As the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter faced a new round of criticism from U.S. lawmakers, scholars are pointing to the growing need of so-called "news literacy" in the run-up to the 2020 election. Boise State professor Dr. Seth Ashley, author of "News Literacy and Democracy," is an expert on the media landscape.
"I've been studying this stuff for nearly two decades now" said Ashley. "It's not new, but it certainly has taken on a new urgency."
With just a few days until Election Day, Ashley visited with Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about the latest research on news literacy, the growing popularity of social media as a news source, and what he calls "the 5 C's," context, creation, content, circulation and consumption.
"People seem to be really receptive to what we have to say. And it can truly be a nonpartisan issue."
Read the full transcript below:
GEORGE PRENTICE: It's Morning Edition on Boise State Public Radio News. Good morning. I'm George Prentice. More than any other American election in the modern era, the 2020 race for the presidency has been hobbled by misinformation, falsehoods, deceptions, distortion. Simply put, lies. Which leads us to something that we have considered before on this broadcast, and that is news literacy. And that means we'll spend a few minutes this morning with Dr. Seth Ashley, professor at Boise State and the author of News Literacy and Democracy. It feels as if your scholarship has indeed led us to this major tipping point in American history. And the stakes are so high in this year's election.
DR. SETH ASHLEY: Indeed, yeah. I've been studying this stuff for nearly two decades now and, you know, it's not new; but it certainly has taken on a new urgency in the climate and with the technology that we have. And it's an exciting time and it's great that we're talking about this stuff, but I'd prefer that we not. It's just… it's the reasons that we're here… not great.
PRENTICE: Only recently have I become familiar with something called the Media Bias Chart. Can you tell our listeners what that is?
ASHLEY: Someone who is not necessarily a media scholar just decided to create a visualization of different sources one day and rank them in terms of the political spectrum as well as how fact-based they are, versus analysis, versus pure opinion. And I think it's a great starting point for people who just want to get a sense, especially for young people and students. You know, it develops some basic familiarity with kind of a basic mainstream view of how they are viewed, where they fall on these different spectrums. But my whole thing is I don't like to tell people what media to consume. I'm much more interested in teaching people about the media environment and the context in which news and media are created, you know, and then they can go out and find information that's going to be most useful and meaningful for them.
PRENTICE: Let's talk for a few minutes about the dominance of Google and Facebook and YouTube - major players in this year's election. But those waters are really deep. And while we hear about them flagging some accounts or some posts, my sense is that's an impossible task.
ASHLEY: Yeah, and the latest on Facebook, with their turnaround on Holocaust denialism, is a great example of that. You know, not long ago, Zuckerberg was saying some of this definitely false, but it's not our job to be arbiters of truth. And we don't want to get into that. That's partly a legal issue. If they start acting more like a publisher of information, then they take on certain legal responsibilities. But they recently turned the table there and said, actually, this is bad enough. We are going to start moderating more of this kind of content. Same with YouTube and Instagram and others have been more aggressive lately, which is great. But I worry that it's too little, too late. And I worry that it's as if they're doing it largely in the face of impending regulation. And that's,been common throughout history. You know, industry is faced with the threat of government involvement in what they do, try to come up with some little ways to say, no, no, we'll be good, trust us, in order to avoid, you know, the heavy hand of government in their affairs.
PRENTICE: You've been talking about news literacy now for a few years to more and more people. I'm curious about some of the feedback that you get. Can I assume that there is a hunger for greater news literacy?
ASHLEY: I think so, yeah. I think it's a very popular topic. People seem to be really, really receptive to what we have to say. And it can truly be a nonpartizan issue. And it's something that I think everybody can kind of get behind, you know, whatever your issue is, whatever you care about, if you can't, you know, figure out how to work with media both to consume it and to produce it. And none of our issues are going to get a fair hearing unless we can better navigate the media environment.
PRENTICE: Can you share maybe some recent research among you and your colleagues?
