The way Mary Robb sees it, you can’t understand government unless you understand the media. She’s been teaching a class at Andover High School for the past 15 years called “Media Literacy and Democracy”. This year she added something new: fake news.
“Anyone can post anything at any time and it can be picked up and considered legitimate information,” said Robb, a social studies teacher. “I think these skills are much more crucial now than they were in the past.”
She spent much of this year’s presidential election monitoring the media; sorting fact from fiction.
“It was really hard,” said Robb. “I felt like I had to come in each day and share with my students, okay, so this story came out. Let’s look at it, let’s see how accurate it is.”
It’s a new approach for a classroom full of high school juniors and seniors. They’ve grown up consuming information, now they’re learning to assess it.
“I was able to vote this year and if I hadn’t taken this class I think a lot of my decisions would have been based off social media,” explained Lydia Rankin, a senior. “I pretty much click every article I see and, before this class, probably would have believed it.”
She’s been researching a fake news story that went viral before the presidential election.
“On the website there was one news story and it looked like a local newspaper and it even had the local weather,” explained Rankin, “but the one news story was FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment murder suicide.”
The students have been tracking news stories and noting how different outlets cover them. They pay attention to word choice, check on the legitimacy of the source and have learned to do some detective work.
“Literally like right there it says spread this everywhere,“ said senior Maryam Raad, as she shared with classmates a story claiming paid protestors were bused to an anti-Trump rally in Austin, Texas. She discovered the story was false, but was spread widely. It started with a single tweet.
“He only had 40 followers,” said Raad, “but by using a couple of hashtags he was able to generate a giant following.”
There is a debate about whether Facebook and other social media sites should filter out fake news. But even if they do, Robb says there will still be a need to approach content critically.
“Every single person has their own bias. How do we guarantee that what they’re choosing to show or not show is really what we need to know,” said Robb. “I think it’s vital for everybody to have media literacy skills to navigate the sea of media information”.
Robb estimates about half the students at Andover High will take the Media Literacy and Democracy class before graduation. A bill is expected to be introduced in the Massachusetts legislature in January that would set up a guidelines for teaching media literacy in public schools statewide.
