Trusting the News in a Digital Age

Toward a "New" News Literacy

Jeffrey Dvorkin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119714408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

TRUSTING THE NEWS in a Digital Age

How to use critical thinking to discern real news from fake news

Trusting the News in a Digital Age provides an ethical framework and the much-needed tools for assessing information produced in our digital age. With the tsunami of information on social media and other venues, many have come to distrust all forms of communication, including the news. This practical text offers guidance on how to use critical thinking, appropriate skepticism, and journalistic curiosity to handle this flow of undifferentiated information.

Designed to encourage critical thinking, each chapter introduces specific content, followed at the end of each section with an ethical dilemma. The ideas presented are based on the author's experiences as a teacher and public editor/ombudsman at NPR News. Trusting the News in a Digital Age prepares readers to deal with changes to news and information in the digital environment. It brings to light the fact that journalism is about treating the public as citizens first, and consumers of information second. This important text:

• Reveals how to use critical thinking to handle the never-ending flow of information
• Contains ethical dilemmas to help sharpen critical thinking skills
• Explains how to verify sources and spot frauds
• Looks at the economic and technological conditions that facilitated changes in communication

Written for students of journalism and media studies, Trusting the News in the Digital Age offers guidance on how to hone critical thinking skills needed to discern fact from fiction.

1
Introduction to News Literacy

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TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 1

1. What you will find in each chapter
2. What “news literacy” is and how it differs from “media literacy”
3. Why news literacy matters now
4. How we achieve news literacy
5. What we can do with news literacy
6. What happens when we are “news illiterate”

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The flow of information that surrounds us all the time can be overwhelming.

From cellphones, to broadcasting, to online content, blogs, and newspapers, we are surrounded by so much technologically delivered content that it can be difficult to determine what is useful and what is not. For many people, it is more than can be handled, and we are seeing a withdrawal from engaging with the news.

Finding a way to handle this ebb of engagement in an analytic and thoughtful way is essential to our living in this contemporary world. We need to know what and who we can trust, what should be shared, and how to engage with the news in a way that serves us as students, as citizens, and as journalists.

We will be examining these issues in this book. In Chapter 2, we will look at how the definition of news in a digital age has changed

The ethical obligations of the news will be examined in Chapter 3.

In Chapter 4, we'll examine how verification is the essential element of reliable journalism.

In Chapter 5, we will examine how the news changes across different media platforms.

The role of news consumers and the interaction between the public and the news media are the subjects of Chapter 6.

In Chapter 7, we will look at bias in the media.

Chapter 8 will examine the economics of news and how we arrived in this period of information saturation.

The deconstruction of news assumptions and the use of framing techniques will be examined in Chapter 9.

Chapter 10 will examine how digital culture has had an impact on the connection between the news and the law.

Finally, in Chapter 11, we will look at how accusations of “fake news” are usually, in and of themselves, fake, and how news consumers, journalists, and students can manage these allegations effectively.

These changes in communication continue to be enormous in their implications. We need to look at the economic and technological conditions that have allowed these changes to occur – sometimes in a beneficial way and often with disruptions to the way things used to be.

But first we need to define what we are looking at. It is through these broad but essential definitions that we can start to place this information flow in a historical and cultural context that makes sense for us.

Definitions

What is the news? The news is defined as the timely sharing of information of some public interest, created through a journalistic process. It is presented on a variety of media platforms. The news was and is a way of sharing common concerns and questions so citizens are able to make informed and reasoned choices.

What are media? Media are the various delivery systems used to present information, cultural expression, and other communications forms. Media content is delivered on a variety of platforms – such as print, broadcasting, and online – and can be news, cultural expression (such as music and art), and opinion. News is is the informational foundation of all subsets of media.

When we talk of news literacy, we also need to discuss media literacy overall, because both are connected.

Media platforms are the mechanisms through which we experience the world, whether it is through news, culture, or ideas. The news is one of many content constructs transmitted on a variety of media platforms. If those platforms are not properly understood, or even misused, then the content that is presented on them can also be misunderstood.

Literacy is the ability to make sense of the world and be understood through the ability to read, write, spell, listen, and speak. It is also about being competent and knowledgeable in a specified area.

Media literacy involves the practices that allow the public to access and to critically evaluate various media expressions. Media literacy is understanding how media assumptions about our culture operate. It is also about determining which cultural presuppositions need to be analyzed and deconstructed in order to properly understand how specific media operate.

As a result, news literacy concerns applying similar critical thinking skills to the various content of specific newspapers, broadcast information, and online presentations.

One way to understand the need for both media and news literacy is to understand the historical origins and the economic underpinnings of how media operate. The economic consequences are critical to understanding how the news works and on whose behalf, since the news is often a first portal into the larger media landscape.

All media and their news expressions remain driven by economic and political interests. Some of those influences can be benign, such as the need to create a community of interests around local events. They can also be a part of an effort to properly inform the public about issues that have previously been unknown. This is known as “investigative reporting.” Other influences are designed to extract profits through monetizing the distribution of information that citizens might find interesting or useful. This can be problematic in certain cases.

Digital Economics

The profit motive and the inherent competitiveness of the news business have always been part of the drive to produce news and information, whether by so‐called press barons, such as newspaper chain owners Hearst and Sulzberger in the US, or by governments that wish to control information for their own political benefit and civic control. We will explore how that model of for‐profit journalism has changed and some of the reasons for those changes.

The business model of using advertising to support news media has been upset by the arrival of digital technology. And just as previous technological inventions changed the way information was created and presented, digital technology has made control of media content more available to the public through blogging and media start‐ups.

This digital democratization of media has allowed for more voices to emerge in the news landscape. This has been criticized as producing an informational cacophony, with more confusion amid the clash of voices and ideas. It has also been disruptive to how the news is produced and distributed, and not always to the benefit of the public. Recently social media platforms, operating in effect as competitive media companies, have done serious damage to traditional news organizations as audiences and advertising revenue have shifted to online platforms.

As recently as 20 years ago, newspapers in the US were seen as profit centers for their owners and investors (Hare, 2009), bringing in larger profits than even the pharmaceutical industry. The disruption of the traditional advertising model for newspapers and broadcasters has meant fewer journalists doing news as before, with the mantra of “digital first” crowding out how reporting is now done and distributed.

The format and delivery of media and news offerings changes constantly. There is a tendency to want to just let it happen and try to assess the value of the various offerings later. One assumption is that in this digital marketplace, the strongest forms will eventually emerge and the public can sample (and support) them as they come along.

Why Some News is Suspect

As we have seen in recent elections in the US and the UK, information with questionable sources doesn't always work in the best interests of the voting public.

Misinformation (which is content that is inadvertently mistaken and just plain wrong) and disinformation (which is a deliberate attempt to convey wrong information) are able to penetrate the public marketplace of ideas. Reliable journalism is need...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1 Introduction to News Literacy
• 2 Changing Definitions of News
• 3 Why Should We Trust the News? Why Now?
• 4 Verification = Trust
• 5 The Effect of Digital on Media Forms
• 6 When the Audience is Biased
• 7 When the News is Biased
• 8 The Economics of Journalism in a Digital Age
• 9 Framing and Deconstructing the News
• 10 News Sources
• 11 Trusting Journalism in a Time of “Fake News”
• Index
• End User License Agreement