‘I want to be part of a society that gets things right’: Los Angeles Times features new push for news literacy

The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday featured the News Literacy Project extensively in a story that explains increasing advocacy efforts to include media literacy instruction in the nation’s classrooms.

The piece profiles NLP’s impactful work in the classroom for almost 15 years and notes the Checkology™ virtual classroom’s impressive growth, with students registered in both liberal-leaning and conservative states.

NLP’s 2021 Gwen Ifill Middle School Student of the Year, Mirudulaa Suginathan Yamini, is quoted saying: “Our society has a value system, and you don’t want to degrade it by spreading misinformation. I want to be part of a society that gets things right.”

The Times also highlights NLP’s expanding mission to reach the public. It notes the urgency of creating a more news-literate electorate “as broad segments of the American populace have been consumed by election denialism, global warming skepticism, and COVID conspiracy theories.”

Says NLP founder Alan C. Miller: “We’ve lost any sense of a common narrative, of a shared reality. We not only can’t agree on what the facts are, we can’t even agree on what a fact is.”