Pages: 3

This chapter introduces my background as a CIA analyst and how I came to realize the need and desire to teach news literacy to middle and high school students. It also discusses the content and layout of the book and the rationale for including the content I did. It includes recommendations for how teachers might use the book’s layout.

Pages: 11

This chapter details the landscape of how young people—including preteens and teens—define, view, and consume news. It includes a pre-class homework assignment asking students to reflect on their relationship to news by considering things such as what they consider news to be, what their view of news is, what types of news they prefer consuming and why, what types of news they prefer to avoid and why, where they get their news, how often they seek to consume news, how well can they distinguish between fact and opinion while reading news, and what sources they trust the most and the least for their news. For in-class content, the chapter asks teachers to discuss these same questions with students using the results of several surveys from young people like them as fodder. The chapter then highlights survey data suggesting that many preteens and teens may not have the ability to determine fact, opinion, and persuasion/propaganda on social media. It concludes by highlighting how the book attempts to help students learn news literacy skills using media beyond the traditional agenda of politics and current affairs to capture students’ attention—e.g., pop culture news—while teaching them the critical skills they need to evaluate the credibility of media in general.

Pages: 193

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 18

This chapter helps students understand that we are emotional beings who are biased in how we interpret media and how our emotions, mindsets, and biases make us vulnerable to media persuasion. It highlights how social media companies want to keep us glued to our feeds to expose us to the agendas of advertisers and other parties. It defines common types of biases and goes on to discuss how emotional headlines, such as those found in breaking news situations, play on our emotions, getting us to engage with the content by enraging, intriguing, or alarming us. The chapter includes lessons that have students evaluate how they feel about a photo, video, chart, and article text, and how their feelings reveal their biases. It drives home the point that students who recognize that all media is biased learn to think of bias as a perspective—a point of view—rather than reject it out of hand, and who develop empathy and curiosity for that point of view will reduce their vulnerability and increase their news literacy.

Pages: 15

This chapter introduces and defines the parts of what the author calls the information ecosystem and the social media ecosystem. It illustrates how news content fits within these ecosystems and how persuasion and propaganda are usually woven into news content, especially on social media. It drives home the point that it is less important for students to understand precise distinctions between these categories than to know that all media use persuasion, and sometimes propaganda, to get them to adopt the point of view of the creator and/or provider. It includes examples to help students identify persuasion, including positive and negative propaganda. The chapter concludes by asking teachers to share examples of data, information, news, infotainment, and entertainment, and to have students identify what slice of the ecosystems each example represents. It recommends that teachers use examples from trending pop culture to pique students’ interest early in the school year. It requires higher achieving students to also determine whether the example is persuasion or propaganda and how persuasion and propaganda appeal to their biases when they evaluate social media.

Pages: 11

This chapter describes the persuasive effect of visuals on our emotions and biases. It details how the author used images in his long career as a CIA imagery analyst to convey information in ways that words, data, and charts could not. The chapter relates how social media does this as well. The chapter emphasizes that if we don’t teach students how to “read” visuals effectively, we leave students open to misreading them. It drives home the point that students should understand how visuals try to communicate with them via explicit and implicit messages, and it introduces basic techniques to evaluate any visual for explicit and implicit messages. It uses common examples from social media to do so, including photos, ads, memes, and charts, as well as a video.

Pages: 6

This chapter discusses how we often give more credibility to photos than words because we think the camera never lies. It defines the terms “shallow fake” and “deepfake.” The bulk of the chapter is a lesson plan that has student groups evaluate a photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. with the caption omitted and then included. When the caption is omitted, it asks students to make inferences, based on their observations, about what they see, whether they are looking at the original version, and where and when it was first published. They should also ask how the photo makes them feel and how their biases and mindsets influence their reaction. It asks higher achieving students to also critique the photo more deeply by asking additional probing questions. The chapter then poses similar questions after the photo is included with the caption and has students compare their answers before they knew the caption and after. The chapter concludes by asking students to bring in a news photo from a social media platform they use to get their news and present a photo analysis to the class.

Pages: 4

This chapter discusses how we often give more credibility to videos than words because we think the camera never lies. It briefly defines the terms “shallow fake” and “deepfake.” The bulk of the chapter is a lesson plan that has student groups evaluate a video with the audio and caption omitted and then included. When the audio and caption are omitted, it asks students to make inferences, based on their observations, about what they see, whether they are looking at the original version, and where and when it was first published. They should also ask how the video makes them feel and how their biases and mindsets influence their reaction. It asks higher achieving students to also critique the video more deeply by asking additional probing questions. It poses similar questions after the video is included with the caption and audio, and asks students to compare their observations before and after they saw the caption and heard the audio. The chapter concludes by asking students to bring in a news video from a social media platform they use to get their news and present a video analysis to the class.

