Valeria Luquin, a high school sophomore who applies skills gleaned from the News Literacy Project’s Checkology^® virtual classroom in her daily life, has been named NLP’s Gwen Ifill Student of the Year for 2019.

“Valeria has taken everything she’s learned on Checkology to heart,” said Alan C. Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO. “She not only has brought these lessons to bear on her work as a student journalist, but is now considering a career in journalism herself.”

The award commemorates Gwen Ifill, the trailblazing journalist — and longtime NLP supporter and board member — who died in 2016. It is presented to female students of color who represent the values Ifill brought to journalism as the first woman and first African American to serve as moderator of Washington Week and as a member (with Judy Woodruff) of the first female co-anchor team of a network news broadcast on PBS NewsHour. Honorees are selected by a committee of NLP staff and board members.

Luquin will receive the award — a $250 gift certificate and a glass plaque with an etched photo of Ifill — at a Sept. 17 lunch at her high school, the Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Van Nuys. Pearl, The Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, was kidnapped and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in early 2002.

Checkology lessons were a weekly component of Luquin’s ninth-grade journalism class in the last school year. Her teacher, Adriana Chavira, called Luquin a “remarkable student who has taken her responsibility as a future journalist to heart. She is not afraid to question where people get their information from, and she makes sure she has facts from credible sources to support her reporting.”

Chavira recommended that Luquin join Miller to discuss misinformation on a local public affairs program, In Depth, broadcast on Fox 11 in Los Angeles in April. The show’s host, Hal Eisner, then invited Miller, Luquin and her mother, Lorena, to discuss news literacy in more detail on his podcast, What the Hal.

“I am so honored,” Luquin said when she was told about the award. “Receiving an award in honor of Gwen Ifill means a great deal to me. The legacy she left behind as a journalist inspires me, especially being a woman of color as well.”

In a video interview with NLP earlier this year, Luquin described how Checkology has had an impact on her life. “After doing Checkology, I feel I have gotten better at being a journalism student and identifying real news from fake news,” she said. “It actually makes me kind of want to be a journalist.”

She also said that she feels a need to help others think critically about information they consume and share: “I think I have the responsibility to identify whether different stories on the news are actually factual.”

She even has become an advocate for news literacy at home. For example, she told NLP how she had asked her father about the credibility of the sources in a documentary he had been watching. “He looked at me and told me, ‘I notice that you’ve gotten a lot more critical,’” she said. “That made me realize I do act more critical.”

Luquin also wants to set a good example for her 7-year-old sister: “I can tell she looks up to me, so it’s important that I’m a good role model.”

Enrique Acevedo, co-anchor of Univision’s Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna, the network’s late-night news program, is the 2019 recipient of the News Literacy Project’s John S. Carroll Journalist of the Year Award.

“Enrique made major contributions to NLP on important fronts in the past year with considerable skill and professionalism,” said Alan C. Miller, NLP’s founder and CEO. “And his work as a journalist reflects the high standards and enterprise reporting that John valued so highly.”

Acevedo will be honored at a luncheon in Miami in September.

About the award

The award — named after one of the most revered newspaper editors of his generation — is given annually to journalists who have contributed significantly to NLP and its mission. The honorees, who receive $500 and a glass plaque with an etched photo of Carroll, are selected by a committee of NLP board members and staff. During an acclaimed journalism career spanning four decades, Carroll was the editor of three major U.S. newspapers — the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, The Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. He was a founding member of NLP’s board and served as its chair until shortly before his death in 2015.

Acevedo first became involved with the News Literacy Project in June 2017 as a moderator for a panel on news literacy and public libraries to mark the launch of NLP’s Checkology^® virtual classroom in the Miami-Dade Public Library System. A year later, he agreed to host the first Checkology lesson offered in English and Spanish — “Practicing Quality Journalism”/ “Practicando el periodismo de calidad,” a game-like simulation in which students assume the role of a rookie reporter covering a breaking news event. The lesson is one of the most popular on the platform.

He continued his work with NLP in April 2019, leading a session on identifying bias in news reports at a NewsLitCamp^®hosted by Univision in Miami. He also follows and promotes NLP on social media.

“I’m thrilled to be part of NLP’s effort to reach Spanish-language audiences,” he said. “I can’t think of a better contribution to the future of journalism and the free press than our partnership with NLP. As journalists, we need to make sure everyone has access to these important tools.”

Notable career

Acevedo, who is also a special correspondent for the Fusion Media Group, has covered news around the world in Spanish and English for print, broadcast and digital media. Highlights of his work include his reports on the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the humanitarian crisis in Haiti and the drug wars in Mexico.

He has interviewed a number of notable figures, including President Barack Obama, philanthropist Melinda Gates and Nobel laureates Bishop Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and Jody Williams. His Univision report “La Amazonía: Un Paraíso a La Venta” (“The Amazon: Paradise for Sale”) won an Emmy award for Outstanding Feature Story in Spanish in 2017.

Before joining Univision in 2012, Acevedo served as special correspondent and anchor for NBC-Telemundo and as a senior reporter for Televisa’s special investigations bureau in Mexico. In that role, he was the host of La Otra Agenda, a daily news program on ForoTV, Televisa’s 24-hour cable news channel, and a correspondent for the network’s investigative news magazine, Los Reporteros. He earlier was a national affairs reporter and special projects editor at Reforma, one of Mexico’s leading newspapers.

A new report from the RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, confirms what we at the News Literacy Project have long known: There’s an urgent need for media literacy education that is scalable, culturally relevant and readily available.

Released earlier this month, Exploring Media Literacy Education as a Tool for Mitigating Truth Decay was produced as part of a RAND initiative exploring “Truth Decay,” which it defines as “the diminishing role that facts, data and analysis play in political and civil discourse” — in part, because of an increasingly complex information ecosystem. This report aims “to describe the field of media literacy (ML) education and the ways in which ML education can counter Truth Decay by changing how participants consume, create, and share information.”

NLP’s expertise as a leader and pioneer in news literacy education is noted throughout the report, which weighs the input and suggestions of many experts in the field and lays out the challenges to developing meaningful education programs that can be scaled for significant impact.

Challenges and solutions

The RAND researchers describe the obstacles to building a news-literate population, such as the many skills needed to evaluate sources, to understand context, and to create and share information responsibly. They identify the alarming gap between proficiency in these skills and the abilities of average individuals: a gap that results in harmful consequences — vulnerability to disinformation, misinformation, viral hoaxes and bias.

Our programs provide educators with the tools and resources that enable their students to close that gap and become civically engaged, news-literate adults. While the challenges detailed are real, I can say with confidence that NLP is successfully meeting many of them:

• The report describes the importance of scaling programs for significant impact. At NLP we have laid out a framework for scaling our e-learning platform, the Checkology^® virtual classroom, with the goal of creating a community of 22,000 educators teaching 3 million students annually by 2022. Since its launch in 2016, more than 129,000 students have created individual accounts on our browser-based platform (this does not include the many students who have been taught in a one-to-many format), and more than 19,000 educators in all 50 states, four U.S. territories and 108 other countries have registered to use it.
• The report rightly states that for media literacy education to succeed, it must be rigorously nonideological. All of NLP’s programs, including Checkology, are scrupulously nonpartisan and represent a variety of perspectives.
• The report explores whether media literacy education should be a stand-alone offering or integrated across disciplines. Because media literacy is an essential life skill, we have designed our programs for cross-discipline learning and lasting impact. Our curriculum conforms to state standards across disciplines (such as English language arts and social studies) and is used by media, technology and science educators. The critical-thinking and analytical skills that students gain from news literacy education serve them well long after they leave the classroom.
• The report notes the need for more developed assessment and evaluation of media literacy programs. For years, we have used formal assessments of students’ competencies before and after they are exposed to our platform, along with self-reported student feedback, to evaluate and enhance our curriculum. The impact is evident in what we heard from students who completed Checkology lessons in the 2017-18 school year (the most recent data available): 93% are more confident in their ability to detect misinformation, 81% are more likely to become more civically engaged, and 80% are more likely to correct misinformation they see online.
• The report cites experts who emphasize that the most effective media literacy education strategies “are those that reach participants in a format and context with which they are familiar and comfortable.” We reach students where they live — on their devices. And the report indicates the need for context and flexibility. Checkology lessons can be taught in a sequential order, or educators can customize them to serve their students at different grade or skill levels and in a wide range of subject areas.

Working with diverse partners

The authors also stress partnering with media organizations to achieve scale. Right from the start, NLP has partnered with outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle and Univision.

We did this for years through our initial classroom program and have continued to do so through our NewsLitCamps^®, which bring scores of educators into newsrooms for a day of engaging teacher-driven professional development. This fall, we will fully launch our Newsroom to Classroom program, which will bring journalist volunteers into schools around the country, either in person or remotely. Diverse and dynamic journalists and experts on the First Amendment and digital media guide students through our Checkology lessons as well.

I welcome the conversations, collaboration and increased awareness that RAND’s timely work will prompt and look forward to expanding NLP’s contribution to the growing field of news literacy education.

Millions of Americans will be paying close attention on Wednesday when former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III testifies before two congressional committees about his investigation into Russia’s election interference in 2016 and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald J. Trump. While Democrats and Republicans will no doubt disagree over Mueller’s testimony, it highlights the importance of developing a bipartisan approach to the threat that such disinformation poses to our democracy.

Mueller’s 22-month probe, which culminated in a 448-page report released in April, included meticulous documentation of how Russia’s Internet Research Agency fabricated news reports, created hashtags for fake groups, used the fake groups to promote simultaneous rallies pitting opposing sides against each other, and posted inflammatory language on social media that spread like digital wildfires. On Facebook alone, content posted by the Internet Research Agency reached more than 126 million Americans — about half the voting-age population — between January 2015 and August 2017.

But Americans would have been less vulnerable to these attacks if we had been taught how to recognize the deceptive tactics that were being employed against us. An electorate trained in news literacy would have had the critical-thinking skills to see through this disinformation.

As we approach the 2020 presidential election, this issue could not be more urgent. Last year, using data provided by Twitter, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that a false news story was 70% more likely to be retweeted than one that was true. They also discovered that while true stories rarely reached more than 1,000 people, the top 1% of false stories were routinely spread by between 1,000 and 100,000.

Even digital natives, like today’s students, are vulnerable: A 2016 study by the Stanford History Education Group found that 80% of middle school students believed that “sponsored content” ads were real news reports, while fewer than 20% of high school students questioned the credibility of a misleading photo. If we don’t take steps to rectify this situation now, we’re potentially dooming our digitally focused future generations to a lifetime of struggling to separate fact from fiction.

To give young people the tools they need to be informed participants in the life of their communities, it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Think of it as an updated version of civics education, one that helps students inoculate themselves from the pandemic of misinformation — whether from trolls, profiteers or adversarial governments — that infects our public discourse.

Lawmakers in a number of states have responded to this moment by introducing or enacting legislation that would support the adoption of media literacy education in public schools. Civics courses, which often include a media literacy component, are returning as a high school graduation requirement; in Illinois, which has such a requirement, a bill that would also mandate civics education in middle schools awaits the governor’s signature.

The News Literacy Project, which I founded 11 years ago and continue to lead, has developed curriculum, resources and programs that give educators the tools to teach middle school and high school students how to determine what is real and verified versus what is false and manipulated. We’ve seen how building news literacy skills helps students become critical thinkers. They learn to approach information with equanimity, not emotion; to value credibility, not clickability. They emerge more confident in their ability to discern and create truthful information and more likely to correct errors when they find them. This deliberative mindset will serve them well through a lifetime of informed decision-making and civic engagement. They are now part of the information solution, not part of the misinformation problem.

I’ll leave it to the politicians to determine their response to Mueller’s testimony. But I hope we all can unite around the idea of empowering teachers to educate young people to become savvy enough to spot any misinformation or disinformation that comes their way. A news-literate public will be cognizant of the challenging information landscape and know how to confidently blaze a trail through the confusion and distortion for others to follow.

While it’s an exaggeration to say that the whole world was watching when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20 fifty years ago, this history-defining moment truly riveted people around the globe.

NASA estimates that 650 million people — almost 20% of the global population in 1969 — tuned in when Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin touched down on the moon’s surface aboard the lunar module Eagle on July 20, 1969.

But the astronauts had barely planted an American flag on the moon’s dusty surface when conspiracy theorists began claiming that the mission was staged. Even overwhelming evidence to the contrary could not dissuade those who believed that the moon landing was an elaborate government hoax. The same is true of people who cling to any number of conspiracy theories today.

