Today, there is a mass of bias and misinformation in the news. If children–who lack the experience necessary to be aware of these problems–consume the news, they will often not recognize how some media sources use these elements to create their own narratives and distort readers’ perceptions of what happens in our world. However, educating children about how to be media literate can be the solution.
Why Kids Should Improve Their Media Literacy
Today, a high number of children are displaying rather minimal media literacy skills. This is proven in Shellenbarger’s Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds, which brings attention to the flaws in many children’s analyses of the media. This article points out:
“More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo.”
This demonstrates how students do not consider the key details, such as the authors’ motives or the amount of evidence provided, that determine the reliability of the media. They are accepting information from news outlets without observing them critically enough to realize how questionable they may be.
Kids need to improve their media literacy for multiple reasons:
- Many of them show a deficiency in their current media literacy skills.
- It is very likely that they will encounter fake news, which they will therefore need to recognize.
- Having good media literacy skills will give kids other skills that will help them in several parts of their lives.
Kids need to build on their declining media literacy skills for multiple reasons, including how widespread fake news is. According to Shellenbarger:
“Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are taking steps to prevent sites that disseminate fake news from using their advertising platforms, and Twitter Inc. is moving to curb harassment by users. But that won’t get rid of false or biased information online, which comes from many sources, including deceptive advertising, satirical websites and misleading partisan posts and articles.”
It is very common for children to encounter misinforming news stories, and therefore they will often need the ability to discern the credibility of these stories.
Another concern is that children spend a lot of time on the internet. The article describes how:
“By middle school, preteens are online 7-1/2 hours a day outside of school, research shows. Many students multitask by texting, reading and watching video at once, hampering the concentration needed to question content and think deeply, says Yalda T. Uhls, a research psychologist at the Children’s Digital Media Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.”
Because children spend a high amount of time online, they may spend a high amount of time reading the news, which will make them more likely to find false stories.
In addition to unreliable news, the internet provides children with biased news. Shellenbarger’s article notes that:
“By age 18, 88% of young adults regularly get news from Facebook and other social media, according to a 2015 study of 1,045 adults ages 18 to 34 by the Media Insight Project. This risks creating an ‘echo chamber effect,’ because social media tends to feed users news items similar to those they’ve read before, says Walter C. Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington, Seattle.”
The fact that social media exposes young people to news with the same media biases prevents them from seeing different perspectives on social issues.
Another danger of social media is how it exacerbates the spread of misinformation in the news. According to the study outlined in Raj’s Indian Social Media Leads To Misinformation On COVID19, people send posts about the news to several of their friends and family members, without thinking to research and verify these posts first. This exposes more people to potentially unreliable news, which could misguide them in regards to important world events.
Lastly, media literacy skills are important to have because they will not only help children in encountering the news, but in many different parts of their lives. After all, kids who develop their media literacy will also develop their critical thinking skills. In Who Consumes New Media Content More Wisely? Examining Personality Factors, SNS Use, and New Media Literacy in the Era of Misinformation, Xiao explains that being media literate requires an in-depth analysis of a news article that examines several aspects, such as its real purpose, the validity of its information, and how it compares to other articles.
If children are well-versed in critical thinking, they will also gain essential communication skills. Alsaleh’s Teaching Critical Thinking Skills: Literature Review lists a handful of important communication elements that are improved by critical thinking: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Strong communication skills will enable kids to express thoughts, form arguments, and participate in discussions. They will need to do all of these in front of teachers and classmates at school, as well as bosses and coworkers at a future job. In fact, after a group of adults from across the U.S. were asked which skills children needed most to succeed, researchers found that communication, reading, and writing were among the skills seen as most needed.
Source: Pew Research
How to Improve Kids’ Media Literacy
Fortunately, there are two main solutions to kids’ lack of media literacy:
- Media literacy education in schools.
- Media literacy education at home.
Schools can focus more on teaching media literacy. Shellenbarger mentions that:
“A growing number of schools are teaching students to be savvy about choosing and believing various information sources, a skill set educators label ‘media literacy.’ A free Stanford social-studies curriculum that teaches students to judge the trustworthiness of historical sources has been downloaded 3.5 million times, says Sam Wineburg, a professor in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the lead author of the study on teens.”
This will ensure that children’s media literacy skills improve by having the children develop and practice these skills on a regular basis in class.
Another problem in schools mentioned in the article is that:
“…fewer schools now have librarians, who traditionally taught research skills.”
Due to the decrease in librarians at schools, less students have access to people who can teach them how to do research. Therefore, if there are more librarians at schools, then the students will be able to properly research certain topics in the news and be fully informed.
Parents can also encourage good habits in regards to media literacy even further, by enforcing them at home. For instance, the article states:
“Devorah Heitner, author of ‘Screenwise’ and founder of Raising Digital Natives, an Evanston, Ill., provider of consulting services to schools, suggests parents pick up on their children’s interests and help them to find and evaluate news on the topic online. Encourage them to read a variety of sources.”
“Parents can instill early a healthy skepticism about published reports. Vincent Tran and his wife Christina allow their three children, ages 10, 8 and 6, to research sports, games and other topics that interest them by googling or by asking Siri or Alexa. Mr. Tran, a Web architect, blocks sites he considers inappropriate for his children and doesn’t allow them to use social media. He notices when they have trouble sorting facts from fiction, and ‘we spend a good deal of time asking them where they get their information,’ Mr. Tran says. He and his wife also ask them during family dinners about topics they’ve been exploring, ‘and hopefully challenge them to think,’ he says.”
Parents can assist in conducting proper research when it comes to any subject that grabs a child’s attention. Helping children do this even in leisure will give them a habit of informing themselves well throughout all of the time they spend consuming media. In addition, parents can check on the research that their children do independently, and check if there is any misinformation that may be skewing their perceptions of which news is true.
Another way for parents to have media literate kids is to be media literate themselves. Shellenbarger gives media literacy advice not only for children, but for parents:
“…let them see you reading news from a variety of sources. Try watching several different TV news programs with them, to compare coverage.”
Parents can become examples for their children on how to consume news without being influenced by biases or false information. If kids watch their parents practice media literacy in everyday life, they will have a stronger idea of how to practice it. Also, a significant part of being media literate in front of kids is learning the skills required to be media literate. One of these is lateral reading, which Shellenbarger defines as researching an author or organization and learning about their reliability and bias before reading their website, article, etc. A second skill is identifying credible sources. Parents need to remember that a trustworthy article uses multiple citations, and has information that is confirmed by other sources. They should also keep in mind that just because a webpage ranks high on Google does not ensure that it is reliable.
Bias and misinformation are rampant in today’s news. But too many people do not recognize this. As a result, they have a distorted perspective in regards to important world events that affect them, along with many others in our society. This is why it is imperative to teach children from a young age to read the news in a critical way with media literacy tools that can identify the truth, as well as when media outlets stray from the truth. If children are taught media literacy at school and at home, they will know the truth about what happens in our world.