News media literacy is a skill important for adolescents and teens to develop. They should be learning to watch, listen, or read and then take the essential step of thinking critically about the information that has been reported to them. Also, all Americans, teens included, should be looking to several news outlets to ensure the information comes from more than one perspective.
Pew released research last week that might help encourage all of us to get our news from more sources. Here are some of their findings:
- Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are much more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents to both use and trust a number of major news sources. These include the major TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), the cable news networks CNN and MSNBC, and major public broadcasters PBS and NPR.
- Republicans, meanwhile, are much more likely to distrust than trust all of these sources. A smaller number of the sources are more heavily used and trusted by Republicans than Democrats, including Fox News, The Joe Rogan Experience, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, the Tucker Carlson Network and Breitbart.
- The legacy newspaper with the largest number of digital subscribers is The New York Times, and most of its readers self-identify as Democrats.
- Sources used by both Democrats and Republicans include Forbes, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
Once we have chosen a few new outlets for our own list, we can use these six tips from the News Literacy Project to detect bias in those sources:
- Differentiate news from opinion
- Think about bias as a spectrum, not a binary concept
- Ask yourself: Compared with what?
- Recognize your own biases
- Be wary of media bias charts and ratings
- Remember that bias has types and forms
To read more about each of these tips, visit the News Literacy Project. Then practice the skills in them as you view news with your teens.