Their persistence and appeal

While it may seem easy to dismiss such outlandish beliefs, conspiracy theories can lure us in by turning healthy skepticism into damaging cynicism. In an interview with The Verge, Mike Wood, who teaches psychology at the University of Winchester, suggests that we’re especially vulnerable in certain circumstances. These include when we’re repeatedly exposed to such information, when we’re experiencing significant stress or when a particular theory resonates with our values. Once conspiratorial thinking takes hold, it can spread, leading us to embrace even more dangerous falsehoods.

Don’t be lured in

Milestones, such as the moon landing anniversary, rightly draw legitimate news coverage. However, that coverage can also revive conspiracy theories. Today and every day, be sure to seek out credible sources online, question your assumptions, and recognize when you might be vulnerable to information you would otherwise view with skepticism. And help your family and friends to do the same.

With the help of all of our supporters and friends, NLP is working to empower young people to recognize conspiracy theories — and other misinformation — for what they are.

Photo: Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin stands beside the United States flag planted on the moon’s surface. Photo credit: NASA.

Although the calendar and the thermometer tell us that it’s summer, it’s a new year at NLP. To better align with the teaching and learning schedules of the educators and students we serve, NLP kicks off its new year in July — not with corks popping or a ball dropping, but with a staff retreat.

We came together last week in Washington for four days of collaboration and camaraderie that celebrated how far we have come and charted where we are going.

On the first day of the retreat, July 8, we welcomed four staff members, including three in newly created positions. They, along with seven others who joined NLP in the past year, are key to achieving our objective of bringing news literacy education to 3 million students annually by 2022.

We also recognized the contributions of Peter Adams, our senior vice president of education, who joined us a decade ago. Peter’s vision, commitment and expertise have been at the heart of what we do. He has been instrumental in the development, refinement and expansion of the Checkology® virtual classroom, the creation and success of our NewsLitCamp® professional development events, and the conception and execution of The Sift®, our weekly newsletter for educators and others interested in news literacy.

Whether veteran or newbie, every staff member at NLP is committed to the vision of embedding news literacy in the American education experience. In the next few months, we will unveil new tools and programs and resources that will help achieve that vision.

But for now, let me introduce you to the newest members of the NLP family:

Mike Webb, senior vice president of communications, joins NLP after serving as a vice president at the Washington public affairs firm BerlinRosen, where he led client teams on youth advocacy issues. Earlier in his career, Mike was the first communications professional hired by ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news organization, and spent five years there as director and vice president of communications.

Henok Tedla, NLP’s first finance director, has more than a decade of experience with nonprofit organizations. A certified public accountant, he comes to NLP from the Global Business Travel Association, where he was director of accounting.

Alicia Trader is the educator services team’s first service support associate. She previously was the marketing department coordinator at Perma-Bound Books, one of the largest educational resource organizations in the country.

Sara Lewis is NLP’s first office manager, assisting the staff in our Washington headquarters. She has experience as a teacher and nonprofit professional working with students in under-resourced communities.

Photo: The News Literacy Project staff at our annual retreat dinner. Photo credit: Molly Hill Patten for the News Literacy Project. 

How are you celebrating the Fourth of July — with fireworks, a parade, a family cookout?

May we suggest sharpening your news literacy skills? Our nation’s founders would be proud of you.

While they didn’t have to contend with the 24-hour news cycle, internet trolls or disinformation-spewing bots, the Founding Fathers were concerned that misinformation could weaken their young democracy.

As Tim Libretti, a professor of U.S. literature and culture at Northeastern Illinois University, wrote last month on PoliticusUSA.com, the founders were worried about meddling by foreign powers. They also worried about the vulnerability of the population to deceit and manipulation by their fellow citizens.

America was piloting a new form of government. It was a concept based on government of the people, by the people and for the people, as Abraham Lincoln would describe it almost 75 years later. And the Founding Fathers were putting a lot of stock in the people’s ability to make sound decisions based on factual information that served the public good.

Trusting in education

John Adams had his doubts, Libretti noted. He feared that “human reason, and human conscience, … are not a match for human passions, human imaginations, and human enthusiasm.” Thomas Jefferson put his faith in the power of education.

At NLP, we put our trust, resources and hard work into the conviction that education is the most effective approach to developing a news-literate public. Our society relies on people who can think critically, engage responsibly with information, value our democracy and participate in keeping it robust.

Thanks to your support, we are working to bring news literacy education to many thousands of young people in classrooms across the nation.

In turn, these informed consumers and creators of news and other information can impart their skills to the adults in their lives.

Journalist and Columbia University professor emerita Ann Cooper (center, on screen) “visited” a fourth-grade class at Carl Von Linné School in Chicago June 20 and spoke to students about journalism and the role of a free press in democracy. Photo credit: Jodi Mahoney.

Usually, the last day of school is an exercise in the mundane: emptying lockers, clearing out desks, shelving books in the library. But that wasn’t the case on June 20 for the fourth-graders in Jodi Mahoney’s technology classroom at Carl Von Linné School in Chicago.

They wrapped up the school year with a virtual visit from Ann Cooper, an award-winning radio and print journalist and the CBS Professor Emerita of Professional Practice at Columbia Journalism School in New York City. The topics of the day: why freedom of the press is important, what reporters’ jobs entail and how the students would cover a story about bullying.

Cooper’s visit with Mahoney’s class was the first in NLP’s new Newsroom to Classroom program — a revival of the journalist visits that were a hallmark of our initial classroom and after-school programs in New York City, Chicago, the Washington, D.C., area and Houston. Through this initiative, educators with Premium access to our Checkology^® virtual classroom can invite NLP journalist volunteers to visit their classrooms, in person or virtually, and give students the benefit of their experience and expertise.

Based on what Mahoney and Cooper told us, the visit was a success.

‘Students loved it’

“Ann talked to students about how news and access to news has changed, what journalists do, discussed freedom of the press internationally and in the U.S., and had students discuss a real-life example of a student who was bullied on a bus and how they would handle it if they were reporters on their school newspaper,” Mahoney said. “Students loved it.”

Cooper also noted how that real-life example resonated with the class. “To my surprise, many students jumped right in with ideas and questions,” she said.

To ensure that the visit would be meaningful, Mahoney and Cooper discussed topics in advance. They decided to tie the session to the Checkology lesson “InfoZones,” in which students learn to identify the primary purpose of information. Cooper also provided the students’ homeroom teacher with materials for them to review.

During the visit, Cooper described her experiences as a journalist (she was, among other things, NPR’s first Moscow bureau chief), explained why journalism is important to society and spoke to the class about how some governments and lawmakers seek to curb press freedom.

“We specifically talked about the case of Ivan Golunov of Russia, which played out over the previous week,” she said. (Golunov, who has exposed corruption in Moscow for the news website Meduza, had been arrested and held under house arrest for attempting to sell drugs, a charge his supporters said was fabricated; he was released when authorities said there wasn’t evidence to hold him.) “They had watched some videos about the case as it unfolded, and they had good questions and observations.”

‘Valuable learning experience’

At the end of class, Cooper asked the students if they would be interested in becoming journalists. “The entire class enthusiastically raised their hands and shouted ‘Yes!’” Mahoney said. “This was a valuable learning experience for my students.”

Mahoney and Cooper have agreed to schedule a second visit with the same students in the fall.

I was delighted to hear that this initial session went so well and look forward to hearing about many more significant classroom connections in the 2019–20 school year. The Newsroom to Classroom program is just one way that NLP is greatly expanding its reach and impact and enhancing the experience of both educators and students.

So far, volunteers include journalists from such outlets as The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Univision, The Wall Street Journal, ProPublica and WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station. Journalists interested in participating in Newsroom to Classroom can learn more by emailing [email protected].

One year ago today, a gunman opened fire in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. The attack took the lives of five people, four of them journalists, on the deadliest day for American journalism in modern history.

Embed from Getty Images

With that tragedy in mind, legislation introduced in Congress this week deserves everyone’s support. The Fallen Journalists Memorial Act of 2019 (H.R. 3465 in the House, S. 1969 in the Senate) would authorize the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation to raise funds and work to locate and erect a memorial on federal land in Washington to pay tribute to journalists who have died while doing their jobs — including those slain in Annapolis.

This legislation stands apart in this climate of political division and partisan rancor because it has bipartisan sponsorship in both the House and the Senate. And it comes at a time when public officials and others irresponsibly label reporters as “enemies of the people” and decry information unfavorable to them or their cause as “fake news.”

David Dreier, the chairman of the Capital Gazette’s parent company, Tribune Publishing, and a former Republican member of Congress, leads the foundation, which operates under the auspices of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, the press club’s nonprofit affiliate.

The memorial, to be funded solely by money raised privately, would honor fallen journalists from around the world as limits on press freedom and attacks on journalists escalate. Reporters Without Borders’ 2019 World Press Freedom Index noted that threats against reporters are mounting worldwide, with just 24% of countries rated as having a “good” or “satisfactory” climate for the practice of journalism.

At NLP, we value the role of a free press and the practice of responsible journalism. Lessons in our Checkology^® virtual classroom help young people understand and appreciate the vital role of a free press in a healthy democracy. Students also gain an understanding of the First Amendment, explore how press freedoms differ around the world, and learn and practice the standards of quality journalism.

Every day, journalists risk their lives to report the news so the public can make informed decisions about their world. Sometimes that work proves to be deadly. This memorial would honor those individuals — from Ernie Pyle to Marie Colvin to Jamal Khashoggi — while also recognizing the incalculable worth of a free press to a healthy democracy.

Diego Hernandez, who recently completed ninth grade at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Van Nuys, California, believes misinformation can harm your outlook on the world.

But Checkology® virtual classroom, which he used in his journalism class, has changed how Diego approaches news and other information. “Now I’m thinking on both sides of the spectrum,” he says. “It just gives you a whole new way of thinking about certain things.”

The platform also has taught him to take a step back and evaluate information more critically. He has become aware of bias in the information he consumes and seeks out information that is fact-based rather than opinion-based.

“I’ve changed a bit as a person. My opinions have altered a bit,” Diego says.

Learn more about how Checkology has impacted Diego in this video.

Christina Van Tassell, the chief financial officer at Dow Jones, and Molly Hill Patten, chief operating officer at Ideas42, a nonprofit that applies behavioral science to complex problems around the world, are the two newest members of the News Literacy Project’s board.

“Molly and Christina bring impressive financial experience and acumen to the NLP board, as well as a strong commitment to the mission of news literacy,” said NLP board chair Greg McCaffery. “Their participation is particularly welcome given the dramatic recent growth of our budget and staff as the organization moves to the next level in creating a news-literate next generation.”

Before being named CFO at Dow Jones — publisher of The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s — in 2017, Van Tassell (pictured left) was global CFO at Xaxis, a digital media company, and a partner and CFO at Centurion Holdings, a consulting and investment firm. She began her career in finance at Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers), working in New York City, the United Kingdom and Sweden. She is also a member of the board of directors of Unruly, a video marketplace owned by News Corp.

“I am honored to join the News Literacy Project Board,” Van Tassell said. “The NLP marries two of my passions — young people’s education and the importance of trusted journalism. I am excited to participate in the advancement of this great cause.”

Patten (pictured right) joined Ideas42 in 2018 from Aledade, a health tech start-up, where she was senior vice president of finance and operations. She has an extensive background in finance and business, including at Revolution LLC, where she was vice president of finance; Exclusive Resorts, where she was vice president for financial and strategic planning; and AOL, where she was director of broadband. She was named Financial Executive of the Year by the Maryland Tech Council in 2017.

“Education and a free press are two of the most important institutions of American life,” Patten said. “As Thomas Jefferson said, ‘They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.’ I’m very pleased to join the board of the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit that supports both institutions.”

For Univision reporter Maria Alesia Sosa, the recent news that press freedom in the United States was now considered “problematic” by an international media watchdog group wasn’t as daunting as it might be to other U.S. reporters.

It’s not that she isn’t concerned about the trend — but she is from Venezuela, which is ranked 148th (the U.S. is 48th) out of 180 countries and regions on the Reporters Without Borders 2019 World Press Freedom Index. And that perspective means a lot to Sosa, who led a session on local journalism at the News Literacy Project’s NewsLitCamp^® in Miami in April and is appearing in a video about the state of journalism in her home country for the “Press Freedoms Around the World” lesson on NLP’s Checkology^® virtual classroom.

“Venezuela right now, we are under a dictatorship and there is zero freedom of the press,” said Sosa, who spent eight years as a reporter there before moving to Miami in 2016. “If you are against the government or if the government knows that you are against them, you will be chased, you will be attacked, you will be followed for your thoughts and for what you write.

