Founded more than a decade ago by Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Los Angeles Times, the News Literacy Project aims to teach students how to distinguish between what’s real and fake in the age of digital communication and a president who routinely denounces real news as “fake.”
Now the leading provider of news literacy education, it creates digital curriculums and other resources, and works with educators and journalists to teach middle school and high school students how to recognize news and information to trust — and provides them with the tools they need to be informed and engaged participants in a democracy. It uses the standards of high-quality journalism as an aspirational yardstick against which to measure all news and information. Just as important, it provides the next generation with an appreciation of the First Amendment and the role of a free press.
The following material comes from the project’s newsletter, the Sift, which takes the most recent viral rumors, conspiracy theories, hoaxes and journalistic ethics issues and turns them into timely lessons with discussion prompts and links. The Sift, which publishes weekly during the school year, has more than 10,000 subscribers, most of them educators.
Here are lessons from the Jan. 27 edition of the Sift, as provided by the News Literacy Project. The first looks at a conspiracy theory about vaccines, and the second is about combating misinformation by figuring out how to identify where online photographs originate.
NO: There is as yet no vaccine for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (also known as the “Wuhan coronavirus”), and the current outbreak was not planned as a way to sell vaccines. NO: The Wuhan coronavirus was not created by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NO: A 2015 patent application does not prove that the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak was planned, nor does it connect the outbreak to Bill Gates. YES: Conspiracy theorists are misinterpreting a 2015 patent application by a vaccinology research organization (one that receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) for a vaccine that would prevent a different strain of coronavirus in birds and other animals. YES: On Jan. 23, the conspiracy website Infowars published an article making these false claims.
Note: The misinterpretation of complex technical information by nonexperts is common among conspiracy theorists.
Clarifying the origin of photos online
The New York Times’ Research & Development group is seeking ways to clarify the provenance of photos online using blockchain technology. The News Provenance Project — an initiative dedicated to collaborating “with publishers and platforms to help combat misinformation” — is exploring ways to attach contextual information to news photos so that their origins travel with them across the web. Drawing on extensive interviews with a diverse group of 15 daily users of social media, the developers created a prototype of what this embedded source information technology might look like.
In theory, creating a such a system would increase people’s trust in the authenticity of images by adding transparency to the process; it would also make it more difficult for bad actors to fool people by presenting photos out of context. However, the pilot testing of the prototype produced some mixed results.
Discuss: How can blockchain technology be used to clarify the origins of online photos? What metadata can digital photos currently contain? Why is placing visuals in a false context such a common misinformation tactic? What else could responsible publishers do to increase trust in their work?
Idea: Use this as an opportunity to introduce students to photo metadata and to tools — such as EXIF data readers — that can decode information that is often embedded in digital images. (Such data can contain the date, time and exact location where a photo was taken, along with the device used, and most social media platforms now automatically strip this data from photos uploaded by users.) This may also help students better understand the work of the News Provenance Project.
