Gen Z’s Problem with “Fake” News

In the eyes of today’s teens, journalism and the media are doomed. 

In two major surveys of US teens conducted over the last two years, the nonprofit News Literacy Project found deep levels of mistrust and misunderstanding of the news: 

• Only about half of teens know that “branded content” is a form of advertising;
• Only 52 percent of teens understand that articles labeled “commentary” are opinions; 
• Teens have overwhelmingly negative impressions of news, calling it “fake,” “crazy,” “biased,” “boring,” and “bad”; 
• Just 15 percent of teens actively seek out news, and many hold low opinions of journalists’ truthfulness and ethics. Half of teens, for instance, believe that journalists make up quotes. 

The root of this distrust is the lack of “news literacy,” argues Charles (“Chuck”) Salter, the News Literacy Project’s President and CEO. Teens aren’t currently taught how to be savvy consumers of the information that flashes across their screens. They don’t know what makes good journalism and how to tell if a story is credible. As one result, far too many teens are falling into the trap of conspiracism and misinformation. In fact, 80 percent of teens said they’re inclined to believe conspiracy theories they see online, according to the News Literacy Project’s research. 

Salter argues that news literacy is a “fundamental life skill” essential to the functioning of democracy. “A democracy can’t exist without a well-informed public,” he says. Far too many schools, however, don’t offer this instruction. Just 39 percent of teens said news literacy was part of their school’s curriculum, though 94 percent of teens said schools should be required to teach it. 

This transcript has been condensed for length and edited for clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube and iTunes. 

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Anne Kim: As the parent of a teen, I want to congratulate you on producing what is possibly the most depressing research that I have seen in a very long time.

Chuck Salter: Some of the data we’ve gotten from the two studies are a little disturbing. In fact, I’ll admit it even shocked our staff, having worked in this field for a decade and a half. 

But I do want to say that there is good news because there’s a solution: news literacy education. The study itself shows that news literacy education helps overcome a lot of the depressing statistics that we saw. And most importantly, 94 percent of the students who were polled think they should be taught these skills. Anybody who has teenagers or anybody who’s in education knows that if a teen wants to be taught something, that’s half the battle. 

Anne Kim: Before we get into details about your findings, I’d love to get a little bit of context about why your organization decided to do this work. Give us a little bit of history too about the News Literacy Project for those who may be unfamiliar.

Chuck Salter: The News Literacy Project is now 17 years old, and it was founded by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist named Alan Miller. He first discovered there was a problem when he went to go teach at his daughter’s middle school class. He just wanted to present about what it meant to be a journalist and what journalism was. And he learned that an understanding of journalism and its role in society and the benefits that it brings to society was sorely lacking among the students. But the response he got from those students and their teachers also showed how helpful his talk had been. So he saw that there was something there, and he started NLP to start bridging that divide and bringing news literacy and news literacy skills into the classroom. Fast forward 17 years, and we are the largest provider of news literacy curriculum in the country. Over half a million students were taught with our materials last year and we are far outpacing that number this year in all 50 states, in small districts, large districts, urban, everywhere across the country.

So we commissioned the first study last year and found that teens are quite cynical about the press. [For example,] almost half of the students polled thought that the press did more to harm democracy than help it. These findings, as you mentioned, were pretty disturbing. So we did a second survey to follow up with many of those same students to see what might be driving that mistrust. What we found was that the mistrust and the cynicism of journalism among teens came from a profound misunderstanding of what journalism is, what it takes to practice good journalism, how it operates, and the indispensable role that journalism plays in society.

Anne Kim: When you look at these two reports together, you really do get this very bleak picture of both teenagers’ ability to understand and analyze news, but also their perceptions about the people who are delivering the news. There are so many shocking statistics in the report, it’s hard to know where to begin.

One thing that struck me was that, first of all, lot of teenagers aren’t actually actively seeking out news to begin with—just 15 percent. But also problematic is the stunning number of teenagers who can’t actually tell the difference between news and opinion or news and advertising. 

Chuck Salter: That ability to identify fact-based, standards-based journalism versus other types of content is really a core skill that students learn when they’re becoming news literate. It is a problem among teens, but we know this goes on into adulthood. There are adults who actually have a hard time really understanding the difference not only between standards-based journalism and other content, but even within standards-based journalism. They , fail to see that something is an advertisement, even if it says “sponsored content,” or understand the difference between fact-based news reporting and the opinion page, even if it might be say at the top of a newspaper or magazine that this is an opinion piece. Folks will look at it and sometimes mistake it as, “Well, this paper is biased.” So it’s news that can’t be trusted, even though it’s clearly a separate part of the news organization. 

This is a real  deficit in the skills that teens have. But again, we are working to ensure that all students are taught news literacy before they graduate high school, just like they’re taught English, math and the other social sciences. This is a key life skill. And it’s important because the way we receive information, the amount of information we receive, and the speed we receive it is more complex than ever in human history. We know that our brains aren’t even really wired to manage that much information. And so it just becomes that much more important for young people to learn how to discern the difference between quality news and information and everything else. 

Anne Kim: Your report found that only 52 % of teens could identify a commentary piece as opinion when it actually was labeled “commentary.” So that’s a little bleak.

Chuck Salter: That is correct. 

Anne Kim: This inability to distinguish news from other content probably helps explain one of your other incredibly shocking findings. You asked teens to give one word that best described the media these days, and the words they gave were overwhelmingly negative: “biased,” “crazy,” “fake,” “boring,” “sad.” You have this amazing infographic in your report with a word cloud that shows that these words are the most prominent. Where is the sentiment coming from? Why are teens so negative?