“What I’ve really appreciated here is the freedom that I have to write, to do stories, and to report on whatever subject I want.”

Difficult, dangerous work

In Venezuela, mainstream media is dominated by government-owned newspapers and television stations. Reporters who are “driven by truth, and not by politics,” publish their work online to ensure that it will be seen, Sosa said. Reporting is difficult and can be dangerous; for example, Sosa said, when she tried to speak to shoppers in a grocery store about the scarcity of food, she was harassed and chased by the military. She said she could never get a complete answer — or access to what should have been public information — from government officials.

“In Venezuela you are not able to get data,” she said. “There’s no public data.”

By contrast, Sosa said of her work at Univision, “there hasn’t been a story that my boss tells me, ‘Don’t do this, don’t report it.’”

Earlier this year, Sosa and a colleague reported on the deaths of patients who underwent a popular, but often dangerous, type of plastic surgery at “cosmetic centers” in south Florida — facilities that the state Department of Health had no authority to regulate because they were not owned by physicians. As a result of their reporting, and that of other news organizations, the state legislature recently passed a bill, now awaiting the governor’s signature, that would, among other things, allow the state to suspend the operation of these centers, or shut them down entirely, if they were found to pose an “imminent threat” to the public.

“Actually, we changed the law,” Sosa said, calling the end result “surreal.”

“That’s the real sense of journalism, the real watchdog sense of journalism,” she added — something that she said “is impossible in my country. That won’t happen until we have fair institutions in my country.”

Sosa returned to Venezuela in 2017 to report on the ongoing protests against the government of President Nicolás Maduro — a trip where she said her life was in danger.

“That time was one of the most terrible attacks that I suffered,” she said. “Pro-government groups and thugs attacked me and my partner who was working with me. They attacked us with a knife.”

An urgent need

Sosa has great admiration for her former colleagues and other reporters who are still in Venezuela. She also is aware, from experience, how frustrating their work is because of the utter lack of press freedom.

“Their great jobs, their words have no effect,” she said. “I’m sure they will have someday. They win prizes and everything, but the best prize for this is when we change something.”

Reflecting on the climate in the United States, the spread of terms like “fake news,” and the public’s declining trust in media, Sosa understands the urgency of the News Literacy Project’s work. Journalists are “voices for the voiceless,” she said. “But if people don’t watch or don’t read us, we are no one.”

She was emboldened by the NewsLitCamp in Miami, which underscored for her the importance of journalists speaking to groups, such as educators, about their work so the public will understand and trust it.

“We have to open our minds and just tell more people how our jobs are done, how we do our work, how we corroborate,” she said.

She believes that if journalists stick to the facts and give readers and viewers a better understanding of how and why reporting is done — lessons learned throughout Checkology — then trust in journalism can be restored.

“To tell the world how important the facts are — that’s the only way that we reduce bias,” Sosa said.

Photo caption: Maria Alesia Sosa visited a U.S. Coast Guard site in March to report for Univision on the seizure of more than 27,000 pounds of cocaine (in black plastic bags). Photo courtesy Maria Alesia Sosa.

Valeria Luquin, a ninth-grader at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Van Nuys, California, is one of the thousands of students who have benefited from the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom.

She said it has helped her to become more aware of the news and other information she encounters every day. “I feel like I’ve gotten better at being a journalism student and identifying real news from fake news,” she told us.

She has also brought her news literacy skills home to her family. As an example, she said, she asked her father about the credibility of the sources in a documentary he had watched. “He looked at me and told me, ‘I notice that you’ve gotten a lot more critical,’” she said, adding: “That made me realize I do act more critical.”

And, she noted, “it’s important that I’m a good role model” for her 7-year-old sister: “It’s important for us to be critical, especially because we’re the next generation in the world.”

See more of Luquin’s story below.

The conclusions that political scientists Morgan Marietta and David C. Barker reach in their new book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy, are enough to make the reader despair.

Based on data from national surveys conducted from 2013 to 2017, they determined that “dueling fact perceptions are rampant, and they are more entrenched than most people realize.”

In an article published May 8 on the NiemanLab website, the authors noted that, according to their findings, Americans no longer agree on basic questions of fact and often cling to beliefs that align with their values, regardless of evidence to the contrary. And fact-checking by reliable organizations appears to have little success in correcting people’s erroneous views. “This has serious implications for American democracy,” they warned.

I couldn’t agree more.

However, I think that Marietta and Barker are mistaken in their bleak prognosis: “Perhaps the most disappointing finding from our studies — at least from our point of view — is that there are no known fixes to this problem.”

The fix

There is no denying that today’s complex information ecosystem challenges all of us, but I believe that there is a fix to the problem: news literacy education. News literacy must be embedded in the American education experience. Nothing less than the health of our democracy is at stake.

As the founder of the pioneering News Literacy Project, I have seen how real-world news literacy lessons can empower middle school and high school students. The Checkology^® virtual classroom, our e-learning platform, reaches them as they are forming the habits of mind and the patterns of content consumption and creation that will last a lifetime, and it does so where they live — online.

The value of these newfound and lasting news literacy skills has resonated with Judy Bryson, a library media teacher at Wilmer Amina Carter High School in Rialto, California. “If students are going to advocate for themselves and become empowered citizens, they need to know where to find quality, trustworthy information,” she said, adding that Checkology has helped her integrate library and research skills into a variety of subjects.

Meaningful engagement

The platform’s relatable examples engage students in meaningful ways. They begin by learning to identify types of information based on its primary purpose (to inform, to entertain, to persuade, to provoke, to sell or to document) and then review examples of content and assign them to the correct categories.

In another lesson, students take on the role of a reporter covering a breaking news story. They learn the importance of evaluating sources, weighing witness accounts, paying attention to attribution and recognizing how the standards of quality journalism come into play. Other lessons explore how to assess the authenticity of photos and videos and determine the credibility of memes and viral hoaxes.

In short, students learn to think like journalists: After all, in the digital age, anyone can be a publisher, and everyone must be an editor.

Critical thinkers

Checkology doesn’t just impart specific news literacy skills; it helps students become critical thinkers. They learn to approach information with equanimity, not emotion; to value credibility, not clickability. This deliberative mindset will serve them well through a lifetime of informed decision-making.

Educators see how transformative this can be in their classrooms — and beyond.

Nicole Finnesand, a middle school language arts teacher in Colton, South Dakota, said that Checkology has provided a framework for her deeply polarized class to have constructive and civil discussions about current events and political issues. Students now come to class armed not just with opinions, but with facts and legitimate sources. (As an example, they no longer cite The Onion’s satire as the basis for their arguments.)

David Teeghman, who spent several years teaching at a Chicago high school, said the platform helped him inoculate his digital journalism students against conspiracy theories and manipulated or fabricated content. He recalled seeing one of his former students post a falsehood on Facebook. Before Teeghman could respond, other former students jumped in to respectfully call it out.

Empowered students

Students immediately begin to apply these lessons in the real world.

Valeria Luquin, a ninth-grade student at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School in Lake Balboa, California, said that her father had recently told her about a documentary he had watched. “Are you sure that the sources and the documentary are credible?” she asked him. She said the ability to think critically about the media “is really helpful and important, because nowadays, with social media, there can be a lot of fake news.”

Sophia Fiallo, now a 10th-grader at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Queens in New York City, said her news literacy skills kicked in last year when a friend shared a photo of Emma Gonzalez, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, tearing up the U.S. Constitution. Fiallo discovered that it was a doctored photo of Gonzalez ripping a shooting target as a protest against gun violence. “It didn’t come from a reliable news source,” Fiallo said.

Ultimately, we want students to recognize that they can be part of the information solution, rather than part of the misinformation problem.

Daniela Rangel, one of Luquin’s classmates at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School, exemplifies this goal. “I like to help people in whatever way I can,” she said. “So if that means telling them that they should try to find correct information over what they are seeing on social media, then that’s good.”

Besides, she added, “I think my parents take me a little bit more seriously. Why? Because I’m more literate, and I sound professional now.”

You won’t always see Kelly Melendez Loaiza’s students using beakers and Bunsen burners to demonstrate their grasp of the scientific method. That’s because this science teacher brings the rigors of evidence-based inquiry out of the lab and onto the laptop.

“Facts must be supported by reliable sources. They are not feelings or hunches,” Melendez Loaiza recently reminded students.

Since 2017, she has used the News Literacy Project’s Checkology^® virtual classroom to help her students at Mansfield High School in Mansfield, Massachusetts, learn how to identify credible sources, determine the reliability of information and recognize biased, false or misleading content.

Not all information is equal

She said her students are often surprised by what they learn in Checkology’s “InfoZones” lesson, which explains that information typically falls into one of six primary purposes — to inform, to entertain, to provoke, to document, to persuade or to sell — and should be evaluated based on that primary purpose. “They never thought about information in that way, the different purposes. They saw it all as equal,” said Melendez Loaiza, who has been a teacher for 12 years.

She challenges students to ground their studies in solid evidence regardless of the topic or the class. For example, students in her Science and the Media class researched the pros and cons of alternative energy sources, while her chemistry classes examined the viability of nuclear power and wrote essays arguing both for and against it.

Sometimes, she said, her students get confused when evaluating sources: “The first thing they always want to know is ‘Can I believe this?’” She recalled one student who mistakenly believed that The New York Times was a “fake news” purveyor that could not be used as a source for class assignments.

‘Look for evidence’

To measure how her Science and the Media students would apply what they learned in the Checkology lesson “Arguments & Evidence,” she asked them to evaluate a video clip of President Donald Trump speaking about wind energy. “Try your best to put your personal bias aside. Be prepared to have your views change. Try to move beyond those feelings and look for evidence,” she advised the class.

In the clip, Trump tells the audience at a Republican Party fundraiser that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer, and that home values plunge by 75% when wind turbines are erected nearby. After viewing the video, the students broke into groups to see what evidence they could find to support his statements. They examined news coverage and social media posts and stumbled across related jokes and satire.

The students concluded that Trump did not back up his statements with proof and noted that they could not find credible evidence to support the claims. One student pointed out that The Washington Post brushed over the president’s concern that wind turbines are deadly to birds — a statement that is grounded in credible research.

Melendez Loaiza encouraged them to go deeper: What is your evidence? How is the topic trending on social media? How is a source you trust reporting on it?

Critical thinking

Melendez Loaiza uses Checkology’s real-world examples to develop her students’ critical-thinking skills. “As a result of the work with Checkology, students feel more confident in their ability to find something that is reputable,” she said.

The platform also has benefited her as an educator. “It’s a really comprehensive tool. It’s empowered me to be a better teacher of the material,” she said.

Creating science-literate citizens is important to Melendez Loaiza, who concedes that the sheer volume of misinformation makes this work challenging. She also recognizes the broader implications of not being able to sort fact from fiction: “What does it mean as a society that we are having conversations that are not based on facts? And what is our responsibility as citizens?”

She then answers her own questions. “It’s our responsibility to teach this,” she said, referring to news literacy. “I don’t want to tell them what to think. I say, ‘You understand the science. Make up your own mind. Get the evidence.’”

Checkology helps her students to do just that.

Photo caption: Kelly Melendez Loaiza (center) in her Mansfield High School science classroom. Photo courtesy of Providence College.

In the 11 years since I founded the News Literacy Project, I have learned time and again that it takes a lasting, comprehensive approach to overcome the scourge of misinformation.

A recent incident involving the Poynter Institute starkly illustrates that point. On April 30, the respected journalism education nonprofit released a list, under the title “UnNews,” of 515 “unreliable” news websites. The list was put together by the International Fact-Checking Network, a unit of Poynter, from five databases compiled by journalists, fact-checkers and researchers across the nation.

Almost immediately, Poynter received complaints that some of the sites on the list were actually legitimate news outlets and that some unreliable news sites had been left off. After conducting an audit, which found “weaknesses in the methodology” used to compile the information, Poynter took down the list on May 2, and Barbara Allen, the managing editor of Poynter’s website, apologized for the misstep.

Resources that aim to make it easier for people to sort fact from fiction amid a sea of misinformation — such as Poynter’s list, or NewsGuard’s red/green website ratings — have worthy objectives. However, this approach has serious limitations.

• Ratings and lists are created by people, who, no matter how knowledgeable or well-intentioned, bring their own perspectives and blind spots to the process.
• The news media are in a state of constant change, which makes it extremely challenging for curators to keep resources accurate and up to date.
• Media outlets are not monolithic. They can make mistakes in reporting or editing, have lapses in judgment or let bias slip into an article or a video. Each incident should be judged separately — and should not be used, by itself, to relegate a news site to the “good” or “bad” list.
• And most important: When consumers rely on others to vet sources and information for them, they fail to develop the skills they need to become news-literate.

A different approach

That’s why the News Literacy Project takes a different — and, I believe, a more effective — approach. We do not recommend for or against any sites or sources. Rather, we provide educators with tools and resources to teach their students how to navigate today’s complex information landscape and learn to judge the credibility of information for themselves.

Our Checkology^®virtual classroom develops students’ habits of mind and patterns of behavior regarding the consumption, creation and sharing of news and other information. Through the platform’s use of real-world examples, our students are challenged to recognize the primary purpose of the information they see online, to determine its veracity, to check for bias — both the source’s and their own — and, in the case of news reports, to judge whether it meets the standards of quality journalism. Students who complete our programs gain the critical-thinking skills needed to make informed decisions about the content they come across, wherever and whenever they encounter it.

Poynter’s experience is just one example of how even the most responsible, well-intentioned organizations can falter when seeking to combat misinformation.

To win the fight for facts, we must help young people become news-literate for life. Doing so is not as easy as checking a list or relying on others to do the hard work of judging the credibility of information. It requires comprehensive news literacy education, which the News Literacy Project is providing to more classrooms every day.

Note: The Poynter Institute served as the News Literacy Project’s fiscal agent before NLP received its 501(c)(3) designation from the Internal Revenue Service in 2011. Poynter is a partner in MediaWise, a digital literacy initiative.

Paul Saltzman, the investigative news editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, has a simple answer when asked whether the public has a solid understanding of what “news judgment” means.

“No,” said Saltzman, who has volunteered with the News Literacy Project since 2011 and is the host of the “What Is News?” lesson in NLP’s Checkology^® virtual classroom. “People tend to understand how their own worlds work, but not so much how other people’s worlds do.”

Saltzman, who joined the Sun-Times in 1999 and has held a variety of positions in the newsroom, used an example from his reporting days to illustrate how we can be unaware of the fact that what is second nature to us can mystify others. He was interviewing a neurosurgeon who explained for over an hour, in detail, a relatively new type of brain surgery.

But the surgeon left out the first step: how he opens a patient’s skull to reach the brain.

“So I asked,” Saltzman said. “‘I know this has to be the most elementary thing to you, but how do you get through the skull to do that?’ And he said, ‘With a drill — actually, one that’s kind of similar, though far more delicate and specialized, to the drills you might use in woodworking.’”

A moment of clarity

That experience helped Saltzman realize something about his own profession and the importance of teaching young people how journalism actually works.

“What we do is hardly brain surgery,” he said. “But I’ve found that most people who don’t do this work for a living have as little clue about how we do it as I did about doing brain surgery.

“And why would they — unless we do something to help them see, preferably at an age when their views on things haven’t begun to harden yet, that it matters?” he said. “And it matters even if they’re never going to be journalists themselves.”

His advice for students as they wade through the massive amounts of information they encounter every day? “First, pay attention. Read and watch a lot of news — because even if journalists aren’t trying to spin you, one might view a particular aspect of a story as the most important or most interesting and another might see things very differently.”

Next, he said, “Look at sourcing. I would advise anyone to look at news stories a little like I do — trying to take them apart and figure out where and how the reporter got the information that’s being presented so you can get a better idea of whether that’s trustworthy information.”

The ‘Big Four’

A lot has happened in the world of information since Saltzman began volunteering for NLP eight years ago. Social media has exploded as a conduit of both fact and fiction. There have never been more voices and more sources of information (and misinformation).

So what, in 2019, is actual news? What needs to be reported to the public, and what should be ignored? That is at the center of “What Is News?,” in which Saltzman asks students to imagine that they are journalists and have to decide, out of everything that is happening on a given day, “what counts as ‘news’ that day.” The lesson guides students through an exercise in which they try to identify which of two events is more newsworthy.

Saltzman concludes the lesson by going over what he refers to as the “Big Four” factors of news judgment:

• How timely is it?
• How important is it for the public?
• How interesting is it?
• Is it unusual enough to warrant attention?

“If something happens every day, then it stops being news,” Saltzman says in the lesson. “If dog bites man, that’s not news. If man bites dog — now that’s news.”

This decision-making process — determining what, exactly, is “news” on any given day — is, to Saltzman, one of the biggest misunderstandings the public has about journalists: that the topics, events or people that are reported on are chosen because of a reporter’s or an outlet’s interests.

“That journalists have an agenda and selectively choose the facts that fit their point of view — that’s not how straight news reporting works,” he said. “But I know there are some people who think that’s how we do things.” Even with opinion columns, he added, “I’m more likely to be persuaded if the writers have the facts to back up what they’re saying.”

Finally, Saltzman said, there’s a skill that most journalists have that can help students become more informed, discerning and responsible consumers of information.

“Be skeptical, but not cynical,” he said. “It’s foolish to take what anyone reports — or what any politician says — just on faith, without the facts or evidence to back up what they say. But I think it has to be a hard life to be such a cynic that you don’t believe anything, even when you’re shown the evidence to prove it.”

The growing contagion of online misinformation should serve as a national wake-up call: We need a new ethos of personal responsibility about the news and other information that we trust — and that we share.

Each of us needs to be inoculated against the viruses being spread in this pandemic and become part of the solution, instead of mindlessly aggravating the problem. The stakes are nothing less than the health of our democracy and the future of the country’s civic life.

It isn’t simply a clever turn of phrase when we talk about content going viral: Just as the measles virus is spreading rapidly both across the U.S. and around the world, with reported cases up 300% from this time last year, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, rumors and outright falsehoods proliferate on social media platforms, multiplying with each like, share and retweet.

In fact, those platforms are, in part, responsible for the resurgence of measles — a disease that, while potentially deadly, is highly preventable, thanks to a safe and effective vaccine. (It was even declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.) In recent years, though, the “anti-vaxxer” movement has used social media to spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines, and millions of people have made health care decisions for their children based on the conspiracy theories and debunked pseudo-science promoted in these posts.

This is one especially unfortunate example of the internet as an echo chamber: We are increasingly inclined to accept as credible the news and social media posts that align with our beliefs and to dismiss content that contradicts our beliefs as biased, or even “fake.” This tendency to see the news through such prisms makes us more vulnerable to content that plays to our biases, exploits our vulnerabilities and further widens our divisions.

Continue reading on Medium.

Cristy Menor, a sophomore at the University of California, Riverside, is majoring in sociology and minoring in education, but you could say that she’s doing an unofficial minor in news literacy, too. This first-generation college student prides herself on her fact-checking know-how and has adeptly helped her family and friends become more responsible consumers of information.

She encountered NLP’s Checkology^® virtual classroom during the last semester of her senior year at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, California — a private school that focuses on students who would be the first in their families to attend college. English teacher Stacy Arevalo, whose Senior Research Institute class teaches academic research and writing skills and develops critical thinking, had just started using the platform as part of the curriculum.

“It was perfect for what we were looking for, and it was actually much more engaging than we even expected,” Arevalo said. “And the students loved it. It was this really great way to close out their senior year in my class, about wrapping up their learning and sending them off into the world with that knowledge.”

A ripple effect at home

One reason the students were so engaged, Arevalo said, was because they could take what they were learning back to their families, many of whom were immigrants. Menor was 11 when she and her mother came to the U.S. from the Philippines; her father followed two years later.

“It was a really neat bridge to their families and friends, many of whom don’t have a college education,” Arevalo said. “And here they are getting ready to go to college and being able to share these real skills with family members who don’t necessarily have access to that same kind of learning.”

It didn’t take many Checkology lessons for Menor to begin talking with her parents, other family members and friends about what they were seeing on social media. Provided the tools and guidance to tell fact from fiction on the internet, she set out to make sure those around her also appreciate the value of not being fooled by misinformation.

For example, she took screenshots of questionable social media content “pretty much every day during the whole unit,” Arevalo said. She scrolled through Instagram feeds with her peers and pointed out posts that seemed like harmless pictures of women drinking smoothies but were actually targeted ads promoting the drinks for weight loss. And she encouraged her family and friends to check out anything they were unsure about at FactCheck.org or Snopes.com.

“They ask me how to do certain things and take in social media and news and stuff, with the impression that I’m going to check it out and talk to them about it,” Menor said. “It just gives us this room and this place, this open space for us — different generations, different mindsets — to be open because we can use news literacy units to have that conversation.”

From student to teacher

She still talks with her former English teacher about college lectures and current events. If her mother shares a questionably sourced article, Menor is quick to text Arevalo about it with a message such as “Oh, my gosh, my mom shared this post and she didn’t even realize where it’s from and now all my aunties are commenting on it on Facebook and I had to tell them.”

In a way, Menor is acting as a teacher to help family members who have spent the majority of their lives far from the United States better understand the world they now live in — both through the lens of the U.S. history that she learned in school and through current events.

“I’m learning NOT ONLY for myself, but para sa aking pamilya rin (for my family as well),” she told NLP in an email. “They didn’t receive the same opportunities that I am now receiving. They’re trying their best to actively engage with the news, understand the news, and they truly want to learn.”

And Cristy Menor is more than happy to help, using the skills she learned through Checkology.

Shea Haslam, a ninth-grader at The Morgan School in Clinton, Connecticut, works on a Checkology lesson in her journalism class. Photo by Meredith Whitefield for the News Literacy Project.

Rumormongers and perpetrators of hoaxes online work hard to deceive people, but they are no match for the journalism students at The Morgan School, a public high school in Clinton, Connecticut.

Their teacher, Leslie Chausse, uses the News Literacy Project’s Checkology^® virtual classroom to develop their critical-thinking skills and hone their journalism chops.

“There is so much information to sort through online. It’s hard,” said Chausse, whose 25 years of teaching experience includes 13 at The Morgan School. “I like that Checkology helps them to do that. It gives them a greater awareness of what they are hearing and reading, and they question it more.”

Every day, she said, “they take what they are learning and apply it.”

Verification tools

Recently, in connection with the Checkology lesson “Arguments & Evidence,” her students examined real social media posts to determine their credibility. They used digital verification tools, such as reverse image searches, before deciding whether the claims made in the posts were supported by strong evidence, some evidence, no evidence or not enough evidence to decide. They then explained how they made their decisions.

The first post they examined featured a photo of a “Forest in Poland [with] 400 pine trees all growing at a 90-degree angle facing north, and nobody knows why.” The students were asked if there was sufficient evidence to support the post’s assertion that there is no way to explain why the trees grow that way — and were immediately skeptical.

“There is only one picture, not multiple ones, and the trees in the background look straight,” said senior Isabella Mongillo.

A classmate suggested that the trees (whose bases were pictured growing in a sideways U curve before eventually straightening up) might have been manipulated with photo editing software. Using Google’s reverse image search, several students found the photo but no additional images or supporting text. A search on Snopes.com turned up no information to verify or debunk the post.

Not enough evidence

After some discussion, students decided that there was not enough evidence to judge the post as credible. As students followed along on laptops, Chausse clicked to the next screen (displayed on a large whiteboard), which revealed that while the photo was indeed real, the students were correct in determining that the post offered no evidence to support its claim that no one knows why the trees grow that way.

As the students moved from one post to the next, they regarded images and text with skepticism, looking for clues to credibility within each photo — including where and when it was taken — and searching for verification of text from multiple sources.

“What’s the point of this?” Chausse asked as her students closed their laptops and grabbed their backpacks at the end of class. “Check your sources. Make sure you are careful about what you are looking at online.”

Habits for life

She said her students put the skills they have learned in Checkology to use as they report on school news for The Pawprint, the school’s online newspaper, and manage the school’s social media platforms.

“It’s definitely opened my eyes a little more,” John Inglis, a senior who writes for The Pawprint, said of Checkology. “It makes me want to make sure information is right. I’ve learned how to do that better and do my own research.”

Chausse said the lesson on social media platforms’ use of algorithms to filter what we see online really resonated with her students. They also have gained an awareness of the larger impact of misinformation on society.

“That’s really important,” she said. “They see what is out there and how it is shaping our country, and they understand the repercussions. They can see it in how people vote.”

‘Don’t be a sheep’

John has advice for anyone navigating today’s complex information landscape: “Don’t be a sheep. Don’t believe everything you read or see.”

Isabella also helps her mother to vet what she sees online. “I look at things with her, check it with her. I look for something reliable,” she said.

