Advancing children’s news media literacy: learning from the practices and experiences of young Australians

Abstract

Social media use has redefined the production, experience and consumption of news media. These changes have made verifying and trusting news content more complicated and this has led to a number of recent flashpoints for claims and counter-claims of ‘fake news’ at critical moments during elections, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Concerns regarding the actual and potential social impact of fake news led us to carry out the first nationally representative survey of young Australians’ news practices and experiences. Our analysis finds that while social media is one of young people’s preferred sources of news, they are not confident about spotting fake news online and many rarely or never check the source of news stories. Our findings raise important questions regarding the need for news media literacy education – both in schools and in the home. Therefore, we consider the historical development of news media literacy education and critique the relevance of dominant frameworks and pedagogies currently in use. We find that news media has become neglected in media literacy education in Australia over the past three decades, and we propose that current media literacy frameworks and pedagogies in use need to be rethought for the digital age.

Keywords

Australia children critical literacy fake news media education media literacy news literacy young people

Introduction: making and receiving news in Australia

News media organisations around the world have for some time been experiencing a period of rapid evolution as they struggle to find new distribution and business models that adapt to digital media environments and practices. The uptake of Internet enabled mobile devices and the rising use of social media sites has changed the way news production is funded, produced and circulated (Bruns, 2018). Digital media environments – and Google and Facebook in particular – now provide a key source of traffic for the online websites of major news media organisations, but they also receive a considerable portion of the advertising income that news media organisations once would have received (Feik, 2017). Major news organisations are also struggling to maintain their authority as the ‘fourth estate’ in the digital environment since audiences are now less willing to pay for news given the proliferation news sources online (Reuters Institute, 2016). Issues of news integrity and trust have also become flashpoints for controversy in recent years with claims often made that the pace and mobility of ‘fake’ or deliberately false news online is now a key contributor to this problem (Edelman, 2018; Newman et al., 2017; Watkins et al., 2017).

In 2017, the Collins Dictionary named ‘fake news’ the word of the year and added it to their 4.5 billion word corpus. The Dictionary’s lexicographers claimed that usage of the term had increased by 365% since 2016.¹ Collins Dictionary (2017) defined the word – as we use it here in this article – to refer to ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’. While we use the term in this article, we acknowledge an ongoing debate by journalists and academics who have claimed that the term should no longer be used because it has been so misused for political gain that it no longer has credible meaning. A number of scholars and journalists now use the term ‘disinformation’ instead of ‘fake news’ for this reason.

In recent years, fake news relating to both actual and non-occurring natural disasters, political candidates, terrorism attacks and urban disasters spread quickly around the world (Bulger and Davison, 2018; Hannard, 2017). Studies demonstrate that, in some instances, just a few people have been responsible for the widespread circulation of this false information (Gupta et al., 2013), while in other cases, automated bots have been deployed (Bessi and Ferrara, 2016). Often, the distribution of fake news is driven by individuals or companies whose business model is based on driving traffic to websites as a way to increase advertising revenue by ‘gaming’ the way the Google advertisement payment model works (Allcott and Matthew, 2017; Bakir and McStay, 2017; Silverman and Alexander, 2016).

Despite evidence of both government and public concern regarding the impact of fake news and news integrity in Australia, we found that no recent national study had examined the news practices and experiences of young Australians. Our study sought to address this research gap in order to provide important baseline data to support evidence-based discussions about young people’s news practices and experiences in relation to concerns about fake news.

At the same time, our ongoing research interest in young people’s media literacy meant we also wanted our study to provide data that would help critique the (potential) impact of media literacy education in schools on young people’s news engagement and experience. The Australian Curriculum is one of the few international curriculum policies to include media literacy as a goal for all students, in the form of the Media Arts curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2018). The curriculum encourages teachers to develop students’ critical engagement with media. For instance, at Years 5 and 6 (11- and 12-year-olds), in addition to a range of creative production skills, students should be given opportunities to ‘consider the ethical behaviour and role of communities and organisations in regulating access to media artworks’, where ‘artworks’ is defined broadly and includes news reports (ACARA, 2018). Yet, while media literacy education has historically focused on developing citizens’ critical capacities to engage meaningfully with media and popular culture, over the past decade our own research has demonstrated that the focus in Australian schools often appears to emphasise digital media production skills and participation over the development of critical literacies that can support students’ capacity to reflect on and critique media content, distribution and consumption (Dezuanni, 2015a; Notley, 2008a). We believe that a focus on digital skills may have led ‘news literacy’ to be considered ‘traditional’ or ‘old fashioned’ and therefore of less interest to young people. At the same time, we have observed that the Australian public (state-funded) school system has tended to ban or restrict social media by imposing statewide school filtering systems (Notley, 2008b, 2009a, 2009b). These practices and attitudes, we hypothesise, are likely to have reduced the likelihood that Australian teachers are providing critical literacy classes on online news media as part of the Australian Curriculum, Media Arts, even though the Curriculum enables them to do so. In light of this, we wanted to consider how useful current media literacy curriculum and pedagogies might be to help combat the spread or impact of fake news.

Changing news practices and the increasing pace of the circulation of news means there is a real need to revisit how we develop young people’s critical thinking and news literacy skills. It is imperative that we ask how and where young people consume, access and learn about critiquing news media; how they use it in their lives; what they think about news; and what they would like to change about their news access and engagement. These lines of enquiry provided a clear frame and purpose for the survey we report on in this article. We also sought to understand how historic and recent academic literature has positioned young people as consumers, critics and/or producers of news. We found that while news media literacy may be located within a broader tradition of media literacy education in formal schooling, more recently it has not featured as a central aspect of the field, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom. Therefore, while there has been a recent focus on news literacy by a range of agencies in the United States and the United Kingdom as a response to new anxieties about ‘fake news’ (boyd, 2018; Livingstone, 2018), in the Australian context there has been very little in-depth discussion about how news literacy relates to the already established media literacy in curriculum in Australia. In the following section, we trace the historical development and current status of media literacy education.

Media education and news literacy

Internationally, media literacy education has developed as a peripheral activity in mainstream schooling over the course of almost 80 years, typically treated as an add-on to the core curriculum or as an elective subject in secondary schools. In addition, media literacy efforts have infrequently focused on news literacy, particularly since the 1980s (cf. Mihailidis, 2012: 1). The earliest media education efforts came through film ‘appreciation’ in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1920s (Bolas, 2009; Dale, 1933; Polan, 2007) at least partly in response to concerns about cinema’s negative influence on children (Dezuanni and Goldsmith, 2015). In parallel, FR Leavis and Denys Thompson (1933) rallied teachers against what they saw as the culturally corrosive influence of popular culture and communications media on children, with significant influence on the study of literature and communication forms in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries for several decades. Perhaps the first media literacy textbook, Levis and Thompson’s Culture and Environment, provides approaches for classroom teachers to pursue ‘training in critical awareness’ with a focus on critical analysis of ‘cheap’ entertainment or ‘substitute living’. They suggest that ‘as the popular Press is the most powerful and persuasive de-educator of the public mind work on it should be started early’ (Leavis and Thompson, 1933: 138). For instance, in what might be described as early attention to what are now sometimes called ‘filter bubbles’ (Pariser, 2011), they ask students to consider: ‘What are likely to be views on politics, equality of educational opportunity, capital punishment, the Leagues of Nations, of a regular reader of, respectively, the Daily Mail, the New Statesman, the Weekend Review, the New Leader?’ (p. 139). In the United States, a form of media literacy education emerged in the 1930s to assist students to critically read propaganda materials (Hobbs, 2010). Thus, in this early framing of media literacy education, ‘teachers were expected to be able to place themselves outside of these processes of media influence’ in order to ‘provide pupils with skills for critical viewing that empowered them’ to make informed decisions about the quality and purpose of the media content they were consuming (Lemish, 2015).

