Interview #2 with WRFK’s Adam Vos: Teaching Media Literacy

WRFK: Len Apcar spoke with WRFK’s Adam Voss for advice on how to discern fact from fiction in a complicated media landscape.

Adam Vos: You teach about news literacy in a journalism school. Before I ask why news literacy is important to people in general, maybe we can start just by defining news literacy for us.

Len Apcar: Not everybody knows what news literacy is, and it's in my title, so I get a lot of questions about it. News Literacy is essentially source evaluation in two words. When you're reading information and are bombarded by it, there's no question that it's a valuable skill to have a life skill really, when you get your information, can you judge its authenticity? Can you judge its fairness, balance, bias? And there's a number of different checks that we talk about in classes. And I'm happy to say that over the years I've been teaching this at LSU, these students have become much more savvy about bias, fairness, balance and independent sourcing. They're not sophisticated at it, but they're inclined to be more skeptical than they were when I first encountered students, say, 10 years ago. 

Adam Vos: You teach a whole course on this, and, not to try to boil it down into a sentence or two, but what are some of the basic points, the basic tools you advise people to use and identifying the quality of their information?

Len Apcar: First, we teach basic tools that students need to have, such as, you know, looking at the URL domains that are suspicious. That's one that we teach. Everything we teach is to take a quote in the body of the story, copy and paste it, put it in an internet search—Google being certainly the most common—and see if you find that quote exactly that way elsewhere. And if you do find it elsewhere, where do you find it?

The other thing that we ask students to watch is looking at the sources who are quoted. Who are they? Are they independent? Are they biased? Is there a suspicion that they may be paid by a third party to say what they say? What is their motive?

The other thing I also tell people is, photos can be very tricky in this age. Google has a cool term with Google Images of taking a photo, dropping it into a tool, and seeing what the provenance is of that photo. And there were a number that might have looked real, but the more you scratch the surface—even just for a few seconds—they were fake.

So those are the kinds of techniques and tools we talk about. Now, that's the tool. I teach a class in fake news, in which we start to look at how information moves through society, whether it's social media or whether it's word of mouth. And we study: if Adam says something, do I believe it? If Bob tells me something, am I less inclined to believe it? How do I think about information that I hear and get, whether it's on TikTok or other social media platforms? Do I pass it on, or do I take a pause, think about it, and evaluate it before I pass it on?

We also look at the question of: what constitutes a lie? What constitutes a half-truth? There's a lot of that in the atmosphere—the information ecosystem—and how do we think about that? So we study half-lies, accuracy, truths, bias. Where did the notion of balance come from in journalism history?

So it's designed to make people literate, sophisticated, and literate about news sources and news information. Because we know, whether you're a student or an adult—fully-fledged adults out there—you are bombarded by so much information. We don't want you to drop out or even take a pause.

But a lot of people have dropped out from reading the news because, I think, a lot of people think, "I can't. I don't want to deal with this. It talks about things that are not relevant to my life, and I'll just live my life without media consumption."

You can do that, but there is a risk, longer term, to your life and to the country, and that's what we don't want people to do.

Adam Vos: We're speaking with Len Apcar of LSU Manship School about news literacy. 

We're rounding out a nationally designated week devoted to awareness for the teaching and understanding of how we, as information consumers, interpret and critique the news and opinions we hear and read.

As you teach this college course on news literacy, as you mentioned, your students over the years are becoming more and more savvy about how to judge the information they receive. You're teaching this in a journalism school, to journalism students. Is there any argument for, say, every student learning this skill, news literacy? And how might having this integrated efficiency in interpreting information eventually elevate the public dialogue?

Len Apcar: Well, first of all, I make an effort pretty regularly to teach this class I was just describing at the Honors College, which reaches engineering students, science students, business students—all sorts of folks who are not in the Mass Comm program.

There are other universities that try to bake this into the curriculum by making it a requirement. Universities have a lot of competing interests, and what ultimately happens is that one department says, "Well, if you do a basic class on news literacy, then maybe you have to have another course on basic science or basic geography," and so that gets complicated. Instead, what I do is offer it to honors students.

Adam Vos: Tell me about the potential of including news literacy and curriculum for students even before they get to college. That's one focus of this news literacy project, reaching younger people before or without college, and making sure they know how to interpret information. 

Len Apcar: It is part of it. And I think, although Louisiana doesn't have a formal curriculum in this, it's clearly reaching not just the high school levels, but also middle school levels, maybe even fifth and sixth graders as well.

I do see more sophistication, which tells me that it is being taught in local schools, some of these basic techniques for checking sourcing, checking the independence of information, and not just passing it on. I think that message has increasingly gotten through. The news literacy project has been a leader in this area on a number of levels.

Adam Vos: And finally, tell me about how news literacy relates to our current atmosphere and politics—attacks on the traditional press. Now, not everybody who is currently a voter will have even heard the term "news literacy." Tell me about how the state of our ability to judge the media we consume relates to our state of politics, our democracy.

Len Apcar: There are a couple of questions in there. If you're asking how we think about the media in our civic life and what our responsibility is to stay up with the news, I think that was a notion instilled years ago in high schools, really, in a more financially robust era.

Local newspapers went into schools and taught people how to read a newspaper and how to think about the news. Now, they have news, they have cable, they have any number of things online. Students probably never watch cable—they stream, and they have information on their phones.

What I think still needs to be crossed as a bridge is that a good citizen has to learn to keep up and understand, if not all the issues, at least the key issues. Media literacy is designed to make you comfortable with what's coming at you and to judge the sourcing. If they get that much, that's a good thing, because then, I think, democracy—the whole point of the media's role in a representative democracy—was to help people make decisions like that.