Teaching Media Literacy in the Modern World

A few times a month, an email from an educator arrives in the Ground News inbox. There’s a distinct theme to these emails - a sense of relief and excitement about finding a tool that helps solve a problem. The challenge revolves around teaching students to practice discernment, critical thinking and constructive dialogue. A common activity in classrooms is to have students compare news articles on a particular subject. Ground News makes this activity richer and more rewarding for students by allowing them to easily compare news coverage and visualize bias. It’s a welcome reminder of why we created Ground News in the first place.

At any moment we can unlock our phone and release a firehose of information, yet most of us don’t have the time or resources to evaluate it thoroughly. To make matters worse, we don’t even have access to the same information. Algorithms prioritize and sort information for us, often without us realizing it. Unfortunately, algorithms also end up sorting us into filter bubbles that lack diverse perspectives. 

Imagine what that experience is like for an adolescent. Imagine having to teach students to navigate this complex digital world, which most of us find daunting even as adults. Imagine taking on that enormous responsibility even though the curriculum doesn’t require it. Only 14 states have media literacy language on the books today. 

Despite these challenges, the teachers we hear from go above and beyond to bring media literacy into the classroom. People like Kristin Schnerer, a high school teacher in Toledo who created a Media & Politics class. Or Michael Wells, a Library Director at a university in Kentucky who’s always on the lookout for tools that help students practice discernment. Or Nate Noorlander, a high school teacher who partnered with a university professor to produce online history lessons that challenge students to analyze primary and secondary sources. 

We’ve spent the last several months talking to educators about how Ground News can play a role in the classroom. We didn’t set out to create an education product, but we’re certainly glad teachers are finding it useful. Here are some of the major themes that emerged from our discussions. 

Practicing Lateral Reading 

At its core, Ground News is a lateral reading tool. Lateral reading is a term that came out of a research study conducted by the Stanford History Education Group that looked at how professional fact checkers evaluate information online. It’s a pretty simple concept - when evaluating an online source, leave the site to see what other digital sources say about it. Ground News makes this easy. When something happens in the world, we take all the sources writing about it and bring them together in one place. We process more than 30,000 news sources a day to ensure our readers have access to diverse perspectives.

Understanding Media Bias

We all have biases. It’s a part of the human experience. These biases shape how we see the world and understand issues. Naturally, they can make their way into news coverage, so it’s important to be aware of them. Ground News uses a combination of third-party news monitoring organizations and our own data to assign a bias rating to media outlets. For every news story, we include a media bias chart to show the distribution of coverage. Making the political leanings of news organizations transparent helps readers avoid filter bubbles and interpret news coverage with a critical eye.

Visualizing Filter Bubbles

A filter bubble results when algorithms guess what information a person would like to see based on their browsing habits such as location, click-behavior and search history. Algorithms tend to show us information we like, cutting us off from ideas that might challenge our perspective and expand our worldview. Ground News exposes this phenomenon through our Blindspot Feed. This dedicated feed highlights news stories that are underreported by one side of the political spectrum. Readers can use this feed to seek out stories they might be missing if they are stuck in a filter bubble.

Exploring Local & Global Perspectives

Local news is incredibly important. In many ways, it has the most direct impact on our lives, yet local newsrooms are suffering the most under changing business models. Ground News supports the distribution of local news in a variety of ways. If available, we always put local news sources first. We also highlight local news from around the world, which gives an on-the-ground perspective that might be missing from national coverage. This provides a more nuanced understanding of geopolitical issues by showing how the same news story is covered across the globe.

Thinking Critically About News Consumption

One of the most important things we do at Ground News is make the invisible, visible. We use data and analytics to help our readers understand their news consumption. Our biggest step forward in this area comes with the launch of our Vantage subscription and the My News Bias feature. Now, not only do we help readers analyze information in real time, we allow them to look back at what they chose to consume and make changes to their behavior. Think of it as a health report for your news diet with valuable insights to help you adopt more productive reading habits.

Continuing Education 

This week, Ground News is presenting at the Charleston Conference, an annual gathering of librarians, publishers and education companies to learn more about how our news literacy tools can make an impact in the classroom. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing more of you in our inbox.