Excerpt
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Now, information is coming at young people from everywhere these days, but where to look and what to believe?
COLIN O'BRIEN, News Literacy Project: You want news sources that are transparent. You want to be able to see who is doing the reporting, see what their agenda is, see who funds them, see if they are, in fact, a credible source or not.
JEFFREY BROWN: How can young people learn to be better consumers of news and information?
A recent class at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, is trying to do just that: helping students distinguish news from opinion, fact from fiction, amid the daily onslaught of TV, radio, newspapers, and social media.
Social studies teacher Colin O'Brien began with a real-life example, a fast-moving email, in fact, a hoax, claiming that all schools in Great Britain had removed study of the Holocaust from their curriculum because the Muslim population claimed it never occurred.
COLIN O'BRIEN: Raise your hand if you thought this was true, because your teacher gave it to you and it was an email, so it must have been true.
JEFFREY BROWN: How did the hoax become accepted as fact? O'Brien had his students do a very common Google search, entering the terms Holocaust, denial and England.
Voila. He came up with an article in the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail.
STUDENT: Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim peoples, a government-backed study has revealed.
COLIN O'BRIEN: Did the email provide documentation?
STUDENT: No.
COLIN O'BRIEN: No.
JEFFREY BROWN: The lesson is part of an effort called the News Literacy Project, a four-year-old program now taught to middle and high school students in 21 inner-city and suburban schools in the Washington, D.C., area, New York City, and Chicago.
It was started by former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Miller.
More excerpts
ALAN MILLER, News Literacy Project: A century ago, Mark Twain said that a lie can get halfway around the world while truth is still putting on its shoes. In this hyperlinked information age, a lie can get all the way around the world and back while truth is still getting out of bed.
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JEFFREY BROWN: In fact, the idea of making this into a national program got a recent boost from Michael Copps, a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
MICHAEL COPPS, FCC: And we need to focus on bringing all these together in the public sector and in the private sector to develop an online news literacy curriculum that can be made available across the nation. This can be a powerful antidote to the dumbing down of our civic dialogue that has taken place.
Now all we need is to make adults news literate skeptics.
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