said. It has become “such an urgent matter” now, he added, because of “profound technological changes” that have increased both the public’s access to information and “the challenge of sorting the informational wheat from the chaff.”

Alisyn Camerota, a founding member of NLP’s national advisory council, wrote a column for CNN about her experience with NLP and the need for news literacy.

“News literacy training can make a profound impact on the way students evaluate and absorb the news,” she wrote.

News Co/Lab, based at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, recently included the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom as one of its “best practices” for “building news savvy.” NLP is a partner of News Co/Lab.

“Checkology is achieving results similar to the project’s highly effective classroom curriculum upon which the online course is based, according to a preliminary assessment,” News Co/Lab noted.

CNN’s Brian Stelter gave a tip of the hat to NLP in his Reliable Sources newsletter in honor of the organization’s 10th anniversary.

He also urged readers to check out NLP’s chorus of supporters by following the hashtag #10YearsofNLP on Twitter.

The New York Times challenged high school students to change their news diets — and write about it. Almost all of the winning essays, along with the winning video, were from students in schools that use NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom.

This contest, which attracted 358 entries, required students to record, over one or two days, what news they found, where they got it and whether it met their needs. They then were asked to find other news sources to fill the gaps they identified and write an essay or record a video about what they discovered.

Katherine Schulten, editor of The Learning Network, a Times resource for students and teachers, highlighted 10 things she learned about teenagers and news from the contest, including: “[G]etting news from a variety of sources can help solve the fake-news problem and makes for a healthy news ‘diet’ overall.”

News Center Maine, the NBC affiliate in Portland, dropped in on a school in Damariscotta where reading teacher John Cannon is using NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom to give his students the critical-thinking skills to separate fact from fiction. Parents were also put to the test.

One of those parents, Heather Kiersted, praised the online platform and said that a course like this would help shape how her three teenagers consumed online information.

“They’re going to be able to look at it with a different set of eyes,” she said.

NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom is a great tool for educators who want to teach their students what to trust and share in the digital age, says Jessica Lander, an author and a high school teacher in Lowell, Massachusetts.

“The News Literacy Project (NLP) has created an online platform, Checkology, with hours of virtual lessons covering everything from First Amendment issues to viral rumors to the role of algorithms in shaping the content you see,” she wrote in Usable Knowledge, the monthly newsletter of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Lander also encouraged educators to download NLP’s “Ten Questions for Fake News Detection”* checklist.

*Updated May 18, 2018, to correct the name of the checklist.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, has donated $250,000 to the News Literacy Project to help further its mission and reach. By doing so, says Stephen Sawchuk, an associate editor of Education Week, Bezos is underscoring his support for reputable journalism.

“Media literacy has gained more attention in this era of cries of ‘fake news,’ as educators and researchers alike fret over students’ inability to distinguish between reputable and biased sources of news, and between fact and opinion,” Sawchuk wrote.

Young people are leading the charge in the fight against “fake news,” according to a Jan. 12 column in The Boston Globe.

Bernhard Warner interviewed Kyle Eichner and Catherine Griffin, two of the more than 10,000 educators around the world who have registered to use NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom. Their students are learning to decide the news value of content, gather information independently and check for fairness, balance and objectivity.

Sanja Kelly, director of Freedom House’s Freedom of the Net project, told Werner that teaching teens how to spot misinformation is crucial to stopping its spread online.

“There are other solutions that could temporarily patch up the problem, but if you really want to tackle this long-term, education is key,” she said.

In an op-ed for The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill., NLP’s Peter Adams discusses the importance of news literacy and provides tips to fight “fake news.”

“To be meaningfully engaged with the world around us, we must be informed,” he writes. “But what does that mean in an age of information overload in which so much ‘content’ isn’t what it appears to be? How, in other words, can we know what to believe?”

Adams says that learning these skills and approaches can go a long way toward ensuring a more credible, engaged and accurate information landscape in 2018.

Quartz recently visited a New York City school where students are learning to discern fact from fiction using NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom.

Eighth graders at George Jackson Academy were given real-world examples of information found online and asked to determine if the content was news, opinion, entertainment, propaganda or something else.

“Students do need more practice in decoding and identifying informational sources,” says educator David Hong, who uses the Checkology® virtual classroom in his English class.

Classrooms aren’t the only place where news literacy is taught. David Beard of the Poynter Institute describes how libraries are teaching their adult patrons how to know what to believe in the digital age. One of their tools: NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom.

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president for educational programs, examined the future of news literacy for a National Association of Elementary School Principals publication.