These classmates also aren’t shy about correcting anyone who shares misinformation. “If I see something that’s blatantly incorrect and false, I’ll give them the facts,” John said.

Their actions are evidence that these students aren’t simply outsmarting the purveyors of misinformation; they’re actively joining the fight for facts.

I am extremely pleased to share some exciting news: Apple announced today that it has selected the News Literacy Project to play a central role in a new initiative supporting leading nonprofit organizations that provide nonpartisan news literacy programs in the United States and in Italy.

Apple’s investment in our work represents the largest corporate contribution in our history. We are deeply grateful for the company’s commitment to fighting misinformation and sustaining quality journalism.

Michael Ventura for the News Literacy Project

Through this initiative, the News Literacy Project will receive a significant contribution and ongoing support from Apple. This will enable us to scale up our programs and resources — specifically, the Checkology^® virtual classroom, our signature e-learning platform; The Sift, our free weekly newsletter for educators; and our Newsroom to Classroom program, which will connect journalists with educators who are registered to use Checkology Premium and will start later this year.

This will also help us build momentum to achieve the goal in our strategic plan — that by 2022, we will build a network of 20,000 practitioners who, using our programs and resources, teach news literacy skills to at least 3 million middle school and high school students each year and support the adoption of news literacy into the American education experience.​

We welcome Apple’s collaboration in our efforts to give facts a fighting chance.

In reporting on conditions at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum, Nellie Bly followed these instructions: “Write up things as you find them, good or bad; give praise or blame as you think best, and the truth all the time.”

Today, on International Women’s Day, we honor a pioneer in investigative journalism: Nellie Bly.

Born Elizabeth Jane Cochran in western Pennsylvania in 1864, Bly began her newspaper career when she was only 20, covering women’s rights, child labor, dangerous conditions for factory workers and social justice reform for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. But when her articles angered some of the paper’s largest advertisers, the Dispatch assigned her to “women’s news” — and she left. She traveled to Mexico, where her reports on poverty and corruption so displeased the Mexican government that she had to leave the country.

Undeterred, she headed to New York City, where she landed a job at the New York World. For her first assignment, she feigned insanity and was sent to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). With neither staff nor patients aware that she was a reporter, Bly took careful notes on what she witnessed, including the staff’s treatment of patients, the food and clothing provided and the practices of the institution’s administrators.

The instructions she got from her editor were these: “Write up things as you find them, good or bad; give praise or blame as you think best, and the truth all the time.”

That’s what Bly did. She described how a nurse refused her a nightgown during her first night as a patient. She noted how several patients were physically, not mentally, ill. Some, she found, were immigrants who were there only because they couldn’t speak English. She concluded that the environment drove even mentally healthy patients to the point of insanity because of the poor conditions and treatment.

Grand jury investigation

Bly’s articles led to significant change. She had reported the truth, and it spurred a grand jury investigation. In the book Ten Days in a Mad-House, a collection of her reports, she wrote: “Since my experiences in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum were published in the World … the City of New York has appropriated $1,000,000 more per annum than ever before for the care of the insane. So I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that the poor unfortunates will be the better cared for because of my work.”

She earned a reputation as a muckraker, uncovering stories that people in power didn’t want exposed: corruption in the state government, the treatment of women held in police jails and the exploitation of young women by false “job-training programs,” to name a few. She also gained worldwide fame through her quest to travel around the world faster than the character Phineas Fogg did in Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. (She did it in 72.)

Nellie Bly set a tremendous example for future generations of women in journalism who hold public officials and institutions accountable. The role of the press as democracy’s watchdog has never been more important, and reflecting on trailblazers such as Bly helps us understand why.

Learn more about Bly in “Democracy’s Watchdog,” a lesson in our Checkology® virtual classroom.

Judy Bryson, a library media teacher in the Rialto (California) Unified School District, believes that news literacy is critical to student success inside and outside the classroom.

In Checkology’s “InfoZones” lesson, hosted by Tracie Potts of NBC News Channel, students learn how to categorize information into six zones: news, opinion, entertainment, advertising, propaganda and raw information.

“If students are going to advocate for themselves and become empowered citizens, they need to know where to find quality, trustworthy information,” she says.

When teaching news literacy, Bryson uses the Checkology® virtual classroom, the cutting-edge e-learning platform developed by the News Literacy Project.

Checkology includes 13 lessons (plus one translated into Spanish) that enable educators to equip students with the tools to evaluate and interpret what they read, watch and hear so they know what to trust, share and act on.

“Each time I viewed a new lesson, I found myself saying ‘Wow! This is just the point I was trying to make with my library lesson last year/week/period,’” Bryson says.

News literacy for all

News literacy, she says, is especially important for students who get little exposure to credible news and information — so she purchased Checkology licenses with a grant for underserved communities from the Harman Family Foundation.

“While families in Rialto may have access to the San Bernardino Sun, the Los Angeles Times and a variety of magazines at their libraries and at newsstands, few actually buy subscriptions,” she says.

“Priorities for the family budget are more pressing elsewhere. If students consume the news at all, it is often via social media or clickbaited headlines.”

How she uses Checkology

Bryson, an educator for 12 years, works with teachers to integrate library and research skills into a variety of curricula, including English, multimedia production, AVID and digital media. She says students often don’t know how to determine the credibility of sources and content.

Checkology remedies that. “I routinely help students with research projects by teaching them how to evaluate sources,” she says. “The ‘InfoZones’ lesson dovetails nicely with my lessons on identifying the purpose of the author.”

She also appreciates Checkology’s online scoring features and gradebook, which let her see how well students are doing.

The lesson “Practicing Quality Journalism” reinforces instruction on source reliability and authority.

“I loved how it illustrated the process that newspapers go through as opposed to an individual posting news on their personal blog,” she says, noting that she has used it to help journalism students complete their coursework.

“I don’t think the students — and many of the teachers — realize the rigor that news agencies apply to their work in order to assure a quality product.”

Student experiences

As they work through the platform’s lessons, students earn rewards and badges as incentives, she says. And Checkology’s relevant, real-world examples and high-quality presentation of videos, memes and graphics keep them engaged.

Once they complete their Checkology lessons, Bryson interviews her students, who confront their own vulnerability to misinformation, hoaxes and manipulated content.

“I was surprised that even the most tech-savvy among them were incredibly trusting of the media they consumed,” she says. “They knew that unreliable and ‘fake’ material was out there in cyberspace, but it only fooled other people, not them.”

Checkology, she says, showed them that they were wrong.

New to Checkology? Here are some of Bryson’s tips for success:

• Work closely with your information technology team to be sure the platform works flawlessly before you dive in.
• Preview everything ahead of time so you can select the best lessons for your objectives and adjust your other lesson plans to complement the Checkology materials.
• Keep a file of login information. Students will forget their usernames and passwords.
• Teach students to use their dashboards and give them time for do-overs. They will improve as they gain experience with the format.
• Develop discussion questions for the videos and graphics in advance. This is where you can really align Checkology with library standards and objectives. Realize that, with discussion, lessons may not fit in one class period; the platform does offer a space for individual feedback.

NLP has created a free, comprehensive guide to developing news literacy education programs that can be downloaded free from our website.

Give Facts a Fighting Chance: A Global Playbook for Teaching News Literacy is designed to help organizations worldwide begin or expand news literacy programs to help counter the relentless spread of misinformation and disinformation. The guide was created with funding from the Facebook Journalism Project.

“We believe that news literacy education is the most effective approach to stemming the global pandemic of misinformation,” said Alan C. Miller, founder and CEO of the News Literacy Project. “The Global Playbook distills what the News Literacy Project has learned in a decade in news literacy education into a practical resource for developing programs that will succeed.”

“Making news literacy education accessible around the world is critical to combating the spread of misinformation,” said Julia Bain of Facebook’s News Partnerships division. “The Global Playbook is a valuable new asset to the news literacy ecosystem and will help support an informed community.”

The Global Playbook provides a road map for developing a news literacy education curriculum, including advice on the logistics of establishing a program, ideas for building engaging and culturally relevant lessons, and the importance of assessing results.

It offers a brief history of misinformation, disinformation and “fake news,” using real-world examples, and discusses the standards of quality journalism and the vital role of the press in a free society. It also includes a collection of best practices in news literacy education, along with a listing of geographically relevant news literacy resources.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Photo: Charles Salter/The News Literacy Project.

The poem “Invocation” by Elizabeth Alexander — engraved on a granite slab in the sculpture garden of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama — includes this line: “There is such a thing as the truth.”

Even as we celebrate the accomplishments and contributions of African Americans during Black History Month, the country is still grappling with the truth surrounding the bitter legacy of slavery and the lingering reality of racism.

The NLP team confronted that reality last month when we converged on Montgomery from our homes in eight states and the District of Columbia. The Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice — projects of the Equal Justice Initiative — are a powerful reckoning of the central role of slavery, lynchings, racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, and the mass incarceration and police shootings of African Americans.

For me, the primary revelation was the scale, duration and nature of the lynchings of more than 4,000 Black men, women and children that the Equal Justice Initiative documented between 1877 and 1950. Many of the allegations against the victims — largely unsupported by any inquiry and unproven by any court — were trivial “offenses,” such as not addressing a White person with sufficient respect or “standing around” in a White neighborhood. Wives were lynched for protesting the murders of their husbands. Women and children were killed when husbands and fathers could not be found. The lynchings and burnings often became public spectacles with hundreds or even thousands of spectators, including children, looking on in a carnival-like atmosphere, with postcards depicting the killings sold to commemorate the event. And they continued until 1950 — 85 years after the end of the Civil War.

Incredibly, only 8 percent of high school seniors in the U.S. know that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, according to a 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. As we reflected on our experience at the museum and the memorial, one staff member who had taught social studies for several years shared the challenge of conveying the truth about U.S. history to his high school students, particularly given the textbooks he had to use and the requirements of state standards. “In a lot of ways, it is a very ugly and bloody history,” he said. “But we whitewash it. And I use that term very deliberately. We sanitize it. I hated teaching U.S. history. We could never do it in a way that was authentic to my students” on Chicago’s South Side.

At the News Literacy Project, we are firmly committed to empowering people to find the facts — and in our time in Montgomery, we found tangible connections both to our mission and to the ways that we could apply the lessons we were learning. One staff member commented on the pervasiveness of misinformation, myths and propaganda about Blacks during the era of slavery and the decades that followed. Another noted the role of the news media, which was both being shaped by and helping to shape the norms and values of the time, in propagating false narratives and even inciting people to violence. We discussed the power of language, such as the dehumanizing term “slave” versus the more descriptive “enslaved person,” and how word choice can shape a point of view.

And we recognized the similarities to the time we live in now: Elaborate false narratives and provocative language bombard us from all directions from online platforms, social media trolls and an information ecosystem that too often rewards dehumanizing behavior — including racial and religious violence and hatred.

Together, we examined some excruciatingly painful realities about our nation’s history. We emerged with a renewed commitment to give today’s students the ability to discern fact from fiction in the world around them. There is, after all, such a thing as the truth.

WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore leads a workshop at a NewsLitCamp® in Chicago. The Knight funding will help broaden the reach of NLP’s signature professional development for educators to 26 cities.

I have some deeply gratifying news to share: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has awarded NLP $5 million in support to expand our news literacy education programs in the United States. This generous support is part of a five-year, $300 million initiative that Knight Foundation announced today.  

The imperative for this bold investment in strengthening journalism is clear — and is revalidated in a new study, Crisis in Democracy: Renewing Trust in America. This report, produced by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy through a partnership of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and Knight Foundation, focuses on the intersection of the distrust in American democratic institutions and in journalism and illustrates how distrust of one fuels distrust of the other. 

These findings in particular stand out to me: that “almost 6 out of 10 (58 percent) adult Americans said the increase in information available today makes it harder for them to be well-informed” and that “just 41 percent of Americans were confident in their ability to navigate the news environment to remain knowledgeable on current events and determine what is factually true.” 

Indeed, today we have greater access to credible information than at any other time in human history. But the inability to sort fact from faction breeds distrust in quality journalism and other democratic institutions, including our government.  

In short, the health of our democracy hangs in the balance. That’s why news literacy is a vital, urgently needed skill that must be taught in our schools. 

As NLP’s founder, I’m particularly grateful for such a significant investment by Knight, which has already played a crucial role in NLP’s creation and development. In 2008, it provided the funding that allowed me to launch this organization. In 2016, it helped us expand the use of our Checkology® virtual classroom. Its continued support for NLP’s growth is tangible validation of the utmost importance of our mission, as well as recognition of our proven, scalable approach to news literacy education.  

I look to the coming years with hope that our collective impact will continue to make a difference in how young people engage with, share and act on information. With this funding, we are taking a giant leap toward achieving an ambitious goal: that by 2022, we will build a community of 20,000 practitioners who, through our programs and resources, teach news literacy skills each year to 3 million middle school and high school students (10 percent of the middle school and high school population) and support the adoption of news literacy into the American education experience. 

As part of that effort, Knight’s support will help broaden the reach of our NewsLitCamps® — NLP’s signature professional development workshops for middle school and high school educators — to 26 cities, beginning in April with events in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Miami. We host these in partnership with news organizations, giving educators real-life, real-time insights from journalists in their communities. 

This grant, the largest in NLP’s 11-year history, represents more than 20 percent of our operating expenses through 2022. We know that it would not have been possible without our committed supporters who — long before “misinformation” and “disinformation” became part of our lexicon — recognized the critical importance of a news-literate population.  

Together, we are giving facts a fighting chance.

No, we’re not talking about the nominees for a Razzie — a parody award “celebrating” the worst in film. In the world of misinformation, a “bad actor” is a type of social media account that spreads misinformation and often causes confrontation. Examples of these accounts include trolls, bots and sockpuppets, and all of them can make it difficult to identify legitimate sources of political discourse.

One recent example comes from the tense interaction at the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 18 involving students from Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School, a group of Black Hebrew Israelites and a Native American elder with a drum. Though many Twitter accounts had videos of the incident, this short clip and comment by @2020fight (the account has since been deleted) ignited a viral controversy:

This tweet shaped much of the discussion that soon followed, including the initial news reports about the confrontation. (For an excellent rundown, see the Jan. 28 issue of The Sift, our weekly newsletter for educators.)

But as more details and context emerged, reporters — and others — took a closer look at the @2020fight Twitter account. (See, for example, this Twitter thread from Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab.) The account, created in December 2016, contained a highly partisan (and likely manipulated and, to many, offensive) political image in its header, described the user as a “Teacher and Advocate” from California and included a link to the site Teachers Pay Teachers, an online marketplace for teacher-created educational materials. But the profile photo wasn’t of a teacher from California; it was of a blogger from Brazil — and three days after the viral tweet was posted, Twitter suspended the account.

It’s still not known whether the account was actually a person, a sockpuppet or an automated account in a “bot” network (or, as Nimmo suggests, a combination). In any case, here are things you can look for to determine whether an account may be a “bad actor,” actively spreading misinformation or sowing discord.

What is a “troll”? This describes a person who deliberately posts offensive, inflammatory, highly partisan content in order to provoke people. Trolls will often write posts and join discussions for the sole purpose of causing conflict. In an article for Psychology Today, Jesse Fox, an associate professor at Ohio State University’s School of Communication, suggests that trolls cultivate their online personalities for a variety of reasons, including the perception of relative privacy or anonymity — and hence a lack of consequences — online.

To determine whether you’re dealing with a troll, look at the history of the account. Does it regularly post content that is inflammatory, offensive or highly partisan? Are the images designed to anger or offend? Do posts on the account use disparaging language directed at specific people? These are all warning signs on accounts by trolls, and by other bad actors as well.

What is a “sockpuppet”? This type of impostor account involves the creation of a false online identity, often to influence opinion about a person or organization with the intention of making it seem like the account is not affiliated in any way with that person or organization.

If the content of the posts are overly flattering about or defensive of a person, organization or cause, you might be looking at a sockpuppet, especially if there is a lot of negative attention being directed at that person, organization or cause. (An example would be an author who creates fake accounts to leave positive reviews of his book on Amazon.)

What is a “bot”? Bots are “automated user accounts that interact with Twitter using an application programming interface (API).” Think of it as a computer program that is designed to post content automatically according to a set of guidelines, without human intervention.

Generally, if you’re trying to determine whether an account is human-powered or automated, any account that posts more than 50 times a day should be met with skepticism. If you hover your cursor over the “joined” date on Twitter (see image below), you can see the exact time and date the account was created. Using a little math with the number of tweets posted, you can get a general sense of how many tweets a day/week/month the account posts.

Let’s look more closely at @2020fight’s Twitter account, saved through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. In a little over two years — from Dec. 3, 2016 (when it was created), to Jan. 20, 2019 (when the account holder announced “a little Twitter break”) — it averaged 84 posts and 139 likes a day. (That said, the account’s history reveals that its activity included both retweets with original comments and replies to others’ tweets, an indication that a human may actually have posted some of the content.) This contrasts with, as an example, the @USFreedomArmy account, which has posted over 450,000 tweets since December 2012 — an average of more than 200 tweets per day — but with few likes, replies or retweets.)

How do I check out an account to see if it is a bad actor? If what you’re reading causes a strong emotional reaction (especially a negative one), take some time to look deeper. The Digital Forensics Research Lab has an excellent online resource, “#BotSpot: Twelve Ways to Spot a Bot,” on Medium. And while it’s often impossible to state with complete certainty that an account is a bot, tools such as Botometer and Botcheck.me can be helpful. Also, since bad actors often have false information in the account profile, do a reverse image search on the profile photo and see if it appears elsewhere.

How do I report a bad actor account? The good news is that social media platforms are making it easier to report abusive behavior and accounts. Here are some key links.

• Report abusive behavior on Twitter.
• Report on Facebook.
• Report on Instagram.
• Report on Snapchat.

Recognizing the differences between legitimate and misleading (or even false) political and social discourse is an essential component of being a critical consumer of news and other information — and a constructive participant in the national conversation. Engaging bad actors online only serves to derail this vital civic activity.

As we celebrate Black History Month, we at the News Literacy Project have been reflecting on the important role that Black journalists have played as watchdogs of democracy, shining a light on wrongs and injustices throughout the course of our history.

One of the first was Ida B. Wells, featured in the “Democracy’s Watchdog” lesson in our Checkology^® virtual classroom.

Born into slavery in Mississippi during the Civil War, Wells used her position as the editor and co-owner of a Black newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, to document lynchings across the South. Her commitment to this cause began in 1892, when a friend who owned a grocery that took business from a nearby White-owned store was lynched, along with two of his employees.

Through diligent investigation, Wells reported that Black men were being killed by mobs for minor offenses, such as failing to pay debts or being drunk in public; some were slain for simply failing to be deferential to Whites. She interviewed family members of victims and spoke to eyewitnesses. She learned that while the mostly White press was reporting (based on the statements of White public officials) that the lynchings were punishments for serious crimes, such as rapes of White women by Black men, the truth was far different.

After a mob destroyed her newspaper office, she left Memphis, eventually settling in Chicago, and described the horrors of lynchings on speaking tours across the United States and the United Kingdom. As any good investigative journalist does — whether a century ago or today — Wells gathered evidence of wrongdoing, put it into context, then shared it with the public. Her courageous work — which included an 1892 booklet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and an 1895 book, The Red Record, that documented lynchings through reported statistics — led to a much greater awareness of the scope of lynching and its horrors. “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” she said.

That commitment continues through the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, based at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. It was established in 2016 to train journalists of color in investigative reporting techniques and “to educate news organizations and journalists on how the inclusion of diverse voices can raise the caliber, impact and visibility of investigative journalism as a means of promoting transparency and good government.”

Learn more about Wells in our “Democracy’s Watchdog” lesson.

Last Sunday’s Super Bowl LIII may have disappointed fans who anticipated a high-scoring game. But those of us who value the role of a free press in our democracy were glad we were watching when an advertisement sponsored by The Washington Post aired late in the game.

It immediately got our attention. Actor Tom Hanks’ recognizable voice provided the narration for powerful images of enduring moments in American history: Soldiers storming a beach on D-Day. A civil rights protest. The moon landing. A flag-draped coffin in the Capitol rotunda.

Wesley Lowery, the host of our Checkology® virtual classroom lesson “Democracy’s Watchdog,” is shown in footage of journalists in harm’s way.

Photos of imprisoned and slain journalists — including Jamal Kashoggi, the Saudi global opinion contributor for The Post murdered in Turkey — appeared as the narration captured what is at stake when reporters pursue the truth on behalf of the public: “There is someone to gather the facts, to bring you the story, no matter the cost.”

At the News Literacy Project, we help students learn to recognize the standards of quality journalism, critically assess information, and understand and appreciate the role of a free press. Lessons in our Checkology virtual classroom specifically address these topics: “InfoZones” teaches students how to identify different types of information based on their primary purpose; “Democracy’s Watchdog” explains the role of the press in holding government accountable; and “Practicing Quality Journalism” lets students test their knowledge of the standards of responsible journalism as they take on the role of a reporter in a breaking news event.

The final words of the Post’s ad certainly resonate with us: “Because knowing empowers us; knowing helps us decide; knowing keeps us free.”

John Cannon, a middle school teacher in Damariscotta, Maine, has a unique — and enviable — student engagement issue. When he teaches news literacy using NLP’s Checkology®  virtual classroom, his students become so absorbed in the material that they often keep working past the day’s assignment.

“Students are immediately drawn in by the engaging format,” said Cannon, who teaches seventh- and eighth-grade reading at Great Salt Bay Community School.

And that discovery has transformed how he teaches informational text — nonfiction excerpts intended to inform. Typically, it is difficult to maintain students’ interest, stamina and engagement with this material, but after seeing how students eagerly engage with information related to current events in Checkology, he now uses examples from the day’s news.

Cannon, an educator with 15 years of experience, said he first recognized the need for news literacy education in the classroom in 2010, when he moved to middle school from elementary school. In the middle school grades, students transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” — analyzing and evaluating text, rather than simply understanding it.

This is where nonfiction material stymies students. “It’s as if they’ve trusted informational texts all the way, so they struggle to develop this wider lens, one that includes point of view, secondary (connotative) meanings of words, and even their own political bias,” Cannon explained in an email exchange.

Developing that wider lens is key to teaching critical thinking while building students’ confidence in their ability to read the world around them. “Checkology ticks off both those boxes,” he said.

A Checkology veteran

Cannon has taught Checkology to more than 100 students in six classes over the past two years, starting with the original platform. He finds even greater value from the reimagined virtual classroom, released for the 2018-19 school year, which offers additional functions and features that appeal to both educator and student.

“I really appreciate the opportunity to customize lessons depending on my classes. I have a broad range of abilities and backgrounds, with some students needing more background and others needing to be pushed into more challenges,” he said.

He also likes the feature that allows busy teachers to quickly and easily comment on students’ work while also providing room for substantive feedback.

And his students have embraced the new reward system. “I’ve come to appreciate how motivating the badge and point system is for students. It keeps them focused and attentive and creates some lighthearted competition to buoy their interest,” he said.

Cannon uses other classwork to reinforce the skills gained from Checkology. “We look for examples of some of the many types of misinformation — specifically ones that have been blended together creatively,” he said. “It’s an authentic way to test out what they’ve learned!” 

This is important, he believes, as information overload can confuse and frustrate readers and further erode people’s confidence in their own ability to determine fact from fiction.

“People are ready to say, ‘Forget it. It’s all biased, and I’m not even going to try and find a balanced source,’” Cannon said. “By supplying deeper background and a wealth of cases and examples, Checkology helps restore their belief in journalism, to see it as a vital tool to help prepare them to participate in our democracy.”

NLP is thrilled to offer heartiest congratulations to Liz Ramos, a high school teacher and a member of our board of directors, on being named Outstanding Secondary Level Social Studies Teacher of the Year by the California Council for the Social Studies (CCSS).

The Constitutional Rights Foundation of Los Angeles nominated Liz for the award, which recognizes educators whose classroom teachings and professional practices reflect the goals and purposes of an exemplary social studies education.

Liz told NLP that she was honored to receive the award, adding: “I strive to create a classroom and lessons that engage students, open the world up to them, and help them to become informed and engaged citizens. This is such an amazing time to be teaching with technology and resources that allow teachers to take the students beyond the classroom walls.”

She has taught history and U.S. government at Alta Loma High School in Rancho Cucamonga, California, since 2005. She actively integrates technology into her curriculum, emphasizing media and digital literacy, to help her students to seek information and to demonstrate what they have learned.

Liz began using NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom within weeks of its release in May 2016, first with students in summer school and then with her college prep and AP government classes in the fall. The platform, she says, has helped give all of her students “the tools to evaluate credible takes on a story, examine and understand the various purposes of news and media, and to be aware of bias and deceit by providing a framework to question the news and social media postings and be critical thinkers for reference in life moving forward.”

