Procedures

• INTRODUCTION:

  Have students work as a class to list all of the news sources they can think of. After they’ve done so, determine how many sources they’ve generated from each of the following: news magazines, newspapers, broadcast television, cable television, and social media, and discuss why that might be the case (why they might have, for instance, skewed more heavily toward cable sources or social media sources instead of toward traditional media)

  Have students do a quickwrite or pair-share on their perceptions of the modern news media and their role as news consumers. Possible questions:

  • Which news sources do you believe are most reliable and why?

  • Which news sources do you believe are least reliable and why?

  • Where are you most likely to get your news? Why?

  • What kind of news stories are you most likely to see as you go about your daily life?

  • What kind of news stories are you most likely to read if they come up in your social media feed or Internet perusal? Why?

  • What kind of news stories are you most likely to share/retweet? Why?

• VIDEO CLIPS:

  Watch the following clips and have students answer the questions below:

  Video Clip 1: Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Mainstream Media News Coverage (1:25)

  Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders discussed the number of minutes of news coverage of various topics in the mainstream media during the period of May/June 2017.

  Video Clip 2: Media/Ethics expert Alicia Shepard on Mainstream Media News Coverage (1:09)

  Media/Ethics expert Alicia Shepard (USA Today) responds to Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders' claims about media coverage.

• DISCUSSION QUESTIONS/WRITING PROMPTS:

  • Does the news media have a responsibility to focus more on issues and less on “personality” stories or should they focus on the topics that the President is tweeting? Justify your position!

  • Did Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Alicia Shepard put forth a more persuasive argument? Justify your position!

• VIDEO CLIPS

  Watch the following clips and have students answer the questions below:

  Video Clip 3: Pause Before You Retweet (1:26)

  Media/Ethics expert Alicia Shepard (USA Today) discusses the importance of news literacy

  Video Clip 4: Confirmation Bias (2:17)

  Media/Ethics expert Alicia Shepard (USA Today) discusses confirmation bias and behind-the-scenes efforts of news organizations

  Video Clip 5: Youth and Partisanship (3:31)

  Former RNC chair Michael Steele and current DNC chair Tom Perez discuss the millennial generation and their consumption of information]

• DISCUSSION QUESTIONS/WRITING PROMPTS:

  • What’s the balance between emotionality and information in most news stories you see? Is it an appropriate one?

  • What evidence of confirmation bias do you see in your own life?

  • How exposed are you to information that doesn’t align to the worldview you already have? What implications does that have for your understanding of national world events?

  • How likely are you to retweet/share a news story? What are the circumstances that usually determine whether or not you do?

  • Which news stories/sources are you most inclined to trust? How often do you try to ensure that a story is reliable before you share it?

  • What’s the balance of responsibilities between news outlets and consumers in terms of judging the value or reliability of news?

  • What challenges does the 24-hour news cycle pose to news outlets? How can those challenges best be addressed?

  • Is your generation doing a better job than your parents’ and grandparents’ at being open to different perspectives and different information or is your information access and consumption equally or more narrowly focused?

• EXTENSION ACTIVITY OPTIONS:

  C-SPAN Lesson Plan: Media Literacy and Fake News

  C-SPAN Classroom Deliberations Lesson: What is Fake News and How Does It Impact Our Lives?

  You Go Live: Have students “live tweet” (into a GoogleDoc rather than on a social media platform) a school event, the school’s morning announcements, or a speech or other news event that you stream into your classroom, requiring a minimum number of tweets that will necessitate a rapid response on their part (They don’t need to be strictly confined to 140 characters, but remind them that they shouldn’t post anything lengthy). Afterward, have them reflect on both the process and the product - how would they judge the quality of their tweets? What challenges were present? Were there tweets that in retrospect, they wouldn’t have posted? Were there tweets they didn’t post that they would have posted if they could? Did their tweets accurately convey the important portions of the event? How constrained did they feel by the 140-character format? Would they have preferred to watch the event and then write something about it afterward? Then discuss implications for the rapid-response nature of the modern news media.

  ClickBait Your School News: Have each student create two GoogleDocs, one containing a sensationalized school news story and one containing a conventional school news story. Have them give each story a headline and insert all headlines from the class period into one GoogleDoc as hyperlinks to the stories. Then have a different class period peruse the headlines and click on the stories they want to read, leaving their initials at the bottom of the page after opening the document. Following that, have the class period that wrote the stories evaluate which stories were most read and discuss or write about the implications for journalism. (If you have technological limitations, this activity can also be done by folding the paper containing the articles in half and writing the headline on the outside)

  Infotainment Investigation: Have students examine the web pages and social media feeds of a variety of news outlets and analyze/discuss what they find - how many of the stories seem chosen because they’re the top stories of the day and how many seem chosen because they might be high-interest?

  Video Clip/Discussion: Levels of Fake News (1:54) ; Discuss: How concerned should we be about each of the levels of “fake news” discussed in the video? What are the potential and/or actual implications of each type of story? Should we view them differently or should all “fake news” be considered in the same way?

  Video Clip/Discussion: Economic Incentive of Fake News (1:23); Discuss: Should social media outlets be making money this way? Are sponsored news items identified clearly enough in social media news feeds? Should social media users be able to opt out of seeing sponsored news in their feeds?

  Video Clip/Discussion: It is a Different Landscape (1:34); Discuss: What are two pros and cons to the way news was consumed in the 1970s and the way news is consumed today? Overall, are we better or worse off in terms of news consumption now than we were in the 1970s? Justify your position!