Media Literacy by Tiffany Whitehead

In a recent collaboration with Britannica Digital Learning, I published a series of blog posts and presented a webinar on the topic of news literacy and fighting fake news. With over 600 educators from around the country attending this webinar and many more accessing the archive, the topic of fake news is timely and important in the world of education. Many of the concepts and resources I shared with educators in this series are also relevant to our entire school community, and I hope you will find them to be informative and useful.

There are several terms that are important to gaining a broader understanding of this topic. I have used a variety of sources, including Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy and Melissa Zimdar’s False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources to curate this list of relevant terms:

• Media Literacy: The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media. A broader umbrella that takes into account marketing, propaganda, and pop culture.
• News Literacy: The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet. Directly relating to journalism.
• Fake News: Sources that entirely fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
• Confirmation Bias: Pursuing information that reassures or reflects a person’s particular point of view.
• Echo Chamber: An environment in which a person encounters beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered. Social media feeds make it easy to have a narrow information base that aligns with your own personal beliefs.
• Filter Bubble: A state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on things like past click-behavior, search history, and location. Check out Eli Pariser’s 2011 TED Talk on the Filter Bubble.
• Credible: Sources that circulate news and information in a manner consistent with traditional and ethical practices in journalism Even credible sources sometimes rely on clickbait-style headlines or occasionally make mistakes. No news organization is perfect, which is why a healthy news diet consists of multiple sources of information.
• Circular Reporting: Also called false confirmation. A situation where a piece of information appears to come from multiple independent sources, but is actually coming from only one source. Source A publishes misinformation, Source B reprints it, then Source A cites Source B as the source. Also occurs when a number of sources report on the same instance of false information that is shared, making it appear valid and verified as it is reported from numerous sources.

If you are interested in digging into some research on the topic of media literacy, I recommend checking out this study completed by the Stanford History Education Group on Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. They assessed how middle school, high school, and college-age students evaluate information online. This recent PEW study assessed the ability to distinguish between factual and opinion statements in the news is also worth a read.

The moral of the story is that it is important, but not always easy, to seek balanced news from a variety of sources. Reading with a critical eye and fact-checking sources is essential. Here are a few websites that are designed to help readers look at news information more critically:

• AllSides: AllSides is a news service aimed at cutting through one-sided bias and hyper-partisanship. They offer news stories on current topics “from the center”, “from the left”, and “from the right” on a scale that rates the bias.
• FactCheck: FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. They are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. They monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.
• Politifact: PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. PolitiFact is run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, an independent newspaper in Florida. They use a number of scales they’ve created: Truth-O-Meter to gage accuracy of statements, Flip-O-Meter to rate whether an elected official has been consistent on an issue, and Promise Meters to gage progress made on campaign promises.

There is no denying that our news and media landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. While we clearly have a wealth of information at our fingertips and accessible on our smartphones, in many ways it is more difficult to discern fact from fiction than ever before. As involved citizens, we must be aware of the challenges and choose to evaluate news critically and carefully.

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Tiffany Whitehead

Tiffany has been an educator for fourteen years and serves as the Director of Library at Episcopal. A lifelong resident of Baton Rouge, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Education from Southeastern Louisiana University and her Masters in Educational Technology Leadership from Northwestern State University of Louisiana. She has served as the President for ISTE’s Librarians Network and was recognized as one of ISTE’s 2014 Emerging Leaders. Tiffany is National Board Certified in Library Media and was named one of the 2014 Library Journal Movers & Shakers. She was the 2016 recipient of the Louisiana Library Media Specialist Award and is currently the President of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians. Tiffany speaks regularly at state, national, and international conferences on school library and technology topics.

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