Media literacy is a perennial problem with a timely twist. For decades, teachers have felt the need to make sure students can accurately judge and analyze the information they consume, whether it comes from newspapers, television, or most likely in 2017, social media.
But in the last year, this issue went from a typical teacher interest to a national concern with the onslaught of "fake news." These fabricated stories with no factual basis are often published on websites masquerading as legitimate news organizations. Fake news was rampant during the presidential election, but when an armed man stormed a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor looking for the child sex slave ring purported to be run by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chair John Podesta, it became impossible to ignore the seriousness of the problem. Right before that incident, Stanford University unveiled the summary of a study that proved what many teachers already knew: teens are not good judges of news.
"There's a tsunami of information" available at students' fingertips, says Janice Schachter, who teaches news literacy at Northport High School in Long Island, New York. This flood can overwhelm kids who are trying to discern what's valid, what's biased, and what's plain fake.
Adding to the problem, experts say, is the trend of politicians calling stories they disagree with "fake news."
"Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media, they are equally perceptive about what they find there," notes the Stanford report "Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning." However, "our work shows the opposite" to be true.
Polling nearly 8,000 students from middle school to college, the Stanford researchers found that most middle school students could distinguish between a news story and a traditional ad, but so-called native advertising threw them off. More than 80 percent believed that an ad labeled "sponsored content" was a real news story. Four of every 10 high school students said a picture posted on a photo sharing site of deformed daisies near a nuclear power plant provided "strong evidence" that the power plant caused the flowers' deformities. These students did not consider who posted the photo, whether there was any proof that it was taken near the power plant, or whether the conditions near the plant could have had any bearing on the flowers' unusual growth.
"We've got to start getting kids to realize the Internet is not the encyclopedia," says Frank W. Baker, a national media literacy consultant. "The Stanford study, I hope, is an eye-opener for educators."
Introducing News Literacy
The concept of altering information in the guise of news has a long history. Photographer Mathew Brady manipulated bodies on Civil War battlefields "to tell the story he wanted to tell," says Joyce Valenza, assistant professor of teaching at Rutgers University. Much more recently, she points to the darkened, altered image of O.J. Simpson that Time ran on its cover, as well as the raft of fake Hurricane Sandy photos that users posted online.
In 1998, education technology consultant Alan November wrote a famous article called "Teaching Zack to Think." The story traces how a 14-year-old student wrote a paper "proving" the Holocaust never happened. He found a resource online, on the personal page of a college professor, which he used to buttress his argument. November explained how media literacy could have helped Zack debunk the legitimacy of the information he came across.
Media literacy has long been a staple of civic education, but a new branch, news literacy, is quickly taking hold. In general, media literacy looks at the impact of media on society, from how ads affect consumers to gender stereotypes to how media is created. News literacy, explains Howard Schneider, dean of journalism at Stony Brook University, focuses only on news, how it is created, whether the content is fair, and how consumers interpret it.
Schneider created Stony Brook's first news literacy course in 2007, which more than 10,000 students have since taken. Earlier this year, in partnership with the University of Hong Kong, Stony Brook launched Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that anyone can audit at no cost.
Although the course is designed for undergraduates, Schneider says the perfect time to teach news literacy is at the beginning of middle school. I.S. 303 in Brooklyn, New York, uses the curriculum with its 6th to 8th graders, who take one hour of news literacy each week for all three years.
At that age, "students are emerging in their awareness of the greater world," Schneider says. "They are not calcified in their belief system." College students, who often over-trust the information they receive from friends, have already begun insulating themselves in a content bubble, he adds.
Audrey Church, the president of the American Association of School Librarians, thinks lessons in news literacy should start in 4th grade and build from there. Librarians, she notes, who are trained "to help students become critical thinkers, skillful researchers, and ethical users of information," can offer their assistance.
Philadelphia teacher Mary Beth Hertz insists that educators can introduce some media literacy concepts even earlier. In an Edutopia article, "Battling Fake News in the Classroom," Hertz wrote that 1st graders can be taught how to distinguish ads from content on a website. And older elementary students can complete checklists when assessing whether teacher-provided sites are real or fake.
Deconstructing News
So how, exactly, can teachers help students vet this rush of content in the classroom? Schachter starts with a simple two-step process to consider a story's "news neighborhood." Students begin by verifying the event and whether the writer and publication are tied to the subject, which could present a conflict of interest. Then, they try to contact the writer or publisher to help determine the story's accuracy.
