Yet the National Association for Media Literacy Education’s 2024 “State of Media Literacy Education in the U.S.” snapshot reveals that only 18 states require media literacy curricula of any sort, and even then, standards and resources remain inconsistent and often woefully outdated. For example, they focus primarily on print media in a landscape where almost 40 percent of Americans under 30 get their news primarily from TikTok.
Given how targeted disinformation on social media may well have played a decisive role in the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and how Meta and other social media sites have, since the election, largely eliminated their own fact-checking protocols, the stakes could not be higher.
Too often, however, teachers are left to their own devices to figure out effective strategies for teaching 21st-century media literacy.
The approaches below are the ones I use in my journalism elective for 10th, 11th and 12th graders. Like any good lesson plan, they are partly adapted and synthesized from the work of other educators. I hope you, in turn, will modify and revise them to match your students, environment, constraints and resources.
1. Have students make some journalism of their own.
Distinguishing false news from responsible reporting is easier when you understand the rigorous process that journalists undertake. Learning about that process teaches you the right questions to ask of what you read and see.
I learned the importance of understanding by doing from a science teacher who taught his students about global warming by having them conduct experiments shining heat lamps on bottles. They found that the bottles full of carbon dioxide warmed more quickly and became hotter. He also taught his students about evolution through breeding fruit flies for different traits.
“If they don’t actually see for themselves,” he told me, “then it just becomes an argument about belief. Do you believe what the science textbook tells you, or what a climate change denier or creationist tells you? But science isn’t about where you put your belief. It’s about understanding the world through observation.”
Similarly, assessing the value of news reporting shouldn’t come down to a person’s “belief” in the veracity of The Associated Press vs. Infowars. That’s why I ask my students to conduct actual reporting, research and interviews and, importantly, practice fact-checking.
To create their own news podcasts and TikTok videos, they use The New York Times’s standards and guidelines on integrity as one of their models. The guidelines cover fundamentals like how journalists attribute and present quotations, confirm the veracity of their information and ensure they have reached out to all sides of a complex topic. They study how to conduct polls to assess the student body’s opinion and, through the experience, learn the limitations and pitfalls of such polling. They submit their articles to our school newspaper, and on occasions when it turns out they have gotten something wrong, they send corrections.
Later, when I have them critically analyze news items from their social media feeds, they do so with firsthand experience of the “back end” of journalism. Having now made their own media that follows journalistic best practices, the students see the gulf between the thoroughness of their work and what most other content producers create.
Unattributed quotations, polls without information about sample size, no evident attempts to present a balance of sources — these all now stand out as red flags to the students, not because I told them these were red flags, but because they now know from experience what legitimate journalism actually looks like.
When they actually take offense (“Hey, we had to do all this work — why didn’t they?”), I know the lessons have been successful.
2. Teach why seeing should not equal believing.
Much of social media’s power lies in the immediacy of visuals, and the tendency for us to instinctively bestow legitimacy on photos or videos. Yet students need to learn that seeing an on-screen image is not the same as seeing something live with their own eyes.
To teach this necessary aspect of media literacy, I invite students to use resources like the Learning Network’s “What’s Going On in This Picture?” series to look at photos that have been stripped of their original captions. Then I have them create two different, often conflicting, interpretations — both of which can be supported by the visual details.
Whether or not either of their analyses matches the actual back story, which I eventually reveal, is less important than my students’ developing an understanding of visual interpretation as a thinking process, not an automatic window to truth.
I also employ Erroll Morris’s work with photo criticism, much of which is available via the Times’s Opinionator blog. Students can see, through Morris’s copious examples, how every photograph is, to some extent, staged — if for no other reason than that additional objects always exist beyond the photo’s frame.
My students use their phones to explore Morris’s adage that “there could always be an elephant lurking just beyond the frame” by snapping photos of scenes at school with both wide-angle and close-up shots. They then explain to the rest of the class what wasn’t captured in each photo, showing how this changes the “story” each photo tells.
We examine some infamous faked photos on Instagram and X, like the melted-looking daisies purportedly the result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Yet that image offers no clue as to when or where the photo was actually taken. We also look at the debunked “voter surveillance footage” of people putting ballots in boxes that some 2020 election deniers claim is sufficient evidence of fraud. I want students to replace the “seeing-is-believing” instinct with these questions:
In an era where A.I. can instantly create realistic-looking false or altered photos, Morris would argue that photos were never pure representations of truth to begin with. It’s just that now we need additional strategies for distinguishing the hallmarks of A.I. art, such as looking for extra fingers and limbs or blurred and misspelled words on signage. (Knowing all the while, of course, that A.I. is improving every day, and that these may soon be outdated.)
Fortunately, students are not alone in this quest, which is how we get to the next step.
3. Practice the skill of checking the whole ecosystem.
Best practices in contemporary critical media literacy involve lateral reading, developed at Stanford and highlighted recently on The Learning Network. The process asks, among other things, that we double-check information we read — especially sensationalistic, inflammatory information — to see if other sources have also reported this story and to see what else the author has posted.
Particularly with visual posts on Instagram and X, I ask my students to use Google’s reverse image search or tools like TinEye to see if that same image has appeared in other, perhaps different, contexts besides the one presented. For example, a widely circulated image purported to be of U.S. troops being deployed to Israel is easily traceable to old footage from a military exercise in Romania.
There are, of course, the old standby sites to check with, like Snopes and AFP Fact Check. Poynter’s Teen Fact-Checking Network might appeal to younger students.
A standby of media literacy education has often been that sites with .edu and .gov extensions are inherently reliable, but university research is not free from bias, and the federal government has increasingly revised its websites to prioritize political ideology over facts. Even information from .edu and .gov sites should always be compared with what we can find in the larger ecosystem.
4. Foster skepticism, not cynicism.
Reputable studies disagree about whether older or younger Americans are more vulnerable to falling for fake news. Diagnostically quizzing your students ahead of planning a media literacy unit is always a good idea so you don’t wind up insulting their intelligence. The University of Cambridge’s MIST (Misinformation Susceptibility Test) is one of several free options, or you could create your own. My students, at any rate, tend to arrive highly suspicious of online news and journalism.
Yet worse than credulity — or perhaps just its flip side — is cynicism. Many of my students have the attitude that nothing in the news can be trusted and that sharing fake news is no big deal because everything is just one big joke. Cynicism can masquerade as skepticism (“You can’t fool me”), but as I tell my students, without the necessary follow-through to find the truth, cynicism is a cop-out.
I share with my class some passages written by Hannah Arendt, the philosopher and political theorist, in which she explains how autocrats often lie clumsily and openly, not “to instill convictions but to destroy our capacity to form any.”
If nothing is ever really provable, Arendt writes, then there is no ground to challenge a dictator, only an endless opposition of “he said / she said,” erasing any concept of moral authority that would give a person the right to challenge the powerful.
It’s a big concept but, with groundwork, one that students can grasp. They know the difference between false gossip and genuine facts in their own lives, and they have lived more than long enough to see authority figures in their homes, schools and communities give flimsy or hypocritical justifications for their actions in order to obscure very real truths. Just a little brainstorming is all it takes for them to produce such anecdotes.
True skepticism presupposes that truth does exist and, furthermore, that it’s worth investing time and energy to find it. Without establishing this fundamental assumption as the “why” behind developing critical media skills, the entire enterprise may be doomed to failure.
Now, as the early weeks of the second Trump presidency have presented Americans with an onslaught of false statements combined with an aggressive attack on the civil servants and institutions that provide accountability, it’s not just cynicism that presents a threat, but also exhaustion.
The rapid pace and overwhelming volume of misinformation is consistent with what the RAND Corporation, describing Russian propaganda, dubbed “the firehose of falsehood.” That fire hose depends upon the power of first impressions and relentless repetition either to convince the public to accept a false reality or, more often, to make them abandon trying to figure out the truth at all.
It is challenging, as RAND puts it, to try to “counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth,” if for no other reason than “it takes less time to make up facts than it does to verify them.” When it comes to educating the public to be efficient, skeptical consumers of information, nothing less than the continued existence of American democracy may be at stake.
For that reason, teaching critical media literacy is every teacher’s job: Librarians, humanities teachers and even science educators have opportunities and tools for taking part. As citizens, we need to push our legislators to add media literacy to state tests, because we know too well that’s the only way teachers will be granted the time to teach it.
