Our Voice: Project helps discern what’s credible news

In this era of social media, Internet scams and fake news, we all need to be smarter when scrolling through news feeds.

It’s so easy for folks to fall for a fake story that pops up. Whether it’s outrage or incredulity or a topic that perfectly fits an ideology, we’ve all seen our friends fall for something that is just not true.

None of us would ever do that. Just our friends. Yeah, right. And we’d type a whole bunch of cute emojis here if we could.

So it is with great pleasure that we’d like to introduce you to The News Literacy Project, an organization with a mission to equip middle and high school students with the” tools to be smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens.”

These kids have been raised on the World Wide Web, social media and technology. Unlike those of us a little more senior who grew up on radio, newspapers and national news networks, they’ve known handheld devices and laptops as their primary source of news and information.

If you’re in a room full of folks these days and a question of significance and substance or inconsequential trivia comes up, someone is more than likely pulling up Google on their phone or asking Siri for help.

It’s just what we do these days.

But how do we know what comes up at the top of the list of hits is legit. Most of us are savvy enough to bypass a few shady looking sources, but not all imposters are that easy to spot.

For kids who’ve only known that information is at their fingertips, it’s easy to see how they can be inundated with misleading content. If it’s on the Internet, it must be true, right?

How can we expect them to be smart consumers of news and information if we don’t teach them how to discern among sources?

That’s where The News Literacy Project comes in and that’s why it’s so exciting. The program “teaches that all information is not created equal. It uses the standards of quality journalism as an aspirational yardstick to determine what information to believe, share and act on. It also fosters an understanding of the role of a free press in a democracy.”

The list of media organizations partnering on the program is long and impressive. It includes the New York Times, the Associated Press, NPR and the Financial Times as well as others like the Online News Association and BuzzFeed.

Fake news was so prolific and so consumed during the recent presidential election that even one of its prime platforms — Facebook — has developed a strategy to combat it.

We can only hope that educators in our region and across the nation will take advantage of the opportunity offered by the project to help young people navigate online information, legitimate and false in nature. And we hope the project will develop a program for the rest of us, helping those who have become adopters of technology to sort the true from the fake. Maybe they can share it on Facebook.

For more information, see The News Literacy Project.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 4:30 AM with the headline "Our Voice: Project helps discern what’s credible news."