ASHLEY: Yeah, I mean, one thing, the kind of a lot of the popular view of news literacy has a lot to do with fact checking and verification, which is great. And, you know, people should definitely learn how to use those tools on the web. And just to get in that basic mindset of what is the evidence for this? Is there anything to support these ideas? But lately, my colleagues and I have tried to separate those separate those things out as behaviors. Right. Those are news literacy behaviors, which are great outcomes. But that's not the actual literacy part, you know, in the same way that you can teach someone to read. But that's different from actually reading and comprehending information. And you just look at in the book. So we tried to focus on the actual knowledge structures that we think are part of news literacy. And that's really distinct from the outcomes. We want those outcomes. We want people to fact check. But people need basic knowledge structures. And we've come up with this construction of these five C’s: context, creation, content, circulation and consumption. So trying to break the process down into these component parts and the things that we want people to know in each area. So context, you know, what's the legal environment? What's the social, political, economic context in which media is created creation? Who are the creators? Who's behind it? What is the content look like circulation? How how does it get out there? What's the distribution look like? And then consumption, how are we involved in how we consume it? So basically, we're trying to teach people more about these individual knowledge areas.
The good news is that we found that, you know, you can increase knowledge. That's something that that we've been successful at. And it does have a positive impact on those outcomes that we're interested in, which is good, because we know that it's basically impossible to change someone's political ideology. Those are things that are so part of our, you know, wrapped up in our identity. But if we can increase knowledge about the media environment, then, you know, hopefully we can all navigate it a little bit better. So that's I think that's all really good news. The more I get into this, the more interesting, the more I you know, I feel like I should have studied psychology instead, because we are we as individuals are so implicated in all of this. Are we know that bias is often in the eye of the beholder. We know what a big deal confirmation bias is. We know that our emotions run high whenever we're talking politics. And the online environment is just it's just awful for that because it's the whole the whole idea is to trigger our effective engagement, which means, you know, finding ways to keep us clicking and keep our eyeballs on the screen, you know, and you've got these, you know, a small handful of billionaires that are running these companies that are basically controlling our access to information. And that's not to say individuals don't have agency in the process, but there's a lot we need to know and that we need to do to improve that that online experience.
PRENTICE: And again, it's understanding the frame first, which is to say who's building that frame, who owns that frame before we start dissecting what's inside as far as content.
ASHLEY: Exactly, and that's a great way to help, you know, have conversations with people who are who are, you know, increasingly engaged in conspiracy theory, belief, you know, just asking questions about the information environment be a good starting point because you're not going to fact check you. And I mean, that's just that's the point is you don't you don't fact check conspiracy theories very well, because they're not they're not built on actual evidence. So that's one way that you can enter in these conversations. Some other tips that research has helped us see with all of that. You know, getting off offline is really important, talking face to face in private when possible, especially when you're talking with your friends and family, understanding that that Internet environment, figuring out how to increase our cognitive dissonance. That's again, that psychology component. It's uncomfortable in general. Humans avoid cognition. It's uncomfortable. It's thinking in general, it's just like extra work. So why would we want to do that? But that's what we all need a little bit more of. And we need to figure out how to be more comfortable with that dissonance, to say it's OK that, you know, to recognize that things are complicated. There aren't easy answers. That's where our simplicity bias comes in. You know, we are drawn to easy answers because things are complicated and it's messy and hard to understand and figure out what to do in a lot of cases. So we're drawn to easy explanations, which usually that's what conspiracy theories provide, which I mentioned QAnon. You know, that's, you know, this basic idea of like satanic pedophiles, like, you know, there's nothing redeeming there. I mean, that's just like that's a you put that label on people and it's just like, oh, this is bad stuff. But the evidence to support that is not there.
PRENTICE: He is. Dr. Seth Ashely, professor at Boise State, author of News, Literacy and Democracy All the Best. We look forward to many conversations in the future.
Find reporter George Prentice on Twitter @georgepren
Copyright 2020 Boise State Public Radio
