The Instagram headline was pithy and alarming: “Head of Pfizer Research: Covid Vaccine is Female Sterilization.” And the report, from a murky source, could have had real-world consequences, coming in 2020, just as the U.S. rolled out the first vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
That made the story a perfect tool for an educator trying to teach high school students how to separate fact from fiction — a survival skill in a culture drowning in a tsunami of information.
Jamie Gregory told the 12th graders in her seventh-period journalism class to examine the article. But, using lessons from a nonprofit called the News Literacy Project, they understood the best way to get to the truth was not to read deeply in the suspect story, but to check it by shifting away to other sources.
The teenagers soon found stories and academic studies debunking the sterilization claim. A Reuters story made clear that the former Pfizer scientist had drifted far from the scientific mainstream on COVID-19. Research never corroborated rumors that the vaccine caused impotence in men or placenta failure in women.
“They really had to do the work to figure it out for themselves,” said Gregory, a librarian and journalism teacher at Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville, South Carolina. “It felt important that they had developed this skill. And it does make me feel hopeful going forward.”
Gregory is one of a growing number of teachers, librarians, counselors and other educators who are teaching students media literacy — skills like discerning advertising from unpaid content, recognizing the difference between news and commentary and separating unbiased sources from those with ties to industry or political groups.
“Media literacy is literacy in the 21st century,” said Erin McNeill, founder and president of the nearly decade-old advocacy group Media Literacy Now. “There is this fire hose of information coming at young people, and they have to know how to cope with it.”
Fifteen states now encourage some form of media literacy education, compared with three in 2011, according to Media Literacy Now. Illinois last year became the first state to mandate such instruction, requiring all high schoolers to take a unit (still to be defined) on issues like “the purpose of media messages and how they are constructed.”
California lawmakers and Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2018 directed the Department of Education to create an online list of media literacy resources. Last month, state officials approved adding media literacy to the list of subjects eligible for funds for teacher training and instructional material.
But while the media literacy movement is growing, so is debate about exactly what the term means.
By its broadest definition, the concept suggests that people who consume media (American 10- to 14-year-olds spend nearly eight hours a day consuming content on phones, computers and televisions) should be better informed about what they take in. That can mean learning about ad placement in movies, sussing out the political roots of television shows and learning who’s behind a TikTok video.
“There are overt and hidden messages throughout media,” said Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, executive director of the National Assn. for Media Literacy Education. “They are in sports, in entertainment, in sitcoms on TV, on film, not just the traditional news.”
In a class she teaches at Brooklyn College in New York, one focus for Lipkin is to get students to understand that what they see on their screens can have as much, or more, impact on their worldview as NPR or some other traditional news source.
“I can’t not talk about ‘black-ish’ in my class,” said Lipkin. “That is a very good example of a sitcom that is bringing deep and intense messaging about race into our living rooms.”
Among the leading organizations in the field is the News Literacy Project, founded in 2008 by Alan Miller, a longtime Los Angeles Times reporter whose career included a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the dangers of a military attack jet.
In the 14 years since it started, initially to help young people better cope with the information onslaught, the organization has shifted its focus to a menu of online video lessons, delivered under the brand name “Checkology.”