She was a member of NLP’s strategic plan steering committee and joined the NLP board in 2017. She has attended our NewsLitCamp® professional development events in Los Angeles and Chicago and led a workshop that featured Checkology (“Empowering Students to Navigate Today’s Challenging Media Landscape”) at the National Council for the Social Studies’ annual conference in 2017.

Liz and the other award winners will be honored on March 15 at an event during the CCSS annual conference in San Jose.

In a previous post I described how debunking misinformation is a meaningful civic action. When we discuss misinformation, we often focus on the types that elicit strong emotional responses and are trying to influence political, social or cultural views. There is another common type of misinformation that we should be paying closer attention to: It’s called “engagement bait,” and, as the name implies, we engage with it often.

Engagement bait is a type of social media post that is designed to get you to interact with (seemingly) innocuous content through likes, follows, shares and comments. These posts are often created by accounts that have two specific goals in mind: First, build a large following for the account; then, monetize that following.

Here’s one example:

In this image, photo editing software was used to add the weapons. A reverse image search brings up several variations of the picture, along with a link to a Corgi owners discussion forum where the person who took the original photo talks about how it went viral.

As an account like this one accumulates followers, increases engagement and becomes more popular, the owner can use a service such as PaidPerTweet or SponsoredTweets to monetize its following through advertising. Eventually the owner can sell the account — and all of the followers it built up.

At this point you might be asking, “So what? Why should we care about fluff items about cute animals?” After all, these manipulated images of animals or nature scenes seem harmless enough. Social media platforms routinely serve us ads anyway, so we probably don’t notice.

But beware: Some engagement bait posts can leave you vulnerable to identity theft.

Many of us have been tagged by friends to answer questions about ourselves: What was the first concert you went to? What color was your first car? “Tag baiting” is another type of engagement bait, and it counts on you and your friends tagging each other, either in the comments of a post or in a post you share on your timeline, so that the post spreads from friend to friend.

What you may not realize while sharing fun facts about yourself is that many of these seemingly innocent questions are remarkably similar to security questions for online banking and other secure accounts. If you get enough people to respond and share, you have a gold mine of personal information.

In December 2017, Facebook announced that it was taking steps to address five specific types of engagement bait:

• Vote baiting: These often take advantage of Facebook’s reactions. Users will see two options (such as images) and are asked to “like for option 1, love for option 2.” The more people “vote,” the more popular the post appears, making it appear in more timelines. On Twitter this would be “like for option 1, retweet for option 2.”
• React baiting: This is similar to vote baiting, but usually only involves one example in the post.
• Share baiting: A post appears in your feed, asking you to “share” or “retweet” if you like it or agree with it. The more the post is shared or retweeted, the more popular it appears.
• Tag baiting: As noted above, a post asks you to tag a friend in the comments or share the post to your friend’s page. That makes the post appear in your friend’s news feed, where it encourages your friend to tag their friends. The more people get tagged, the more popular the post appears. (Seeing a pattern?)
• Comment baiting: A post asks you to write specific words or phrases in the comments section. As more people comment, the post appears to be more popular.

These types of posts try to leverage Facebook’s news feed algorithms to boost both more typical engagement bait posts (adorable animals, “amazing” nature photos, etc.) and posts for companies, products or services — often for unethical and sometimes illegal purposes. The same is true for Twitter and Instagram, though the engagement obviously varies by platform.

(Since that announcement, Facebook has expanded the demotion of “engagement bait” posts to include those written in 22 languages other than English. The company also is demoting comments that contain engagement bait, meaning that those comments are less likely to appear in users’ timelines.)

Sometimes, the engagement bait is being used to promote a legitimate business or a cause — a form of viral social media marketing. Here’s an example from the DC Extended Universe, promoting the movie Aquaman:

This post is designed to encourage people to follow the DCEU account and generate popularity through retweets — meaning the company doesn’t have to pay for it to be a promoted post on Twitter. Marketing efforts like this are common, but they’re still engagement bait.

Compare the DCEU promotion with this, however:

Several fake Lululemon accounts on Instagram posted an image advertising a fake brand ambassador program. This used a combination of engagement bait tactics, and it was widely shared by thousands of users. (In fact, Lululemon does have an ambassador program, but it is managed through individual stores — not online.) While the account that posted the original hoax no longer exists, the image it created continued to spread. (And the date can be manipulated, so this falsehood could continue into this year and beyond.)

Other social media platforms are also attempting to mitigate engagement bait. Last month, Twitter suspended the @oldpicsarchive account, which routinely posted images that were manipulated, were posted in false context or were complete fabrications. Such posts are debunked daily by accounts — such as @HoaxEye and @PicPedant— that follow engagement bait accounts and use digital forensics skills to debunk false images, hoaxes and other misinformation.

Understanding the difference among the various types of engagement bait is just as important as knowing how to identify news, opinion, propaganda, advertising, entertainment and raw information. It applies the same analysis skills to determine what is true and what is false. The Aquaman post is real, and that can be verified. The Lululemon post is not real, and that can also be verified. Many other forms of engagement bait use manipulated or fabricated images and other forms of misinformation to generate likes, shares and follows; these can also be verified using digital forensics and fact-checking skills.

With most forms of engagement bait, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is — so don’t like, share, follow, retweet or comment on it!

Messages and images that appear online, in print and on television strongly influence how people think about issues such as migration, according to Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education.

“People see different things in the way stories are reported, or in photos that are used to represent a situation or person,” Adams told Adam Strom of UCLA’s Re-imagining Migration project, noting that the way a group of migrants is identified in the media — as “an army” or as “a pilgrimage,” for example — can affect a reader’s or viewer’s perception. “If a piece of information causes you to have a strong emotional reaction, you need to be careful — because when our emotions are high, they can override our rational minds and cause us to miss key details.”

When David Teeghman, a teacher at Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School in Chicago, first heard about the Checkology® virtual classroom, it was a no-brainer: “I was like, ‘YES, this is a resource that my students need to have access to.’”

Navigating the information landscape these days is difficult enough for adults — and even more challenging for his students, many of whom had never seen The New York Times or The Washington Post and didn’t know the difference between an unreliable source and a credible one.

“These skills were missing in my students,” Teeghman said. “They would be susceptible to conspiracy theories, they couldn’t differentiate a real from a fake piece of content, they couldn’t tell when something had been manipulated or put in the wrong context — or had just been fabricated entirely.”

In the three years since he introduced Checkology in his classroom, Teeghman has noticed consistent improvement in his students’ ability to trust what he calls their “spidey sense” — the feeling that something isn’t right — and find the facts.

“The biggest challenge as a teenager about getting information is knowing if it’s real or not,” said Nayaisha Edmond, a student in Teeghman’s digital journalism class. “I improve day by day as I get on Checkology.”

Teeghman, too, has only praise for the platform: “I love how decentralized it is, I love how individualized it is, and I love that students can work at their own pace.” He is also impressed by the diversity of representation in the lessons. His students, he said, “can see themselves in the videos.”

But what’s most important to this educator is that his students take their newly acquired news literacy skills out into the real world, and that after they leave his classroom, they continue to apply what they have learned. Much to his delight, they do.

Once his students have finished his class, he said, he allows them to “friend” him on Facebook. One day, he noticed that a former student “unfortunately” posted something false on his feed —and he was gratified to see that other former students — in an online conversation he described as “very respectful” yet ”spirited” — “jumped in to correct that before I even had a chance to say anything!”

Watch this video from our visit to his classroom.

NLP’s Alan Miller (left) moderated the talkback session with Lifespan of a Fact director Leigh Silverman and actors Bobby Cannavale, Daniel Radcliffe and Cherry Jones. Photo by Miriam Romais/The News Literacy Project

“Facts have to be the final measure of truth.”  

That’s what fact-checker Jim Fingal (portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe) says in the play The Lifespan of a Fact. At the News Literacy Project, we believe that the lifespan of a fact is eternal. 

The play, based on a 2012 book by Fingal and writer John D’Agata (played by Bobby Cannavale) about Fingal’s fact check of an essay by D’Agata, shone a light on the tension between accuracy and creative license. And on Tuesday, students from two New York schools that use NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom — the Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria and the Bronx Collaborative High School — attended the play and participated in a talkback session with Radcliffe, Cannavale, Cherry Jones (who plays Fingal’s boss, a magazine editor), and the play’s director, Leigh Silverman. NLP founder and CEO Alan Miller moderated the discussion.  

The 30-minute Q&A covered a number of topics, such as the importance of the arts and the ability to enjoy a movie “based on a true story” without looking up every fact upon leaving the theater. The actors also had a strong message for the students, describing how their roles in the play had strengthened their respect for journalism and for real-life fact-checkers. In fact, in preparation for this part, Radcliffe shadowed a fact-checker at The New Yorker.  

“It gave me incredible faith,” Radcliffe said, noting that he was “inspired” by the “people out there who are doing this job and doing it amazingly rigorously.”  

Checkology students Christina Wright (left) and Kelis Williams from Bronx Collaborative High School. Photo by Miriam Romais/The News Literacy Project

The play, in a limited run at Studio 54 in New York City, centers on Fingal’s fact check of an essay by D’Agata before it is published in a magazine. It devolves into a philosophical argument over “true” versus “true-ish”: Fingal and D’Agata disagree, for example, over whether specific numbers — how many strip clubs there are in Las Vegas, for example — must always be accurate (the fact-checker’s opinion) or can be changed to serve a literary purpose (the essayist’s opinion). The audience applauded when Fingal described facts as “the final measure of truth.” 

All three actors responded to the students’ questions with answers that led to a similar conclusion: A play might not be based on facts, but the news you consume every day needs to be. Every time.  

“It’s just the world we’re living in now, isn’t it, where every day people in power play fast and loose with the facts,” said Jones, adding that it’s only because of “superb journalism” that their misstatements are known. 

The night ended with a group photo — and NLP bumper stickers (“My facts just ran over your fiction”) for the actors and the director as a reminder to continue to fight for facts. The students thanked Radcliffe, Cannavale, Jones and Silverman for the opportunity. Amazingly, no one asked Radcliffe anything about Harry Potter.  

And that’s a fact.

ProPublica Illinois (@ProPublicaIL) regularly uses Twitter to answer questions about journalism. Recently a reader asked: “How do you go about finding those new ideas? Is it by brainstorming? Or following on tips?”

Here’s the response from ProPublica journalist Jodi Cohen:

“Reporters are always on the lookout for ways to inform the public about the world we live in, including wrongdoing. We go to all kinds of public meetings — for school boards, city councils and park districts — and not only report the daily news but look for the bigger stories by spotting trends, questionable spending and more. We ask a LOT of questions.”

So who’s going to these meetings and asking the questions in your community? As part of a project to track local news coverage and encourage students to contact and interact with journalists, consider curating a list of local journalists. Most journalists routinely use Twitter for their work. If you have a Twitter account you use for your classes, here’s how to create a Twitter list:

1. Click on your profile icon. (On a computer, the profile icon is in the upper right corner of the screen between the search box and “Tweet”; on mobile devices, it’s in the upper left corner.)
2. Click on “Lists.”
3. Click “Create new list.”
4. Select a name for your list and give it a short description. List names cannot exceed 25 characters or begin with a number. Decide if you want the list to be private (only you can see it) or public (anyone can subscribe to it).
5. Click “Save list.”

Next, add the Twitter accounts of local journalists to your list:

1. Once you’ve identified an account that you want to add to your list, click the overflow icon on the journalist’s profile page (on a computer, the three vertical dots next to the Follow/Following button; on mobile devices it may be the same three vertical dots and others the gear).
2. Select “Add or remove from lists.” You don’t need follow an account to add it to your list.
3. A pop-up will appear with the lists you have created. If you’d like to add the journalist to a list, click the checkbox next to the list name. To remove an account from a list, simply uncheck the box.
4. To see if the account was included, go to “Lists” on your profile page. Click the list name, then click “Members.” You should see the account that you added.
5. Sometimes people will put “no lists” in their Twitter profile. Please respect that request.

As an example, here’s my Twitter list of education reporters. Once you have created your list and added journalists, just click on the list to see a feed of tweets from those accounts. Over time, you will undoubtedly see patterns emerge in the topics and issues the journalists are covering.

As part of this effort, look for a calendar of public meetings in your community. For example, the Chicago City Clerk’s office maintains a calendar of council and committee meetings. These calendars typically include the date, time and location for the meeting, along with general public information and agendas. If there is a meeting your students are interested in, they can contact journalists on your list to see who might be covering it. Many journalists also live-tweet the meetings so people can know what’s happening in real time, especially if the meeting is of some importance.