“If ‘teaching literacy’ means teaching students to access, comprehend, and evaluate information and create meaningful information of their own, then it also necessarily means teaching three overlapping skill sets: news literacy, civic literacy, and digital literacy. Far from distinct areas of study, these specialized literacies signal ways in which literacy itself is changing,” Adams said.

The Washingtonian recently included NLP in its “24 Local Charities That Make Giving Back Feel Great (and Smart)” list.

Author Erica Sloan wrote, “This Bethesda nonprofit creates classroom, afterschool, and e-learning curricula to help young people distinguish fact from fiction while analyzing text, photos, and videos.”

The PR Council announced that it will be supporting NLP to celebrate its 20th anniversary, and Nyhus Communications has joined in on that effort.

“NLP helps young people determine what information they should trust, share and act upon, and is committed to empowering youth with the knowledge necessary to actively participate in our robust democracy,” Isobel Press, an account coordinator at Nyhus, wrote on the company’s website.

The News Literacy Project is leading the way in creating a news-literate public by giving American youth the tips, tools and resources they need to sort fact from fiction, Aine Kerr wrote for Independent Business and Technology in Ireland.

“The project’s motto is simple: when you’re informed, you’re empowered. Via a series of free lessons, students learn the difference between news and branded content, how to differentiate trending rumours from reported facts, what questions to ask about the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, and how to go about detecting biases,” Kerr, co-founder and COO of NevaLabs, wrote.

John Silva, the News Literacy Project’s director of education, was recently interviewed by Offspring, Lifehacker’s parenting vertical, about what parents can do to spot and fight “fake news.”

Silva told writer Leigh Anderson that parents should participate in lateral reading (real-time fact-checking from other news sites) with their children and make sure that the news their kids consume is fair and balanced.

He also urged parents to teach their children the structural fundamentals of media and encourage them to “get your news from news organizations.”

It’s never too soon to teach young people media literacy, says Lisa Guernsey of New America in a piece for Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America and Arizona State University that explores emerging technologies and public policy.

And one tool that’s “gaining traction,” she says, is the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom, which teaches students in middle school and high school how to be shrewd consumers of the news and information they encounter every day: When they understand how content is made, they realize how it can be manipulated.

The 21st, a production of Illinois Public Media, recently explored how to be news-literate in an age of misinformation. Erika Hobbs, NLP’s communications director and Chicago program manager, urged listeners to “think before you share.”

Hobbs explained how NLP works with educators and journalists to teach students the standards of quality journalism — and how students can use those standards to decide whether to trust, share and act on what they’re reading, watching and hearing. She also told host Niala Boodhoo how NLP is collaborating with Facebook to encourage adults to be more responsible news consumers and producers.

A day-long conference on Nov. 6, sponsored by Reuters and the National Association of Media Literacy Education, kicked off Media Literacy Week, an annual celebration of the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education today.

As part of the day’s events, NLP’s director of community partnerships and engagement, Damaso Reyes, and the Newseum’s vice president for education, Barbara McCormack, led a breakout session for educators on facilitating classroom discussions about media and politics.

Author and journalism professor Kim Lisagor Bisheff writes in MediaShift about the importance of teaching students to become responsible news consumers. She recommends the News Literacy Project as a great resource to help them separate good journalism from bad.

“‘It’s all fake’ is a refrain we can’t afford to accept — as journalists and as a society,” Bisheff says. “If your students worked to address and overcome their distrust, that’s an accomplishment worth celebrating.”

A new report by PEN America — Faking News: Fraudulent News and the Fight for Truth — calls on schools to provide news literacy lessons in the classroom, and on teacher-preparation programs to train educators to teach them. The best way that the general public can be protected from the problems associated with “fake news” and misinformation, the authors write, is to “inoculate” people with news literacy.

We’ve been leading that call to action for nearly 10 years, helping students in middle schools and high schools learn how to discern fact from fiction in the digital age.

“We are teaching them to be skeptical about what they see and hear and read and to question whether they should believe it, share it or act on it,” our founder and CEO, Alan C. Miller, said in an interview for the report.

PEN America is a New York City-based nonprofit that focuses on free speech and human rights.

Keep reading for more about its recommendations and our solutions for news literacy education.

The Daily Herald, which covers eight suburban Chicago counties, published a column by Jim Baumann, vice president and managing editor, in which he discussed misinformation frequently found online and the tools available to help news consumers become more astute. He listed the News Literacy Project as a resource for both teachers and the general public.

His column includes examples of fake social media content, such as manipulated photos, provided by Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president for educational programs.

Alan C. Miller, the News Literacy Project’s founder and CEO, participated in a panel about fake news and news literacy, hosted by the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations.