Academic Commons

News Literacy and a Civics Model for Journalism Education

Charles B. Wang Center

News literacy is a relative newcomer to media literacy education even though instruction on teaching students how to access, analyze, evaluate, and, in some cases, create news media messages has been part of media literacy research and practice for decades. What is new is the label news literacy—a label that emerged in American journalism education circles in 2006 and media literacy education communities shortly thereafter. RobbGrieco and Hobbs (2012) identify two news literacy paradigms: Global and American. Global news literacy programs encourage macro-level inquiry of news issues—issues such as ownership, ideologies, and institutions that many argue negatively influence news production practices. American news literacy pedagogies take a “Journalism School approach” and thereby include lessons on freedom of the press and news values as well as offer tools designed to assess news texts (22). The primary source of the aforementioned “American” approach to news literacy is Howard Schneider (2007), who is founding dean of the Stony Brook University School of Journalism in New York. Schneider created a freshman-level news literacy course in 2007 to teach undergraduate how to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports. More than $3 million was raised to support the development, instruction, and expansion of the program. One foundation’s stipulation that 10,000 Stony Brook undergraduates complete the news literacy course transformed Schneider’s largely intuitive instructional idea into one of the most ambitious and wellfunded experiments in modern media literacy and journalism education. The proposed conference presentation and accompanying paper would build on previous research that found that Stony Brook news literacy instructors focused on teaching students how to question and assess the veracity of news texts, and their approach favored cognitive skill development over other ways people make meaning of media messages. The research also found that the specialized approach to information analysis in the Stony Brook news literacy curriculum was inspired and guided by journalistic methods and mindsets, hence the emphasis on factual and reliable evidence (Fleming, 2014). More specifically, the proposed paper would advance this research by arguing that news literacy instruction is essential to the success of an independent, investigative press and, more broadly, journalism and journalism education as we understand them, in the digital age. Think of news literacy as the journalistic equivalent of a film appreciation course—a course designed to help students identify, examine, analyze and appreciate high quality, fact-based information sources. At a time of revolutionary change in news industries, many journalism educators continue to focus instruction squarely on future news producers. In my view, news literacy presents an opportunity for journalism educators to broaden the scope, reach and purpose of their programs considerably—to follow a civics model—by educating news audiences on the principles and practices of the press many deem essential for democracy to function well. Revelations about the prevalence of “fake news” and its possible impact on the outcome of the recent presidential election demonstrate the need for programs designed to develop critical and skeptical news consumption skills and habits. To express this point differently, in order for citizens be informed in a democracy, they must first be informed about the information they encounter, create and share, hence the relationship between news literacy education and the civic and social roles of journalism and higher education in democracies. References Fleming, Jennifer (2014) "Media Literacy, News Literacy, or News Appreciation? A Case Study of the News Literacy Program at Stony Brook University", Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 69(2), pp. 146- 165. RobbGrieco, Michael and Hobbs, Renee (2013) A Field Guide to Media Literacy Education in the United States. Schneider, Howard (2007) "It's the Audience, Stupid!", Nieman Reports 61(3), pp. 65-68.

https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/cnlglobalconference/cnl2017/one/2