During the pandemic, Brittney Smith was a life science teacher and department chair at a Cincinnati public high school. Many students and colleagues approached her with questions about Covid-19, virology and epidemiology during a time when misinformation was spreading as quickly as the virus itself.
“Students came to me with all sorts of random information they’ve gotten online, and they really believed it, because these things are presented with authority,” said Smith, who left teaching in 2022 to join the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that provides resources for teaching news literacy. “In my experience, teens felt like they didn’t have a choice but to believe it, and I think by providing them news literacy instruction, we can give them the tools they need to begin evaluating this information in the wild.”
Smith said programs like the News Literacy Project are more crucial than ever in an era of news influencers, artificial intelligence and misinformation. A 2024 NLP study of teens 13-18 years old found that 94% want lessons and guidelines on media literacy, but aren’t receiving them. Additionally, 81% of teenagers believe at least one conspiracy theory they’ve seen on social media.
“We are swimming in media content, and without the skills to navigate it, we’re going to drown,” said Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, the executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, a nonpartisan nonprofit founded in 1997. “Media impacts every single person every day from their relationships to what they choose to eat and who they vote for, to where they get their entertainment and information.”
Here’s how four initiatives are ensuring young people are educated in media and news literacy.
The policy changemaker
Founded by journalist Erin McNeill in 2013, Media Literacy Now is a nonpartisan advocacy organization that informs and drives local, state and national policy change to make sure K-12 students are taught media literacy. Its main goal is to get media literacy curricula in classrooms across the country. (It’s important to note that media literacy refers to the ability to evaluate and analyze all forms of communication, including news, social media and pop culture; news literacy just refers to news.)
In the early 2010s, legislators weren’t as familiar with media literacy — and the need for analyzing all forms of communications — as they are now. With the rise of social media concerns, AI and misinformation, the organization has been able to concentrate more on advocating for governments and districts to require media literacy education in K-12 schools.
“In recent years, we’ve seen an uptick in not only conversations about media literacy, but also legislative activity,” said Amanda Marsden, Media Literacy Now’s director of communications. “We’ve seen that policymakers are stepping up. Legislators in more than half of the states have held hearings or votes on media literacy education, either in committees or on the floor of the statehouses.”
In Media Literacy Now’s 2024 policy report, seven states, both red and blue, have taken major steps toward comprehensive media literacy education via legislation. In 2023, California, which has the largest K-12 population in the U.S., with 6.7 million public school students, passed a law that requires media literacy instruction at every grade level. Twelve states, including Colorado and Minnesota, do not have such laws but have still taken steps toward providing more media literacy education, such as creating a resource bank and reviewing standards every 10 years. Nine other states, including Arizona and New York, have legislation currently pending.
The event host
After working in children’s television production for many years, Lipkin became executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education in 2012 — when the media landscape was much different than it is today. She recalled how many people didn’t return her phone calls or see the need for media literacy at the time. Back then, the organization had 200 members.
But media and politics have changed a lot, and the association’s membership has grown to 9,000 educators and over 50 organizational partners. It holds an annual convention for members to connect and share knowledge, providing resources and curricula for educators.
“It was a lot of trying to get people to care,” Lipkin said. “Now, we have no problem — the urgency is clear. We are in the implementation stage, and now we’re talking about how we do this on a large level.”
The association’s biggest program is Media Literacy Week, held during the last week in October. The free event spotlights the efforts of media literacy educators and emphasizes the importance of media literacy in K-12 education. Members and parents are encouraged to talk to their kids about media literacy, use lesson plans and spread the word on social media. “We show that media literacy is broad and matters, not only in formal spaces, but informal spaces, and across industry sectors,” Lipkin said.
The association has teamed up with Vanderbilt University researchers to study its impact and how it can strengthen its efforts.
“We’ve obviously seen the reach of Media Literacy Week grow,” Lipkin said. “And as you can imagine, media literacy is now so much part of the cultural conversation, especially given our political environment globally, and how impactful media and information are on those environments. We know we’re having impact, but we are trying to do a better job at assessing it.”
The online resource
The News Literacy Project offers digital resources to educators in all 50 states, through lesson plans in its resource library; The Sift, a weekly newsletter that calls out recent examples of misinformation; and Checkology, a free e-learning platform with lessons and quizzes to measure its impact.
“One of the things I love the most about our resources is that we use real examples,” Smith said. “That helps students really connect to our work or our resources, because they may have encountered some of these things kind of in the wild on their own.”
For instance, the organization started a website called RumorGuard to debunk misinformation floating online, like the conspiracy theory that Elon Musk’s Starlink was used in tallying election votes. The site evaluates each rumor by five crucial factors: source, evidence, reasoning, authenticity and context.
This is important since most young people are fed various types of content online every day. According to a project study, only 18% of teens can correctly distinguish among different types of information, including branded content, opinion commentary and ads, and 45% say journalists do more harm to democracy than good. To help combat this, Smith recommended the project’s Newsroom to Classroom program, which connects teachers with 121 vetted, working journalists to speak to the class.
“It’s a great way to personalize journalism and bring back some of that trust our students may not have,” Smith said. “Our students often only see journalists in some communities when there’s been a tragedy, a shooting, or some sort of crisis. Giving them opportunities for them to interact with journalists who are telling stories about their communities will continue to be important.”
The course instructor
UNESCO has sponsored many Knight Center courses, but last year, the United Nations agency prioritized one specific topic: a journalism class for digital content creators and influencers.
Knight Center associate director Summer Harlow, also a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, was initially shocked at the course suggestion, but then saw it as an opportunity to bridge the gap between journalists and news influencers, who are sometimes blamed for spreading misinformation. Harlow wanted the course to address that social media platforms, such as Facebook and X, are just as culpable.
“This is a multipronged problem that we can’t just say, ‘Let’s blame it on the influencers,’” she said, “because they’re not the only ones at fault here, but they do have an important role to play.”
A year of research, roundtable talks and panels with content creators resulted in a popular Knight Center course called “Digital Content Creators and Journalists: How to be a Trusted Voice Online” (more than 9,000 people have enrolled from around the world) and a free e-book titled “Content Creators and Journalists: Redefining News and Credibility in the Digital Age,” edited by Harlow.
In the e-book, Harlow includes perspectives from news influencers, lessons from the roundtables and panels, and journalism best practices for digital content creators. Among them are understanding what their ethical and legal responsibilities are, amplifying verified information and fact-checking rigorously.
“As educators, we have to make sure that the people who are graduating and going the entrepreneurial route have those media and information literacy skills in place when they’re aggregating content, which so many of these news influencers do,” Harlow said. “They have to ask themselves: Where are they getting it from? How do they know how to verify that information? How do they know how to check that content?”
NBCU Academy teaches students media literacy through The Edit, a free digital storytelling challenge for middle and high schoolers. If you’re a teacher, sign up for The Edit to get a free lesson plan and enter our contest by March 3!
