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…
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…
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…
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,”…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
