Effort pushes news literacy to fight misinformation

NEW YORK — A special effort launched this week is promoting the idea of news literacy education to help the public, particularly young people who have grown up with social media, learn to track down trustworthy information.

News organizations across the country are backing National News Literacy Week, with a particularly aggressive campaign across television stations and other properties owned by the E.W. Scripps Co. Teachers are meeting journalists at Bloomberg News to learn how newsgathering works.

The ultimate goal is to get news literacy programs incorporated into civics education in as many schools as possible, said Alan Miller, founder of the News Literacy Project.

“The truth is we live at a time when people have more credible and valuable information at their fingertips than at any time in history,” Miller said. “Yet misinformation has turned that world against us in so many ways.”

Young people are growing up with social media that can spread false rumors as fast as fact, and watching television stations where it’s hard to discern opinions from fact, Adam Symson, Scripps president and CEO, said Wednesday.

“Over the long haul, if Americans cannot discern quality journalism from garbage, we as a journalism company are going to have trouble selling our wares,” Symson said.

The news literacy experts cite surveys that show many people don’t know the difference between opinion pieces and news articles. An overwhelming majority of young people did not understand, for example, why they might want to double-check assertions about climate change on a website funded by the fossil fuel industry.

The idea of news literacy is to get people to understand biases embedded in information and recognize credible news sources where they can double-check for the truth, Miller said.