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The Tech Advocate
eSchool News
Is it fake? How to teach with news and media sources
By Eileen Belastock, CETL, Director of Technology and Information, Nauset Public Schools, MA
January 6th, 2021
Teaching students how to identify and use high-quality news and media resources isn't as daunting as one might think
Between the recent presidential election, COVID-19, and racial unrest,
our students are barraged with 24/7 access to news and media that can
be real, fake, or altered. According to the presenters in a recent
edWebinar sponsored by ABC-CLIO, the relationship between the terms
“news” and “media” are fundamental distinctions that we need to make
when working with students in the new era of journalism.
Jacquelyn Whiting, the innovation and technology specialist for
Cooperative Educational Services, and Peter Adams, the senior vice
president of education for the News Literacy Project, assert that while
there are many credentialed journalists, there is also “a world of
citizen journalists with mini-computers in their pockets.”
Because both news and media types of journalists are content creators,
the relationship between professional and citizen is significant for us
to consider with our students. Students must understand when to
recognize trustworthy information and credible, high-quality journalism.
Whiting and Adams favor beginning the process of teaching students to
identify reliable journalism by ensuring they understand and
acknowledge high-quality journalism standards: sourcing, documents and
evidence, minimize bias, fairness, transparency and accountability,
news judgment, verification, and context.
While many journalists, both professional and amateur, keep high
journalism standards, many content creators are posting, sharing, and
writing disinformation. These creators count on three types of bias
from their readers: emotional reactions, implicit bias, and propaganda
tactics. When the reader has an emotional response to a piece of media,
emotional arousal suppresses critical thought. When beliefs and
attitudes are triggered, implicit bias can inspire a different reaction
and connection to a piece of media. Propaganda tactics rely on
emotional responses, getting on the “bandwagon,” and fear.
It is fundamental to teach students the standards of high-quality
journalism to evaluate and grapple with the critical question of what
counts as the center and who decides.
When introducing a new lesson with the framework for teaching bias, it
is imperative to break it down to the five types of news media biases:
partisan, demographic, corporate, neutrality, and “big story.” The
presenters recommend creating lessons that help students push past all
of the biases by identifying the five core forms biases can take: the
absence of fairness and balance, framing, tone, story selection, and
sourcing.
While social media can play a big part in where our students get their
information, it is paramount for educators to design news and media
lessons on straight news. The mindset for educators in designing
quality lessons about news and media should be that the perception of
bias is the beginning and not the end of student inquiry. If a student
thinks something is biased, ask them in what ways is it biased, what
type of bias are they seeing and how is it expressed, and how could it
have been fairer or more accurate?
Whiting and Adams also cautioned educators to be wary of students’
cynicism and their assumptions that everything is out to manipulate
them in some way. Help students approach identifying biases in a
fair-minded sort of skeptical way and avoid the pitfalls of cynicism.
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