News Literacy is a curriculum developed at Stony Brook University in New York over the past two decades. It is designed to help students develop critical thinking skills and acquire tools and concepts to judge the reliability and credibility of news and information, whether it comes via social media, television, news websites, print newspapers and magazines, or any other medium. What information can we trust? How can we tell? Why does it matter?
Originally designed exclusively for college students, the curriculum is now being adapted for middle school and high school students, as well.
The curriculum addresses major challenges that confront all of us.
- Information Overload: The sheer volume of information and misinformation that descends on us each day makes it difficult to find reliable information and identify legitimate news outlets.
- The blurring of lines: It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish reliable journalism from the advertising, propaganda, infotainment, publicity, and raw information coursing through the Internet.
- A crisis of authenticity: New technologies to create, manipulate, and widely share information make it possible to spread disinformation that looks like it’s authentic (but isn’t).
- Speed vs. Accuracy. The conflict between speed and accuracy has escalated. We all want information as quickly as possible, but accelerating the consumption and sharing of information, especially on social media, has increased the chances that the information will be wrong.
These challenges have created the demand for a new kind of literacy—a literacy that empowers news consumers to determine whether information is reliable before reaching a conclusion or sharing it with others. A healthy civil society can exist only if the public is well-informed. If people can be easily led to believe rumors, gossip, propaganda, and disinformation–or are unwilling to believe legitimate, fact-based news– the consequences are dangerous for all of us.
The Gutenberg printing press launched a communications revolution that altered power relationships around the world. But Gutenberg’s revolution and subsequent communications advances like radio and television still largely left the power to publish in the hands of corporations, interest groups, governments, and wealthy individuals.
This Internet revolution has transformed society anew, for it has made it possible for everyone with access to a computer or a smartphone to publish information. It is an empowering development, but as Uncle Ben told Peter Parker in Spider-man, “With great power, comes great responsibility.” A significant goal of our Stony Brook curriculum is to persuade students that they have a role to play in the quality of information on the Internet and social media.
To accomplish our goals, the News Literacy Stony Brook model uses heavily illustrated lessons followed by hands-on exercises to help students understand how journalism works and why information is such a powerful force for good and ill in modern societies. The curriculum has lessons and units in three domains: News Awareness, News Analysis and News Action. In terms of News Analysis, the goal is for students to become interrogators rather than just consumers of news and information. And to:
- Recognize the difference between journalism and other kinds of information and between journalists and other information purveyors;
- In the context of journalism, recognize the difference between news and opinion;
- In the context of news stories, analyze the difference between assertion and verification and between evidence and inference;
- Evaluate and deconstruct news reports across all news media platforms, based on the quality of evidence presented and the reliability of sources;
- Distinguish between news media bias and audience bias.
Underlying these skills, the curriculum presents and reinforces these key concepts:
- Appreciation of the power of reliable information and the importance of a free flow of information in a democratic society;
- Understanding why news matters and why becoming a more discerning news consumer can change individual lives and the life of the country;
- Understanding how the digital revolution and the structural changes in the news media can affect news consumers; understand our new responsibilities as publishers and creators as well as consumers.
Thus far over 11,000 undergraduates have taken our three-credit undergraduate course at Stony Brook, and about 30 universities in the US and overseas have adopted or adapted all or part of the course. An online course on the educational platform Coursera, “Making Sense of the News,” co-developed with our partners at the University of Hong Kong, has attracted more than 20,000 adult learners from all over the globe. More recently, nearly 20,000 students in seven Long Island school districts have begun studying elements of the Stony Brook K-12 curriculum, with the goal of developing replicable models for districts across the state.This comes as a growing number of states are mandating media or information literacy for all of their graduates.
A new generation of news literate citizens who demand high quality information will also shape the future of journalism, determining the balance between information that is important versus that which is titillating – a struggle that has been part of journalism from its beginnings. Savvy news consumers are already beginning to understand the value of the journalists’ ability to authenticate and then put into context the vast amount of information that constantly floods over us. Citizens can vote for reliable information by frequenting websites and following social media outlets that check the facts as much as possible, strive to avoid conflicts of interest, and take responsibility for the information they publish. Just as it is often said that in a democracy citizens get the government they deserve, in the 21st century newly empowered consumers will get the journalism they demand.
The ability of the next generations of citizens to judge the reliability and relevance of information will be a leading indicator of the public health of civil societies around the world.