Episode 9 | Breaking News OR Broken News: Teaching News Literacy to Kids September 19, 2021

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GUEST: Robin Terry Brown, Author, Breaking The News: What’s Real, What’s Not, and Why the Difference Matters

In today’s media landscape, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. We’ve invited author Robin Terry Brown to talk about how this affects kids, tweens, and teens, and what they can do to become more educated about truth versus misinformation. We’ll talk about her latest book, Breaking The News: What’s Real, What’s Not, and Why the Difference Matters. In it, she addresses how young people can easily become overloaded with the information streaming from digital devices, traditional channels, friends, and family, and she provides tools needed to spot the noise from the news.

GUEST BIO:

Robin Terry Brown is the former senior editor for National Geographic Kids magazines and books, in which her role included editing the popular Weird But True! series. A graduate of the master’s program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Robin is a longtime editor and writer who has written for numerous publications and books. She also has a self-described penchant for “getting the facts straight.”

LINKS:

Media Literacy Resources

For Tweens and Teens

Digital Compass by Common Sense Education – Games and quizzes on social media smarts

Commonsense Media – Fact-checking tools

Society of Professional Journalists –  Journalistic code of ethics

NewseumEd –  Free resources to build media literacy skills.

For Parents and Teachers

Media literacy websites with tools for parents and teachers:

American Library Association’s Literacy Clearinghouse

Commonsense Media

Media Literacy Clearinghouse

New Literacy Project

News just for kids

Smithsonian Tween Tribune – free online educational service with daily news sites specifically geared for kids, teens, and tweens

Dogo News –  Kid-friendly news site of current events

News For Kids – News site that makes the news accessible to kids

Pepe the Frog:

Matt Lewis’ article: https://www.thedailybeast.com/did-russia-delete-its-twitter-mob

Full Transcript

BRAD PHILLIPS, HOST, THE SPEAK GOOD PODCAST:

I’d like to talk to you about … a frog.

Not a frog as famous as Kermit, or Shrek’s King Harold, or even Jeremiah, the bullfrog immortalized in Three Dog Night’s 1971 hit song, “Joy to the World.”

No, this frog had humble beginnings in 2005 in the comic “Boys Club.” His name was Pepe the Frog. The comic, explained the Los Angeles Times, depicted “Pepe and his anthropomorphized animal friends behaving like stereotypical post-college bros: playing video games, eating pizza, smoking pot and being harmlessly gross.”

Some Pepe fans liked the character so much they started making memes showing Pepe as a sad frog, or a smug frog, or an angry frog. But sometime around late 2015, Pepe suddenly found himself in more sinister scenarios. In one, for example, he stood in front of the burning World Trade Center towers, wearing a Jewish Yarmulke, as if to suggest Jews were responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In another, Pepe used the n-word. In another, he wears a Ku Klux Klan robe. You get the point.

According to New Scientist, “During the contentious 2016 US elections, Pepe became so associated with racism, antisemitism and other forms of bigotry that both Hillary Clinton and the Anti-Defamation League defined him as a hate symbol…Pepe, like Trump, was being embraced by a fringe but growing far-right movement.”

To be clear, Matt Furie, the artist who created Pepe, did not consent to these malicious uses of his creation, and he tried – if only partially successfully – to regain control over his creation.

Nonetheless, what’s clear is that the symbol was adopted by many conservative figures – then-candidate Donald Trump and his son, Donald Trump Jr., shared images of Pepe on their social media feeds. Supporters of Trump’s 2016 campaign carried Pepe signs to his rallies. And members of the “alt-right,” including the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, along with white nationalist and anti-immigrant hate groups – also flooded social media with Pepe images.

Back in that 2015-2016 time period, I remember seeing many of those Pepe tweets. Many people who were offended by those images retweeted the upsetting posts, often expressing shock at how many people were openly sharing their racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. And I, too, was dismayed at the sheer number of bigoted tweets I saw being spread throughout my feed.

