The Place of Media Organisations in the Drive for Post-pandemic News Literacy

Abstract

Even before the pandemic, several major UK news platforms had begun engaging in news literacy education. Against a backdrop of declining levels of trust in the news media (Newman et al. 2019) as well as concerns about the rise of mis- and disinformation, providers of news including the BBC; News UK; the Guardian and the Economist (the latter two via their linked foundations) were expanding their own remit as educators about news. In summer 2021 the authors carried out case studies on five of these projects as part of a wider ongoing project mapping the UK news literacy landscape. This paper draws from these case studies, focusing on one key strand: the role of news organisations in the teaching of news literacy to children, and attitudes among those involved in these projects towards these media organisations. It finds that news literacy projects tend to teach a normative version of professional news content as untainted by bias and framing, or accusations of a lowering of standards driven by tough economic circumstances. At the same time, there was a widespread perception from those interviewed that only certain parts of the news media industry were acceptable participants in news literacy education.