Chuck Salter: People could ask why teens think anything, right? When we look at these two studies even together, they don’t explicitly answer the question why teens feel this way. 

However, the findings do point to a lot of possibilities. First, teens really don’t have a lot of positive examples or role models of journalists in popular culture today. In fact, the survey points out that very few teens could actually think of an example that they’ve seen in whatever entertainment they’re consuming, where the media is actually accurately portrayed and done so in a fairly positive light in terms of what the free press means to a free society. 

Students also really don’t understand the ethical and professional standards that credible newsrooms follow, and how hard it is to actually produce good journalism. Teens today don’t understand the amount of work that it takes to bring people quality and accurate news. And then the third thing is that teens just have trouble right now with such a flood of different types of information at their fingertips. They really struggle to distinguish what is news versus what is other content they’re consuming, which a lot of people now mistake or use as their news. 

Anne Kim: There are some numbers from your report about the negative attitudes that teenagers ascribe to journalists as far as their behavior, which illustrates the depths of the battle you’re fighting here. For instance, you found that 69 % of teens say that news organizations intentionally add bias. Half think that journalists make up quotes, and half say that journalists always or almost always do things like give advertisers special treatment or makeup details or do favors for sources or take videos and photos out of context. I take this personally! 

Chuck Salter: I think anyone who’s in journalism or cares about journalism or understands the role that journalism plays in our democratic society should be disturbed by this.

But while the work ahead of us is daunting, and these statistics are pretty disappointing, there’s a solution, and it’s been proven. The issue we’re talking about now is how to scale it and to make sure that students are given this kind of education.

Anne Kim: What can be done about the representation of journalists in popular culture and the media? Your report mentioned that few kids were able to name a movie or a TV show with a positive role model for journalists in it. And to the extent that they knew of any journalists, they mentioned Spider-Man. And I have to point out here that Peter Parker, while maybe a great superhero, is actually a really, really bad journalist. He actually does do the terrible unethical things that teenagers ascribe to journalists! He only has one source and that’s himself. He makes up quotes about himself as Spider-Man, and he takes photos and videos out of context. How do you fix this connection between the representation of journalism in popular culture and the attitudes that teens have toward the news. Are you going to Hollywood and telling them this has got to change?

Chuck Salter: I stopped to think about what positive role models I saw of journalists and, funny enough, it goes back to superheroes again: I think it was probably Lois Lane. But now that I’m well versed in news literacy, I don’t know if she followed all the rules either. 

Anne Kim: She had a big time conflict of interest! 

Chuck Salter: But to your question on a serious note. That’s not our work or our lane to tell Hollywood what they should or should not be doing. It would be nice if teens these days had better role models for good journalism in the entertainment that they consume. 

What we’re best positioned to do is educating students to understand that the journalists that they read or that they see on TV are in fact the role models that they need.  It really comes down to teens’ lack of knowledge about how hard this work is to bring you credible news and information. Role models would be great, but I think students should be able to see the value in journalism even without fictitious role models.

Anne Kim: A lot of parents hearing this might say news literacy is a lower priority compared to other things that kids have to deal with. But you point out in your reports that there’s actually a tangible risk of personal harm that comes from low news literacy. For instance, you find that four out of five teenagers who encounter conspiracy theories online say they’re inclined to believe them, which is really concerning.

Chuck Salter: Well, of course, you won’t get any argument from me. I think our message to school districts and policymakers across the country is that news literacy is a fundamental life skill, and that it is very difficult to exist in a free and democratic society without it. But even leaving democracy and politics aside, [misinformation] could lead to great harm. Conspiracy theories or believing in conspiracy theories is one route where that harm could come to people. 

Within our own curriculum for news literacy, there are courses and lessons around conspiratorial thinking. We don’t take time to debunk specific conspiracy theories. We teach students how to think about news and information, but not what to think about any source or theory. We leave it to them to apply the skills that they’ve learned to assess and analyze what they’re looking at. They learn why conspiratorial thinking happens, and why people might be attracted to this kind of thinking. 

Anne Kim: What happens to a society when you have a generation of young people growing up who not only distrust the press, but nearly half of whom believe that journalists are the ones damaging democracy? What does that mean for the future of our country?

Chuck Salter: We’ve begun taking to the phrase that the future of journalism is being decided in classrooms today. And it is true. They are the future consumers of news and information. So for anyone who’s interested in shoring up the field of journalism, or bringing back local journalism, we invite them to think of the demand side of the journalism equation.

If people don’t understand or appreciate or trust what you are doing, there will be no audience for it. And so I think the societal harm, especially in a free and democratic society, is potentially devastating. A democracy can’t exist without a well-informed public. 

And I want to be very clear that news literacy is nonpartisan.

News literacy as a concept doesn’t care who you vote for or what you vote for. It wants you to vote, though, and it wants you to vote as a person who is well informed. It’s not a partisan issue. People shouldn’t fear it, feeling that it would favor one side or the other. This is an indispensable life skill, a societal skill. If we want to maintain a free and democratic society, our people need to be informed, and news literacy is where that starts.

Anne Kim: What is your advice to working journalists who practice standard-based journalism? What can they do day to day to elevate the quality of their work and to help the cause of promoting news literacy?

Chuck Salter: Well, I don’t think we’re not in the business of telling journalists how to do their job. There are thousands of wonderful journalists doing tremendous work every day, and we’re champions of that. I think the only advice we would give is focusing on transparency. While we are working to educate teens on how journalism works, there’s probably no better reinforcement of that idea than if journalists themselves show how they do their work. 

Many outlets have started doing this. They’ve started fact checking sites. They’re going behind the curtain to show people how decisions are made. The more of that they can do, the more trust that they could engender.