Let’s fast forward to May 2017, when I saw an article in The Daily Beast by a conservative writer named Matt Lewis – who tends to be a thoughtful writer, not an ideological flamethrower. He wrote some lines about Pepe that I hadn’t considered and that jolted me. He pointed out that he hadn’t been seeing many Pepe images lately – that they suddenly seemed to disappear – remember, this was now four months after Trump’s presidency had started, well after the election season had passed. And Matt Lewis’ article made me realize that I hadn’t seen much of Pepe lately, either. He wrote:

“There seemed to be a perfectly rational reason that Pepe the Frog disappeared from my timeline right after Election Day; in mid-November Twitter purged some high-profile alt-right accounts. Then I heard Clint Watts on Meet the Press (by the way, Clint is a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University and a Foreign Policy Research Institute fellow)…and he said that while we are focused on hacking and leaking, what Russia really did was to ‘create information nuclear weapons’ that were spread over social media to ‘undermine trust, create divisions, and foment chaos.’ This involved the use of bots, he said, ‘to create what look like armies of Americans.’ ”

Matt Lewis’ article made me realize that it was at least possible that some, or many, or even most of the Pepe images I had seen weren’t actually sent by Americans. That maybe an Army of trolls – some possibly Russian – were using propaganda to divide Americans and sow confusion. And, if that sounds crazy, it’s interesting to note that, in early 2017, the Russian Embassy in the UK tweeted an image of Pepe on its official account to troll then-British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Now, I don’t know how much of Pepe was spread by American hatemongers and how much was spread via foreign interference. I looked for evidence – studies or data that supported the hypothesis that Russian disinformation bots were responsible for a sizeable share of the Pepe spread – and I couldn’t find any. But still, it’s entirely possible that I took at face value something that wasn’t what it appeared to be.

At the risk of coming across without sufficient humility, I truly do believe that my overall news literacy is high. That my ability to spot a fake is rather finely tuned. That my healthy skepticism weeds out misinformation, and that my curiosity refuses to accept new information without at least considering the counterarguments.

But now, it’s clearer to me, that even with those guardrails – I’m still susceptible to falling for a well-choreographed disinformation campaign.

And if I’m susceptible, what chance does, say, an 11-year-old have when trying to distinguish fact from fiction? Even if their parents and educators talk to them about what’s real and what isn’t, the virtual firehose of information that teens and tweens encounter every day comes so fast, with algorithms programmed to deliver content that taps straight into their existing belief systems – that it can be difficult, if not nearly impossible, to analyze all of the information. And let’s be real here – us parents who are trying to teach our kids these concepts are almost certainly missing some important things ourselves.

So today, we’ll focus on how we can help teens and tweens become more news literate. It is, in my view, one of the most important things we can do to maintain and, hopefully, strengthen our democracy. My guest is Robin Terry Brown, the former senior editor for National Geographic Kids magazines and books, including a favorite in our house, the Weird But True! series. She’s also the author of a new book that is the focus of our conversation today: Breaking The News: What’s Real, What’s Not, and Why The Difference Matters.

[Music plays.]

PHILLIPS:

So first of all, I know that you used to edit the Weird But True! series, which is not the focus of our conversation today, but because I have a six- and an eight-year-old who are both fans of that series, the weirder the facts, the better. I’m just curious if looking back on that part of your career, you have a weird fact that has stuck with you more than any other.

ROBIN TERRY BROWN:

I have thousands of weird facts. [LAUGHS] I think that some of my favorites are … did you know that dolphins sleep with one eye open?

PHILLIPS:

Huh? That’s a pretty suspicious dolphin, I guess.

TERRY BROWN:

And my other favorite is that peanut butter can be converted into a diamond.

PHILLIPS:

Wow.

TERRY BROWN:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

Now that’s something. And I guess the engagement rings would smell a whole lot better.

TERRY BROWN:

[LAUGHS]

PHILLIPS:

I think that my kids love the ones where it involves weird state laws, things like that you can’t go fishing from a bridge from a moving vehicle in a certain state.

TERRY BROWN:

Yes.

PHILLIPS:

It’s very strange. But, of course, that’s the fun part of your work. And I don’t want to say that the media literacy part of the work isn’t also fun, but certainly the consequences are much greater. So, I thought I’d start with maybe just a couple of statistics to frame all of this up.

TERRY BROWN:

Sure.

PHILLIPS:

You noted in your book, which, by the way, if people are watching the video excerpt, is over my left shoulder here. I thought it was excellent. A couple of stats you cited: Experiments conducted by a scientist from MIT found that 44 percent of kids say they can’t tell fake stories from real ones that according to a 2017 poll by Commonsense Media. Another study from Stanford University found that 82 percent of middle-schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between sponsored content and a real news story online. So, it’s very obvious that the lack of news literacy is a tremendous challenge. What are you hoping that your book accomplishes to help address that?

TERRY BROWN:

Yeah, it is. It’s a really huge challenge and it’s a huge challenge for adults too, right? This is tough stuff. What I really hope that this book accomplishes is that, first of all, it’s entertaining for kids to read. Kids aren’t going to read it if they don’t like it. So, the most important thing is that it’s interesting for kids and it also provides educators and parents with a way to open up a conversation with their kids about how do we talk about this? Where do we even start? I think that the book really both provides a big picture – here are the influences on our news media that can make it maybe a little bit slanted one way or another – and also provides really practical toolkits and tips that educators and parents can use, and can really help their kids put into practice the steps of media literacy. So, I wanted it to be big picture and also really practical.

PHILLIPS:

And when you were writing this, what age range did you have in mind?

TERRY BROWN:

I was really thinking about kids ages 10 and up, and the sweet spot being tweens, because they’re really first beginning their journey into the social media landscape and they’re novices. They don’t really know what they’re getting into and yet they’re fascinated by it. But I have to say that many adults who have read this said that it really resonated with them and that they really took away a lot of good pointers from it. So, I would say kids of all ages, including us. {LAUGHS]

PHILLIPS:

And that’s the thing about news literacy. It is not easy.

TERRY BROWN:

Yeah.

PHILLIPS:

In the open, I talked about how I was caught off-guard by something. And I’ll just add something new to that, which is something that happened literally this morning. There was a viral video going around of a Frontier Airlines flight attendant, who you may have seen the story of the news in the past week, who had to duct tape a passenger to the seat. It was a disruptive passenger. And, the flight attendant was interviewed on the news and was hilarious. And everybody’s, retweeting this is very direct and funny flight attendant. And I retweeted it, saying, this guy doesn’t need media training, he needs to be teaching how to do. And only after I retweeted it did I realize that was a comedian playing a flight attendant and it wasn’t actually the flight attendant. And it’s just another reminder that even if you pay attention to this stuff, it is so hard to get it right all the time.

TERRY BROWN:

It is.

PHILLIPS:

And so, what are the things you are doing to teach tweens and maybe teens, how to be more news literate? What are a couple of specific tips you’re offering them to be more savvy?

TERRY BROWN:

I think there really are some really fundamental questions that kids can try to answer in order to understand the news better. So, the very first question is, we all know this in journalism, what is the source of your information? Know where it’s coming from. So, if you get something crazy and outrageous, the first question is who is putting out this information and could they possibly have an agenda of some kind. The other important tip really is to look at multiple sources of information. Because, you know, these days we are all in kind of a bubble of our own information and information that validates what we already think. And so looking at multiple sources of information and seeing ‘Is that crazy video appearing on other news websites, or is it being reported the same way on a lot of news websites? Or, is it not there at all, which is a really good tip that it probably is not true. So I think those are the fundamentals.

PHILLIPS:

You’re reminding me that when I worked for Nightline many years ago, Ted Koppel used to say, when people would ask him, why should we trust Nightline, why should we trust you, his answer was:  “Well don’t trust just me, watch five other sources and then compare them. And you make your own judgment. Watch diversity of views.” I think that is so important. And, you know, one of the things I’m struck by, Robin, is that a lot of bad actors have gotten very good at looking like they’re legitimate news sources. And so even if you go to their website and you look at who’s quoted and you look at their about page, they look credible. What thoughts do you have about how to kind of ferret out, uh, good information from bad?

TERRY BROWN:

It’s really tough. When I started out my career in journalism, I was a fact checker. That was something that, back then, nobody knew what it was except for people in the news industry. And now we all have to be fact checkers. Even if you’re 9 or 90, you have to learn how to do this. I think that one of the most important things that we can do is really monitor our reactions, because the thing about misinformation and propaganda is that they sound like facts. But, they’re actually designed to make you feel really strong emotions. You feel outraged or you feel shocked. So, your first reaction is click and share with everybody, and have them share your outreach. That’s your first reaction, but, actually, if you feel that way, that tells you that someone behind that post wanted you to feel that way. And then you have to take the next step and say, well, why? And so I think that what we can teach kids is to pay attention to how they feel. And if they have this really strong reaction, don’t just share right away. Stop and pause and think, and look at where the information came from, check it against other sources, see if it’s real. And then think again and then really consider whether they should be sharing this information and whether they should be believing it.

PHILLIPS:

I was thinking about that old, you may remember as a kid, we were taught that if a piece of your clothing catches fire, you should stop, drop, and roll. And I was thinking of that almost in connection with this topic that it’s stop, pause, and don’t share.

TERRY BROWN:

[LAUGHS]

PHILLIPS:

There must be some trio of terms we can come up with just to remind people to take a breath. In fact, one of the things I liked a lot in your book was you had this quiz in your book and it said someone sends you a story with a headline, “Rats found in school cafeteria,” what should you do? Read the headline, share with everyone you know, and vow never to eat at the school cafeteria again. Read the headline and immediately start organizing a protest of the school cafeteria. I liked that one that sounds very middle school.

TERRY BROWN:

[LAUGHS]

PHILLIPS:

Read the headline and the full story, and then decide what to do. And that really gets to that key point about how important it is to slow down, which isn’t so easy to do. Because, as you’ve just pointed out, we’re more likely to trust information that confirms what we already know. So can you talk about that for a moment about that confirmation bias and how to try to get past?

TERRY BROWN:

Absolutely. So, yes. You wanted a pithy phrase. So, my mantra, while I was creating this book was think before you click.

PHILLIPS:

I like that.

TERRY BROWN:

Think before you click. That was what kept running through my head. I think that we have all, whether we are kids or adults, we have all fallen prey to clickbait, correct? Like you see this outrageous headline and your brain kind of fills in the rest. Because you think that you have the whole story. You see this headline and you think you understand what the story is and then your biases fill in the information that’s missing. If you actually take the next step and click, a lot of times the story does not live up to the title at all. And sometimes you click and there’s nothing there, but someone just made a buck off of your click. Right? And that was the whole point of it being posted. So, I think the first thing we have to remember is read the story. Read the story. Don’t only read the headline.

PHILLIPS:

Yes. And I guess just thinking about concrete tips to offer teens and tweens is, so you read that story and then maybe what do you do? Plug into Google News that topic and you look for maybe a well-reasoned, but opposite point of view to supplement the point of view you just read?

TERRY BROWN:

Yes, you do look at other sources. And I think the main thing is it’s good to look at different perspectives, but also just to validate that the facts that are in this story are actually being reported elsewhere. Because people can … maybe have news organizations could have a different slant … but are the fundamental facts the same in the story. And so I think that’s what you can get from other sources and you definitely will figure out if no one else is reporting this, except for some crazy social media site or something, then you can be pretty certain that it wasn’t true.

PHILLIPS:

Yes. I was also thinking about one of the, one of the trends that I see a lot on social media is there’ll be maybe a 12-second video clip that goes viral and you see maybe somebody committing a horrendous act in those 12 seconds. And the act may be exactly what it appears to be. But sometimes there have been cases where you end up seeing the longer video of what proceeded and followed that moment. And it tells a much different story. Do you have any thoughts about that? About sharing those uncontextualized pieces of information and advice that you would offer to kids, teens, tweens about what to do when they confront them.

TERRY BROWN:

I think it really goes back to, you almost have to develop like a kind of spidey sense I like to call it about when something’s wrong.

PHILLIPS:

Yes.

TERRY BROWN:

I think it goes back to emotions. If you are feeling outraged or shocked by something that should be a trigger that maybe something is missing from this picture. And that should be your trigger to dig a little deeper into what the context and the source might be.

PHILLIPS:

I think one of the challenges that exists, as you point out in your book, propaganda’s not anything new. It has existed for a very long time. In fact, I think you have several examples in your book, but one of them was that old Benjamin Franklin drawing of a snake divided in 13 different segments, each representing one of the American colonies at that time. And the point of it, them being divided in separate segments, was that they’re not operating as a single unit, but that they should be. And that you cited as a piece of propaganda in that case, not necessarily a negative piece of propaganda, but serving the same purpose. But, obviously there’s all sorts of more insidious propaganda misinformation, intentional disinformation campaigns. And I guess what I think about is these things are difficult for adults to distinguish. In fact, I think of the 2020 election, 2016 election, you look at the Russian influence campaigns. You see how hard it is to distinguish what’s real from what’s fake. How do kids stand any chance?

TERRY BROWN:

Yeah. Well, I think that we can give them these fundamental tools. And I think that also,, we should have a lot of faith in kids. Kids are smart and they are incredibly tech savvy and incredibly adaptable. And I think they blow all of us out of the water with how tech savvy they are. So I think if we give them these fundamental tools, and like I said, that there really are tool kits and quizzes and all kinds of things in the book that make this very interactive for kids so that they really understand. This is not something that only applies to now for kids. This is a skill that they will build and they will put to good use in their lives. And so it’s critical thinking. This is something that kids absolutely can learn. We’re never gonna all get it right a hundred percent of the time. That’s just not gonna happen. But, it’s at least important for us to understand and for kids to understand the big picture of what’s going on. And to know that they have to be critical thinkers about what they’re seeing.

PHILLIPS:

I was thinking about one of those very famous, ads that have aired in the past decade. You may remember the truth campaign. It was an anti-smoking campaign aimed at teens. And one of the things that I thought was so smart about that campaign was that it tapped into the natural defiance that people of that age have. And in that case, it was to combat what was being portrayed as a positive representation of cool kids and teenagers smoking. They tried to really reverse that. And they did that by saying these big corporations are lying to you, don’t fall for it. So, they tapped into that sense of defiance. And I read your book and wondered if maybe that sense of defiance is useful to try to tap into for teens and tweens that there are people out there lying to you or trying to manipulate the way you think. Don’t let them succeed. Here’s how you can be savvier and outsmart them.

TERRY BROWN:

I think that’s so smart. I mean, one of the things I think we have to remember is that if we preach this to kids, if we try to shove it down their throats, they are not going to listen. We have to make it fun and we have to work within their worlds and the way that they think. If it’s younger kids, you can turn it into a game. Social media is their world. They love it. Right. So, work within that world. Find a fake video and a real video and sit down with your kid and say, which one do you think is real? And then have them try to figure it out and start asking those questions that prompt them to think in a critical way. I think you’re onto something there, which is like, let’s talk to them about this in ways that will engage them and be in their worlds.

PHILLIPS:

I love that. This is a good time to mention that at the end of your book, you have tools and links for tweens, teens, parents, and teachers to improve their media literacy. We will post those links on this episode’s show page on our website as well @throughlinegroup.com slash podcasts. So, if listeners are interested in doing those types of activities, you just mentioned, there will be resources they can click to find that. I thought you did a very good job, since you brought up social media, you talked about that by writing social media sites track what you click on, what you like or heart, and what you respond to most. They use this information to automatically feed you more of what you like and less of what you don’t. So you’ll stay on the site and keep clicking and sharing. Instead of being introduced to new ideas, you get more information about what you already know. So, if the social media bubble sends someone false information that echoes what they already believe to be true, they may be more likely to be fooled.

TERRY BROWN:

Yes.

PHILLIPS:

So how do you pop that social media bubble that keeps feeding you more of the same to try to get you to confirm your views that much more?

TERRY BROWN:

Yeah. And especially for kids because their social media is their entire world. That is their world. And they have no need to go outside of it, if it were up to them. So, again, the important thing here is, first of all, that kids understand the context that they’re in when they are on social media. So, it’s important to share with them that yes, what you were seeing is coming to you because you have clicked on other things like it, and it’s going to be more of what you like, and it’s going to validate what you already believe. So that’s step number one, just for them to know that. And then that there’s all of this other information out there in the world. So it would be great if they were willing, if we can get them to, to look at other sources every now and then just close the window and look at something else. But, at least in the event where they see something on social media that’s really shocking or that they may wonder if it’s true, that is really the time for them to close the window and do a Google search and see what else comes up. And I think once they have that basic understanding, it creates a framework for what they’re seeing.

PHILLIPS:

I’ll give you another example from my own life. I mentioned to you, I have a six- and an eight-year-old, and they’re both baseball nuts. My eight-year-old likes to watch on YouTube, a guy who kind of debriefs on the previous night’s baseball games. And my eight-year-old came to me and said, Garrett Cole, who’s a star pitcher for the New York Yankees has been cheating. He uses something called spider tags to make his hand stickier and changes the spin rate on the ball. And I said, where are you hearing that? And he said on YouTube. And he told me the guy who is saying those things. And I said, you know, there’s been an accusation of that, but there’s been no evidence of that. There’s a difference between an accusation and proof. And we should be a little bit careful. Now it turns out in hindsight that accusation turned out to be true, but it did kind of highlight for me that, okay, I, as a dad need to do a better job of, of listening in more to what he’s listening to on these seemingly benign YouTube pages. Beyond just being aware of what your kids are consuming, what else can parents and educators do to help improve their kids’ literacy?

TERRY BROWN:

You know, actually the first thing that you can do is become a very savvy media consumer yourself. Like we all need help these days being media literate. This is hard. So, I think the first thing is to check yourself and see how you’re doing and then really model that behavior for your kids, as well. But then I think also, as I mentioned earlier, I think really engaging with them in a way that’s in their world and that they understand and really taps into the kinds of things that they’re looking at and kind of using these as examples to press them a little bit. It’s to ask them questions that get them thinking critically and also to help them understand, you know, not only about checking sources, but also what are the consequences, if you share a false video? These are things that kids don’t think about consequences like that. So, I think for parents to keep saying, where do you think this came from and why do you think this is real? And if it wasn’t real, what would the consequences be of sharing it and to help kids think through those steps?

PHILLIPS:

That’s really smart. I like that idea of, of having that discussion. What are the consequences? That’s something I wouldn’t have thought of doing. I do worry that a lot of the parents themselves are not news literate. Part of that is, as you said, it’s hard. I’ve shared in this episode now two times when I’ve been fooled and they’re two of many, and you look at stats, at the number of Americans who believe the 2020 election was a fraud, or you look at a vaccine hesitancy based on misinformation. You look at a tech CEO being accused by probably millions of people likely to believe this, of implanting a chip into the vaccine to track their behaviors as if the phone they’re carrying around voluntarily in their pocket doesn’t stand a much better chance of any of that, anyway. How do you think about, and I know this is a much bigger question than a single book, but how do you think about reaching parents who themselves are not very news literate?

TERRY BROWN:

That is a really hard question. I think they have to want to be reached. So, it’s very hard to reach people who don’t want to be reached. But, I think we can all look ourselves in the mirror and know that there are really extreme examples of, I mean the 2020 election being the one that is first and foremost in our minds, of the power of misinformation and how many people believe it. And also the horrible consequences of it. I mean, there was an insurrection against the Capital because people believed these lies. And so these things have really big consequences. So I think as adults, we may not be, most of us may not be that extreme, but it’s important for us to recognize that we all do live in somewhat of a similar bubble to what these insurrectionists believed. They kept following, they only listened to what they thought was true. They lived in a bubble that supported and reinforced what they thought and created like an alternate reality of what truth is. And we all do this to a certain extent, maybe not to such extremes. And so I think it’s just important for us to look in the mirror and say how much are we doing this and challenge ourselves to get outside of our own bubbles. Nothing is going to hit everybody, but I think we can start with ourselves, really.

PHILLIPS:

Yes. I mean, one of the things I think about a lot is, and it’s not easy to do this, but I try as hard as possible to view the other side, whatever that other side is on whatever issue I’m thinking about, with curiosity and not with judgment. I try to think about, well, where are they coming from? What are they thinking? What are their fears, concerns? What do they care about? What do they love? And look for places where maybe there’s some similarity or bridge. Maybe that’s part of all of this to at least exploring what that is at the very least as a news consumer, it at least allows you to understand another point of view more completely.

TERRY BROWN:

Yes.

PHILLIPS:

This may be a very existential question to ask. I’ll ask it anyway. I have you on this episode because I believe so strongly in the need for news literacy. I think it is so important to be able to process information accurately and contextualize it accurately. But I do think the speed of misinformation, disinformation propaganda, the speeding of social media in our pockets, reaching younger and younger people by the day up that news literacy doesn’t have a chance of keeping up with that. The other stuff will win. Do you ever kind of have that same fear?

TERRY BROWN:

Well, I’ll be honest with you. I think it is winning. So, yes. I think we have a really tough job ahead of us. And I do think technology keeps moving forward and so technology keeps changing the ways in which we can be tricked. These deep fake videos where they can make it look like someone is saying things they didn’t say and doing things they didn’t do. These didn’t exist a few years ago, so our teaching and our own learning has to keep up with this technology. Ithink again with kids, you know, they’re very adaptable. They’re like sponges. They soak things up. So I do have faith that they can learn this and they can absorb all of this into the way that they think and live, really. But they need to be taught it. They need the tools. And so, I think if we give them the tools, then they can carry this through their lives, which will be very helpful to them.

PHILLIPS:

Yes. And so your book, I think, is clearly a piece of the puzzle and important one. I know in our email exchanges, you’ve said that you’re aware that there are at least some media literacy programs out there at elementary or middle school or high school level.I would think that that would be incredibly important too, although I do wonder in this moment in history, when there are these debates over the meaning of history and critical race theory, and can we teach the full story of Christopher Columbus and all of this, if media literacy itself would be so politicized that you couldn’t teach it, because it means that you are coming down on a side, even though the side you’re really trying to come down on, is that of the facts? I don’t even know if there’s a question in there other than just asking to the degree you’re aware of any media literacy programs that exist out there.

TERRY BROWN:

So, the good news is that a lot of people are teaching media literacy in the classroom and critical thinking. This is incorporated into a lot of school curriculum. But, it varies widely. So, some good resources for educators to get started, and I think it’s helpful for parents too, is the News Literacy Project. It is a really great place to start. And also the now defunct newmuseum has a great website called Newseumed.org, and they have a lot of great media literacy resources for educators and parents.

PHILLIPS:

Yes, I loved and will miss the physical structure of the Newseum. Can you think of a time when either your BS meter went off when you were fact-checking, and you said something about this just feels a little off? Or, conversely, a time when you were fooled by a story that looked real, but it wasn’t,

TERRY BROWN:

Well, that’s a very good question. I feel like every day I see something. I actually, there’s not one example of that that comes to mind for me. I know it’s happened a lot, but I think when I was a fact-checker, what really became ingrained in me is you kind of don’t believe anything on face value. Everything has nuance to it. So you just kind of learn to be a little bit skeptical and to look for proof of things.

PHILLIPS:

You just said something that I was thinking about when reading your book, and that is the difference between healthy skepticism and unhealthy skepticism. Because, you know, as a former journalist myself, only that old expression, I think you even quoted in your book, about if your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source.

TERRY BROWN:

Yes.

PHILLIPS:

But there is a point at which you become so skeptical of everything that it’s a disservice to you. How do you satisfy your skepticism and say, now I have enough evidence to believe that this is true?

TERRY BROWN:

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think it really is about checking multiple sources and really trusting your gut. If something seems fishy, like follow that to the next step. Check your sources and look at the source of the information and try to suss it out.

PHILLIPS:

So ultimately, after reading your book, I walked away thinking being an educated news consumer is hard work. It’s not easy. And, given that the title of your book is Breaking The News: What’s Real, What’s Not, and Why the Difference Matters, I thought the place to end was to ask you why the difference matters.

TERRY BROWN:

I think that difference maters because truth matters and because disinformation is dangerous It can be dangerous. I think this example we’ve talked about, the 2020 election and the insurrection is a perfect example of how these things matter and how they can spiral out of control. I mean, people died because of this, right? So, I think that it’s important for us all to recognize the role we play in keeping our society healthy related to the information that is circulating. And I like to say that we all need to be safe drivers on the information super highway It’s really about us, what we’re doing every day, because we make this happen.

PHILLIPS:

Well, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this. By the way, I didn’t ask, but you said Breaking the News is the title of your book. Was that a pun? Because there’s two ways you can break the news.

TERRY BROWN:

It was.

PHILLIPS:

So, breaking the news …

TERRY BROWN:

That was intentional.

PHILLIPS:

I thought it was. I assume our listeners will figure out what the two meetings are. Robin Terry Brown, author of Breaking The News: What’s Real, What’s Not, and Why the Difference Matters. Thank you very much for coming..

TERRY BROWN:

Thank you so much for having me.

• Breaking the News
• media literacy
• Robin Terry Brown