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.

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For Education Week, educators share how they teach students to question health influencers

An opinion piece in EducationWeek by two educators from New York featured the News Literacy Project’s District Fellowship program. The commentary described how the program supported their efforts to teach students to critically evaluate health and wellness claims on social media. “By the end, our teens had developed habits of healthy skepticism when scrolling their…

NLP in the News

In CNN piece, NLP urges care and transparency as journalism embraces AI

Peter Adams, the News Literacy Project’s Senior Vice President of Research and Design, was featured in a CNN article examining the use of artificial intelligence to generate content in newsrooms and the challenges it raises around verification and transparency. “It is precisely because AI is prone to errors that newsrooms must maintain the ‘fundamental standards…

NLP in the News

Insider Spotlight: Genna Sarnak

Welcome to the Insider Spotlight section, where we feature real questions from our team and answers from educators who are making a difference teaching news literacy. This month, our featured educator is Genna Sarnak from Northfield, Massachusetts, where she teaches digital media literacy to middle school students.

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