Finally, this list can be useful when students want to engage with journalists directly, either by asking questions or offering their perspectives about news coverage. This is one of our indicators of civic engagement and can be an excellent avenue for student voice. And it provides you with information about your community from those whose job it is to determine what’s going on: local journalists and news organizations.

For Nicole Finnesand, integrating current events into her lessons at a middle school in the southeast corner of South Dakota was daunting — until she encountered the News Literacy Project and its Checkology virtual classroom.

She teaches in Colton, a tiny town (population 676, according to 2017 Census estimates) about 25 miles northwest of Sioux Falls. As she put it during a recent phone conversation, “Sometimes, here in the Midwest, we feel very insular.”

You might think that such a small population would be more likely to share political beliefs, but Finnesand said that the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade language arts classes reflect the fractures in the country as a whole.

They are, she said, “very divided on social issues. That was very intimidating for me as an educator to talk about someone like Kim Jong Un or Donald Trump or any political anything in my classroom, knowing that the answer to it would be very polarized.”

A search for resources

Finnesand first heard the term “news literacy” after the 2012 election, but it wasn’t until 2016 — with the country more divided than ever — that she felt compelled to research resources that might help her discuss current events with her students and show them how to think critically about what was happening in their community, their country and the world.

That’s when she discovered Checkology, and it didn’t take her long to become a dedicated user.

“I have really loved all of the resources I’ve gained and the knowledge my students are walking away with,” she said. Also important, she added, are “the skills that they’re able to apply to their own reading and consumption of media.”

As an example, she said that before they were exposed to Checkology, some of her students would produce articles from the satirical publication The Onion as truthful sources for persuasive writing exercises.

“That was shocking,” she said, “but they had no idea what that whole genre of satire is. And certainly with the political climate of our country, there were students that were just shouting ‘fake news’ at things without knowing what that meant, or knowing what they’re saying, or what is fake news. They really couldn’t tell me.”

She knew that her students were capable — but that they didn’t know how to determine what was credible news or how to find it.

Enter Checkology — and a classroom transformed.

Civil discourse

Suddenly, students began coming to class not just with opinions, but with facts and legitimate sources to back them up. They may have strongly different views on some topics, Finnesand said, but civil discourse now feels possible.

“I think the Checkology platform gave us a tool that was engaging without telling the students, ‘Here’s the right answer, here’s the way to view it,’” she said. “It gave them talking points that we could all agree on or agree to disagree on. …

“We get to use our class as a space to discuss ‘Well, what are the two sides? And how do we know what’s real and what’s not real?’”

Finnesand has watched her students gain an appreciation for — and understanding of — quality journalism. One “lightbulb moment,” as she put it, came when they learned, through the Checkology lesson “Democracy’s Watchdog,” that journalists act as detectives and hold those with power in check. They have also enjoyed tying current issues to Checkology; “The First Amendment” gave them a starting point to discuss the recent efforts by the White House press office to lift the press credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta.

It’s a challenge for anyone, adults included, to consume news responsibly and discuss it civilly. But Finnesand says she has seen a real change in her students since introducing Checkology, and she believes that they can be agents of change.

“I’m learning with my students what kinds of things we can read about and agree to disagree and work on,” she said, adding: “Hopefully our country isn’t always so divided and we can still have conversations about issues without alienating each other.”

Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media following natural disasters, mass shootings, terrorist attacks and other dramatic news events. In addition to seeing doctored photos and patently false “breaking news,” we’re also likely to be bombarded with conspiracy theories — another subset of misinformation. Since many of these involve alleged actions by the government, we need to make sure that our students have the news literacy skills they need to prevent them from believing these falsehoods and becoming distrustful of the government.

In his book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, published in 2013, Jesse Walker defined five types of conspiracy theories:

• The “Enemy Outside” refers to theories based on figures outside a community alleged to be scheming against it.
• The “Enemy Within” finds the conspirators lurking inside the nation, indistinguishable from ordinary citizens.
• The “Enemy Above” involves powerful people manipulating events for their own gain.
• The “Enemy Below” features the lower classes working to overturn the social order.
• The “Benevolent Conspiracies” are angelic forces that work behind the scenes to improve the world and help people.

In a 2018 study (PDF download) of people who believe in conspiracy theories, Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra of Virginia Tech’s computer science department examined 10 years of posts (and four crisis events) in the Reddit community r/conspiracy and defined three types of participants:

• “Veterans” are long-term active members of r/conspiracy.
• “Converts” were active in other discussions on Reddit and joined r/conspiracy in response to a specific crisis.
• “Joiners” became Reddit users and joined r/conspiracy specifically in response to a crisis or other event.

How do conspiracy theories manifest on social media? Let’s take a hurricane as an example. Amid the misinformation and hoaxes that typically appear before, during and after such storms (such as the inevitable “shark on the flooded highway” image), posts claiming that the government can alter the weather will start appearing. There will be references to chemtrails (the condensation trails from aircraft engines that conspiracy theorists say are laden with weather-changing chemical or biological agents) and to HAARP, an actual research program, based at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, that studies the properties and behavior of the ionosphere. These posts will often link to sites or discussion groups that have compelling and detailed descriptions of how HAARP and other government programs can control the weather.

Without the skills to critically evaluate the content and sources for these posts, sites and other discussion groups, students can easily be persuaded that what’s being said is factual. They may even contribute to the viral nature of the ideas by sharing them — in short, becoming a “joiner.”

Samory and Mitra found that “joiners” demonstrated a very high level of engagement in the online discussions, posting longer and more detailed content that was comparable to that of the community’s “veterans.” “Converts” in these discussions tended to come and go, with lower levels of engagement overall. Perhaps most troubling is that the longer the “joiners” engaged in these communities, the more likely they were to become “veterans.”

This is where the importance of news literacy comes in. People who believe conspiracy theories are not necessarily the stereotypical “tinfoil hat” types. In a 2017 study, Stephanie* Craft, Seth Ashley* and Adam Maksl found that anyone can end up believing a conspiracy theory, since most of them are structured with a compelling story that provokes strong emotional reactions and has a connection to an existing bias or belief.

For their study, Craft, Ashley and Maksl surveyed 397 people to determine what they knew about the news media and the extent to which they believed several conspiracy narratives. Perhaps not surprisingly, they found a correlation between respondents’ knowledge about how the news media works and belief in conspiracy theories: “The greater one’s knowledge about the news media — from the kinds of news covered, to the commercial context in which news is produced, to the effects on public opinion news can have — the less likely one will fall prey to conspiracy theories,” the researchers wrote.

At the News Literacy Project, we emphasize the importance of news literacy as an antidote to misinformation and a catalyst for becoming a critical consumer of news and information. Discussing conspiracy theories with students can be tricky, and doing so is not typically part of the curriculum. But if students fall prey to this type of misinformation, their ability to be critical and open-minded about all types of information, including news, is compromised. And if their belief in conspiracy theories leads them to become fearful and cynical about the government, they are less likely to become active, informed and engaged participants in our country’s civic life.

*An earlier version of this post misspelled the first name of Stephanie Craft (not Stefanie) and the last name of Sean Ashley (not Astley).

Nov. 5-9 is Media Literacy Week — our favorite week of the year, when champions of news and media literacy raise awareness of the critical need and available tools to discern and create credible information as students, consumers and citizens.

Here are some things you can do each day during Media Literacy Week to support these efforts:

Monday: Double-check your facts (before you vote). Take The Easiest Quiz of All Time, then watch our video to see how others did. Warning: It’s not that easy!

Tuesday: Check your ballot! It’s Election Day, and news literacy education empowers the well-informed voters who keep our democracy strong.

Wednesday: Check in. Visit our online “booth” at the virtual fair hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education. On Wednesday between 3 and 5 p.m. ET, our own Jordan Maze will answer questions about our programs and about news literacy in general.

Thursday: Image check. People instinctively trust images more than words — but many images are manipulated or taken out of context. Brush up on your reverse image searching skills so you can teach someone else how to find out if that compelling photo is real or fake.

Friday: Check and correct (kindly). If you see that someone has shared misinformation online, let them know in the spirit of giving facts a fighting chance.

Everyone has to work harder than ever these days to avoid misinformation and manipulation. Keep fighting for facts!

Americans head to their polling places in less than two weeks — and in each election cycle, it’s becoming more and more difficult to make sure that we actually know what we need to know before casting our ballots. (Check out our “Double-Check Your Facts” PSA to see how people did on The Easiest Quiz of All Time.)

To be active, engaged participants in the civic life of our communities, we all must take proactive steps to better understand the issues we care most about — especially since Facebook, Twitter and other social media have become, for many of us, our primary sources of information. By relying on these platforms for news, we’re likely to become encased in a filter bubble — a phenomenon that, in essence, limits what we read, watch and hear.

We end up inside these bubbles when the algorithms used by these platforms attempt to select content that they feel we want to see and that aligns with what they perceive as our personal preferences. And when our online friends and connections share our opinions, we’re trapped even more: We become insulated from opposing viewpoints, making it increasingly difficult to understand all sides of the issues. (Another description for this is the “echo chamber” effect — meaning that our beliefs are repeated and amplified by our connections.)

How do we pop these filter bubbles? We can’t expect any of the platforms to do it for us. We have to be proactive by engaging with new sources of information. Here are a few that will help.

Blue Feed, Red Feed

This site, from The Wall Street Journal, was launched several months before the 2016 presidential election. The concept is simple: Click on one of eight pre-selected topics (such as health care or immigration) and scroll through a series of Facebook posts that have been shared from sources that a study by Facebook has identified as “very liberal” or “very conservative.” Each post in the feeds has at least 100 shares, and the sources for the posts have more than 100,000 followers.

The strength of this tool is that it allows users to see the latest arguments for their selected issues side by side. People from across the political spectrum can consider their own beliefs against opposing viewpoints to come to a clearer understanding of their position — or perhaps change it to a new view.

ISideWith.com

This site was started in 2012 by Taylor Peck, a political analyst and marketing expert, and Nick Boutelier, a web designer and developer, who wanted to find ways to increase voter engagement and knowledge. Users can choose from more than 30 countries and select from 22 languages (including several variations of English).

For U.S. voters, the site has a 2018 midterm voter guide that asks users to rate their beliefs on a wide range of issues — economic policy, foreign policy, education, health care and more — and then presents information about candidates whose views concur with the users’. There are also guides to candidates for Congress and state legislatures. In the Polls section, users can see how others have answered the questions about their beliefs on issues, with both sides represented on the same page.

This site has an almost overwhelming amount of information — but it’s this comprehensiveness that makes ISideWith an excellent resource.

Vote Smart

Originally known as Project Vote Smart, this nonpartisan organization was founded in 1992 by Richard Kimball, a former Arizona state senator who had run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate against John McCain in 1986. Users can enter their ZIP code to see who currently represents them (federal, state and local offices) and who is running for office; when they click on a name, they can learn more about the official’s or candidate’s voting record, positions, speeches and funding. Similar to ISideWith, Vote Smart created Vote Easy, which allows users to explore candidates running for federal office (in 2018, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House) and their positions on key issues.

Other resources

The challenge with sites such as Vote Smart and ISideWith is that they tend to focus on enabling voters to find candidates whose political beliefs reflect their own. This actually serves to reinforce the filter bubble. If we look only for candidates with positions that agree with ours, we’re not really learning about opposing viewpoints.

ProCon.org focuses on the issues, not individual candidates. Users choose from an extensive list to see arguments for and against specific topics. Examples include:

• Should student loan debt be easier to discharge in bankruptcy?
• Should the drinking age be lowered from 21 to a younger age?
• Should marijuana be a medical option?
• Should bottled water be banned?

The site provides citations for all sources listed in the results. The arguments are listed side by side for easy comparison.

BalancedPolitics.org also lists arguments for specific positions side by side and provides background and links to additional resources. Finally, Debate.org is an online community (free to join) where members can vote and contribute their own opinions to current issues.

Civic engagement is more than voting. We must find ways to increase our knowledge and understanding of the issues that affect us and our communities. To do so, we first must be aware that we are inundated with information through our social media feeds and that we must critically evaluate everything that we encounter. Next, we need to seek out content that shows us opposing positions and ideas. What we find can either reinforce what we already believe or allow our positions to evolve.

When we burst our filter bubbles and are ready for our positions to be challenged, we’re taking an uncomfortable but important step. It’s one we have to take, though, if we want to become active and engaged participants in civic life — and informed voters.