Image: www.vpnsrus.com via Flickr
How to teach kids to spot fake news?
First: Teach everyone to spot fake news.
When I was a child, my parents had access to only a few news sources: our local paper, the big-city dailies (for us, the Washington Post and the New York Times) and the nightly news. Kids today have … the entire internet, with every crackpot theory and faked moon landing right at their fingertips. Even the distinction between “media” and “journalism” has blurred to the point that many adults don’t know if anyone can be trusted at all.
Which means that parental responsibilities now include giving your kids the tools to assess whether a given story is real – backed up by solid reporting – or biased, or totally and completely fake. Or Russian propaganda. To this end, educators are developing curricula to encourage “media literacy” in the face of an onslaught of, well, media bullshit and a president who’s actively trying to discredit responsible journalism. To get an idea of how parents can help their kids separate fact from fiction, I spoke to two people who are deep in the media-literacy trenches.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment