What is news literacy and why do kids need it?

Growing up in a small town in Amherst County, Virginia, Pierre Thomas would gather around the table each night with his family to eat dinner and watch “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” on ABC — in part because Jennings was their favorite evening news anchor, but also because it got the best reception on their TV.

That ritual instilled two strong beliefs in Thomas, now chief justice correspondent for ABC News based in Washington, D.C. 

In Salt Lake City last week during the first national conference of the News Literacy Project, Thomas said that night by night, as he learned about the world, he knew he always wanted to be an educated and informed person. He also decided he wanted to be a journalist.

Something similar happened to me.

When I was a kid growing up in Weber County, my parents subscribed to the Standard-Examiner, and I was often the one to grab it from the newspaper box and bring it inside. On the weekends, my dad and I would sit at the kitchen table eating cereal and flipping through the paper together, where I would check my favorite funnies and read the weekly musings of local columnist Mark Saal.

That’s how, from a young age, I knew if I wanted to learn more about what was happening in my community, local journalists would tell me.

Now I have a young daughter, and I wonder, what will be her equivalent of fetching the morning paper? How will she develop an interest in her community, and an awareness of where to find reliable information?

That’s a great question to ask the News Literacy Project, a cause championed by Thomas. The nonpartisan education nonprofit works with K-12 educators on teaching their students how to think critically about the onslaught of information they encounter, identify misinformation and bias, and understand the difference between news, advertisement, opinion and entertainment content.

Thomas moderated a panel for the Project’s Salt Lake event, which included John Arthur, a Democratic state legislator and Utah’s 2021 Teacher of the Year; Patricia M. Hunt, a social studies educator with 33 years experience who teaches at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia; Gretchen Zaitzeff, district library media specialist for Canyons School District in Sandy; and me, representing local journalism.

In his remarks, Thomas emphasized that news literacy does not mean promoting any specific media outlet or political perspective. It is not partisan, it is teaching young people to discern for themselves where to find the best information to make their own decisions. And he believes developing that ability can make all the difference. 

“There’s so much negativity out there. People are so quick to retreat to their tribes and tribal positions. One of the few counters to what is happening is providing people with the tools they need to help themselves make some sense of it all,” Thomas said.

That’s where news literacy comes in.

Thomas continued, “Teaching students how to understand what the news is, how to pursue gathering information is more critical than it’s ever been. A public that is not informed cannot make good decisions about anything.” 

Utah schools were among some of the first to partner with the News Literacy Project. In Canyons School District, Zaitzeff has been working with 300 educators on how to teach information, news and media literacy to their K-12 students. 

Speaking on the panel, Zaitzeff said she sees news literacy as a vital skill that rounds out all of the subjects students are learning and prepares them for civic engagement.

“I would say that we can teach kids science and reading and social studies and health, but if we can’t help them find accurate information in those fields, what does it matter that they have this foundation, because they’re going to go out in the world and not be able to figure out what is out there and what they can trust,” Zaitzeff said. 

And of course, the final piece of promoting strong news literacy in young people is making sure they have quality news sources to turn to. Like Thomas, who said he strives with each story to be accurate and fair, or my reporters at Utah News Dispatch who clearly lay out the impacts of policy decisions in our state, or the journalists on the impressive list of strong Utah news outlets. 

Keeping that journalism in our communities requires looking to reputable news operations — which cite their sources, not their opinions — for information about what’s important to you rather than relying on social media screed. It can also mean supporting those news outlets by donating or subscribing, when you can. And it means sharing verified information from those quality news sources with the people in your lives, including kids, in order to spread the positive impacts of news literacy in our state.