If the story passes these initial tests, Schachter says students can dig deeper, examining sources and evidence in the story. Her students use the "I'M VAIN" mnemonic from Stony Brook's Digital Resource Center to help assess validity:
- I: Independent sources are better than self-interested sources.
- M: Multiple sources are better than single sources.
- V: Sources who Verify with evidence are better than sources who assert.
- A / I: Authoritative / Informed sources are better than uninformed sources.
- N: Named sources are better than unnamed sources.
Students using this rubric can score news by rating each story on a scale of 1–3 for all six measures. Schachter's class also uses this model to check the reliability of social media posts.
"What students find on social media, once they start paying attention, is that they often don't know the origin of something posted. Facebook is not a news organization. Twitter is not a news organization," she emphasizes. "If we don't know the actual source of the information, we can't trust it."
"This is tricky for young people who grew up on social media and have always gotten their information there," Schachter continues. "A post from a friend or a stranger looks the same as a post from the Washington Post or Fox News."
Schachter shares how her students—and some major media sources—fell for a story around Christmas that turned out to be fake. A man who played Santa in Nashville told the News Sentinel that he was called to a hospital to meet a terminally ill boy. The child died in his arms, right after the Santa told the boy, "When you get to those pearly gates, you tell 'em you're Santa's No. 1 elf, and I know they'll let you in."
Three days later, the newspaper backtracked and said it now believed the story was false because they could not find another source to verify the man's account. Further reporting uncovered that no hospitals in the area knew of the story and that the coroner's office could not confirm the event without the name of the boy. Schachter said her students questioned the lack of other sources, finally deciding the story was fake.
"Several students talked about how they initially were inclined to believe the story because Santa told it," Schachter says. "They had to overcome that initial reaction to properly analyze it."
Schneider references a famous news story from post-Katrina New Orleans, to hammer home the point. When a reporter wrote that deceased victims were being stored inside a freezer at the Superdome, the story was widely disseminated, but later proven false. It turns out that the reporter had taken a source's word and hadn't looked inside the freezer himself. Students at Stony Brook are taught to question whether "the reporter opened the freezer," says Schneider.
The News Literacy Project, a nonprofit that works with middle and high school students to evaluate the veracity of news stories, offers a helpful infographic: "Ten Questions for Fake News Detection." Beyond considering the source of the information, the checklist asks students to analyze the main message of the story or photo. Does it contain excessive punctuation (professional news organizations typically won't use all caps or more than one exclamation point), or is the information presented as a secret someone doesn't want the public to know? The checklist also advises students to conduct a reverse image search, to consider the quality of links within a story, and to see if the topic turns up on a fact-checking website such as Snopes.com, PolitiFact.com, or FactCheck.org.
With verification complete, students can then determine whether to share the story on social media.
Internet Self-Policing
Notably, a big part of the fake news phenomena is how quickly such stories are able to spread online. For example, a social media post that the band Rage Against the Machine was going to reunite and release an anti-Trump CD was false, but was shared or commented on by 560,000 people on Facebook.
After some initial protests, Facebook and Google have taken steps to fight the spread of demonstrably false stories by denying profitable ads to fake news sites. Facebook has also made it easier for users to report fake news and has partnered with fact-checking organizations to better verify posted stories. There are browser extensions, too, that can help flag fake news sites, such as Fake News Alert.
However, these measures are like the filters that are supposed to protect children from inappropriate online content, notes Church. There are sites that sneak through the filters, sites that are caught that shouldn't be, and ways children can get around the filters. "While these Internet tools could be helpful, there's nothing like being able to evaluate [a source] on your own," says Church.
"Many students think Google has already vetted the search results," adds Baker, "so they tend not to look past the first result in an online search. They are clearly ignorant that a company may have paid to get top billing."
"The dike is too big to plug," confirms Valenza. "There are no fingers big enough to stop the flow of user-generated content. It is up to teachers to ensure that we enable readers to negotiate the truth."
Not Getting Duped
The one thing the Stanford study didn't show, educators say, was how eager students are to learn news literacy skills.
"We start off the course with examples of fake news," says Schachter. When students realize that they have seen and believed some of these stories, they get upset. "They don't like the idea they can be so easily tricked."
She noted that current events have made this year's class different from the previous five years she taught the course. "In the past we would look at news stories that were sloppily done or hastily written." With fake news on the rise, her students have to spend more time trying to verify whether the events occurred, she says. Even students who are not enrolled in the class seek Schachter out to ask, "Is this story real?"
"This [work] is critically important," says Baker, the media literacy expert. "So many organizations are putting a lot of time, money, and energy into what people are seeing. I guarantee you fake news is not going away."
