Don’t let ABC’s mistake fuel distrust of the media

NLP in the News


In a report Sunday about violence in northern Syria, ABC’s “World News Tonight included a video clip of a nighttime machine gun exhibition at a Kentucky shooting range. Anchor Tom Llamas mistakenly described it as “appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians.”  While ABC made a serious error in including this footage, the lapse fueled cynical notions about how standards-based news organizations work.

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, puts the incident in context in a piece for Poynter Institute. “This is a good reminder of a fundamental concept in news literacy: Not all information — including misinformation — is created with the same motivations and processes. Most significant errors and breaches of standards at major news outlets are driven by a desire to break news,” he writes.

More Updates

How news literacy lessons help students navigate AI

Artificial intelligence technologies are flooding the internet with misleading and fake videos, photos and posts. Hannah Covington, senior director of education content at the News Literacy Project, recently visited classrooms in Oklahoma to see how news literacy lessons are helping students find credible information.   In an op-ed for The Oklahoman, she writes: “In the age…

NLP in the News