Pages: 14

This chapter introduces the concept of memes. It defines what memes are and the persuasive effect they can have on students. It includes an activity in which teachers present a meme without its caption. All students should examine the meme closely and identify what they see, whether they are looking at the original version of the meme, and where and when it was first published. They should ask how the meme makes them feel and how their biases and mindsets influence their reaction. The chapter asks higher achieving students to also critique the meme more deeply by posing additional probing questions. Teachers then present the meme with its caption and ask students to compare their thoughts about the meme with and without the caption.

Pages: 7

This chapter cites surveys indicating how students can be particularly influenced by endorsements from social media ‘influencers.’ After discussing new requirements from the Federal Trade Commission for a “clear and conspicuous” disclosure if there is a “material connection” between an influencer and marketer, the chapter highlights how students should be interested in determining how the ad seeks to persuade them with explicit and implicit messages. It concludes by having groups of two to three students examine ads on social media, answer questions about the ads, and present their findings to the class.

Pages: 13

This chapter introduces students to charts in social media news. After citing a quantitative survey on the fun topic of pizza consumption and asking students what they think about it, the chapter highlights how we often give more credibility to numbers and statistics—especially when they are displayed as charts, maps, graphs, diagrams, and tables—than words. It explains how media producers know this and use numbers and statistics to make their information seem more credible. The chapter then discusses and offers examples of the five common ways chart makers misrepresent and distort statistics to support their explicit or implicit message. It gives groups of students electronic copies of five charts, each of which represents one of the five ways charts often misrepresent and distort data. It asks each group to identify which one of the five ways each chart shows. The lesson requires all students to identify what type of chart they see, what its main message is, what ways it misrepresents or distorts data, whether they are looking at the original version, and where and when it was first published. It requires higher achieving students to also critique the chart more deeply by asking additional probing questions. It includes a homework assignment asking students to bring in a chart from a social media platform they use to get their news and present a chart analysis to the class.

Pages: 7

In this chapter, students learn to understand that some media cannot be evaluated for credibility because it is opinion-based and contains no verifiable facts. Students learn to distinguish between fact-based and opinion-based media and that misinterpreting uncheckable opinions as facts can spread disinformation and potentially harm people. The chapter begins with a story from the author, who describes that when he was a CIA analyst, he sometimes caught himself treating a source’s opinion as fact, even when it was not consistent with other evidence or could not be cross-checked. The author explains that some of the analysts he trained would sometimes fail to distinguish opinions unsupported by facts from fact-based opinions. The chapter stresses that reputable news outlets usually label their social media posts as opinion, op-ed, analysis, advice, perspective, etc., but that many other social media posts do not. Middle and high schoolers may not see the labels in their social media feeds if they are in a small font or are not at the top center of the post. They may have an even harder time knowing the difference between the labels. The chapter concludes with a lesson about Martin Luther King Jr. to help students distinguish fact-based from opinion-based statements. It uses a decision chart and a discussion worksheet on fact- versus opinion-based statements to help students evaluate three statements about MLK.

Pages: 20

In this chapter, the author describes how as a CIA officer analyzing satellite imagery in the wake of 9/11 and the run-up to the US war in Iraq in 2003, he was tangentially involved in helping determine if Iraq was operating mobile biological weapons facilities on its soil. He details how the United States and its allies did not find evidence of the facilities and how analysts’ poor evaluation of reporting contributed to the failure. The chapter highlights how students’ failure to properly fact-check news reports on social media can have as far-reaching implications for US democracy as the Intelligence Community’s (IC) failure to properly fact-check intelligence reporting on Iraq. It emphasizes why evaluating media credibility is critical to students’ becoming digitally literate and how students can use SIFT to evaluate pop culture and social studies, civics, and ELA media. The chapter offers lessons that ask students to fact-check various types of news on social media using SIFT. It includes charts about the bias of some popular news media outlets to help them with their evaluations.

Pages: 11

This chapter provides techniques to help students spot news on social media produced by bots and bot-like accounts. It discusses why and how bots are a problem and then lists and discusses key indicators of a bot and bot-like behavior. It concludes by offering a lesson that helps students identify bots and possible bot-generated content on social media by evaluating four accounts on X.

Pages: 41

This chapter introduces the technology of artificial intelligence (AI), including the opportunities and challenges it poses for teaching and learning in middle and high school classrooms. The chapter begins by defining key terms associated with AI and then discusses how AI can enhance and interfere with learning. It gives students practice identifying whether a text, image, or video is human- or AI-generated, using key indicators. It discusses the ethics of AI use outside and inside the classroom and presents students with several fictional but realistic scenarios illustrating so-called right-versus-wrong and right-versus-right (ethical) dilemmas. It discusses current and planned policies around the governance of AI and has students read and discuss the implications of the White House Executive Order (EO) on AI. It asks students to consider how the EO, if fully implemented, would affect their use of AI outside the classroom, how the measures could change the types of careers available to them in the future, and how the measures could affect the job market and skills they would need to get a job. The chapter also asks students to consider how the measures would affect their use of AI inside the classroom. It concludes by discussing the current and pending AI policies by social media platforms and asks students to consider how the policies, if fully implemented, would affect their role as consumers and creators in and outside the classroom.

Pages: 24

This chapter has students play two interactive games that reinforce the news literacy skills they have learned so far. One game has students evaluate social media news examples for authenticity and credibility using various indicators. The other game has students determine whether each example is misleading news, and if so, what category it falls into, by impact and motivation. Students are asked to play the games individually and then come together in groups to discuss their results and refine them if they desire. The chapter recommends that teachers grade each student on how well their scores approximate the ‘school solution.’

Pages: 72

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 24

This chapter introduces students to text-based arguments and how to evaluate them. It highlights how the author learned to produce and present logical text-based arguments during his career as a CIA analyst. It emphasizes that middle and high school students should expect the same from social media posts. After defining an argument and key terms related to argumentation, the chapter illustrates with a diagram how arguments relate to the social media ecosystem. It discusses what makes a good text-based argument and how a good argument must satisfy the Logic Condition and the Truth Condition. It then provides a text-based tweet and associated full article and asks students to determine if either or both make an argument and, if so, how good of one. It also asks students how their emotions, mindsets, and biases influenced their reaction to the tweet and if they changed after reading the full article; could they fact-check the tweet; what was different about fact-checking the tweet vs. the full article; did they find disinformation in the tweet and/or in the article; could they trace claims, quotes, and media to their original contexts in the tweet; and what does their experience tell them about getting news only from a tweet or other snippet of information in a social media post.

Pages: 23

This chapter introduces students to visual-based arguments and how to evaluate them. It begins by highlighting how the author learned how to create and present persuasive visual-based arguments during his career as a CIA analyst. It emphasizes that middle and high school students should expect the same from social media posts. The chapter discusses the debate over whether visuals by themselves can make good arguments or arguments at all, and concludes that visuals such as photos and videos—including those created by AI—as well as charts, memes, etc., can provide key support for an argument, but they must have text or spoken words to form an argument. The chapter reminds us that a good argument, even a visual-based one, must satisfy the Logic Condition and the Truth Condition. The chapter concludes with a lesson in which students evaluate whether a photo and two visual-based memes make an argument and if they are good ones. It requires higher achieving students to also ask, “If the visual makes an argument, what is the creator or poster of the argument trying to achieve?”

Pages: 12

This chapter shows students how to evaluate fallacies in social media posts about pop culture and social studies. They learn how to define a fallacy, the definitions of common fallacies, why spotting fallacies is important, and how they can easily be persuaded by fallacies on social media. They learn how evaluating the argumentation behind social media posts can help them identify fallacies and reduce their vulnerability to them. The chapter includes an activity in which students identify common fallacies in social media about pop culture and social studies. It wraps up with a lesson that has student groups evaluate a tweet and a video that appeared on TikTok and Instagram. The groups answer questions about each, such as does the creator/poster make an argument, is it a good one and why or why not, what fallacy does the media use, and how does the fallacy affect the persuasiveness of the argument.

Pages: 11

This chapter shows students how to detect manipulation tactics in social media posts about pop culture and social studies. They learn how to define a manipulation tactic, the definitions of common manipulation tactics, why spotting them is important, and how they can be easily deceived by social media posts that use them. They learn how evaluating the argumentation behind social media posts can help them identify manipulation tactics and reduce their vulnerability to them. The chapter concludes with a lesson that has student groups try to identify whether a YouTube video and an ad on social media use a manipulation tactic and, if so, what they are. Higher achieving students also answer questions such as, does the creator/poster make an argument, is it a good one and why or why not, and how does the manipulation tactic affect the persuasiveness of the argument?

Pages: 25

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 17

This chapter reinforces students’ understanding of the news literacy skills they have learned in the book to evaluate any type of social media. It tweaks the order of the evaluation steps from what the author presented in Parts I and II. Now that students understand each step, the new sequence is the most streamlined and time-efficient approach. The chapter offers recommendations on how teachers can use the book most effectively. It encourages teachers who have not taught news literacy skills to their students to cover Parts I and II in the first part of the school year, using pop culture examples from social media to hook students. It suggests that teachers weave in examples supporting the social studies, civics, and ELA curriculum as the year goes on. It recommends that teachers who have already covered the skills in Parts I and II when the school year begins use the calendar-based media evaluations in Part III, as well as evaluations posted regularly on the author’s website, to keep students’ skills fresh.

Pages: 6

This chapter includes the Afterward, where the author explains his passion for teaching news literacy. He tells how he decided to write the book for teachers of middle and high school students because the students are at a prime age to learn and apply the skills and are attracted to social media. He discusses how he realized that teaching news literacy skills to these preteens and teens, who have several years left in school and long lives ahead of them, can help them perform better in school, make better decisions in life, and engage with news on social media with the open-mindedness necessary for a healthy democracy. The author explains how he hopes the lesson plans in the book make teaching news literacy easier for teachers, especially with its heavy focus on pop culture to engage students. He points teachers to his website for additional lesson plans. He concludes the chapter with a list of key news literacy tools and resources, including a calendar of recurring events for news literacy instruction.