Discourses of the harmful (or at least anti-intellectual) influence of media on children remained prominent in approaches to classroom study of media in the middle decades of the 20th century. Raymond Williams’ (1962) ‘Communications’, written in part as a response to the 1960 UK National Union of Teachers special conference on ‘Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility’, proposed educators should teach students about communications institutions and develop ‘criticism’ of communications, including the Press (pp. 132–134). He suggests, ‘I am sure that we are neglecting the world of ordinary communication to which all of us, after education, go home or go on’ (p. 134). Thompson’s (1964) edited collection Discrimination and Popular Culture includes a chapter that critiques the problems of ‘the Press’. Unusual for the time, the author argues that to reform journalism, students should be educated to critically read newspapers but also to produce their own journalism, with critical discussion about technical factors and content (Martin, 1964: 93–94).

Hall and Whannel’s (1964) ‘The Popular Arts’ is less dismissive of popular culture and provides some comprehensive analyses of ‘the Press’. They provide curriculum activities aimed at secondary school students that require institutional and industry analysis of news agencies (p. 424) which recognise journalism’s broader social, economic and political roles. Academic media scholarship began to have an impact on the development of school resources during the 1960s and 1970s, and school textbooks and resources began to appear internationally, often including a least some focus on ‘the Press’. These included resources produced in the United States (Curtis, 1975; Potter et al., 1979), the United Kingdom (Firth, 1968; Tucker, 1966) and Australia (Dwyer and Thompson, 1973). The approach of these texts was typically to dedicate chapters to each of the major media forms, including film, television, advertising and news media.

A shift towards a more abstract approach to media literacy education developed in the 1980s, with an increasing focus on students applying conceptual knowledge across media, regardless of form or type. Masterman (1980), for instance, argued, ‘it is the establishment of valid cross-media generalisation which can give media studies its worthwhileness and academic respectability’ (p. 4). Masterman drew on work in media, communications and cultural studies, including Williams’ work in ‘Communications’ and Hall and Whannel’s work in ‘The Popular Arts’, along with Louis Althusser’s ‘Marxist Structuralism’ and Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy to bring ‘theory’ to media education. He suggests a focus on core concepts like ‘total communication’ (visual and non-verbal communication), connotation (drawing on semiotics) and mediation and ideology (including aspects of industry and audience reception). Masterman’s chapter on television news focuses particularly on the constructed nature of news and claims to authority, suggesting ‘in no other area of television education … is it quite so incumbent upon the teacher to demonstrate to his [sic] students the constructed nature of what they see’ (p. 78). Masterman’s (1985: 24) goal to assist students to develop ‘critical autonomy’ in their responses to media is based on their ability to apply conceptual thinking across a range of media forms and is more important than their ability to produce their own media.

Over the past three decades, Masterman’s approach has become highly influential on what has become known as a ‘core concepts’ approach to media literacy education, formalised through a range of media curriculum policies internationally (British Film Institute (BFI), 1989, 1991; Ontario Ministry of Education, 1987; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 2011), and has become the predominant framework for studying the media in schools (Buckingham and Domaille, 2009). Definitions of concepts vary across approaches and jurisdictions but cluster around media languages and narrative concepts, media representations and social or ideological influences, audience and reception theory, institutional and industry practices, and the role of technologies in production, distribution and access. From a process perspective, media literacy has come to be defined by leading media literacy scholars and advocates as the ability to ‘access, analyse, evaluate and produce’ media (Aufderheide, 1993; National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), 2018).

During the 1980s, media production became more possible in schools due to the increasing availability of low-cost media production technologies. Masterman (1980) and others (e.g. Ferguson, 1981) were suspicious of student media production for fear that it simply reinforced dominant media discourses, in opposition to the development of critical reading skills. This reinforced significant concern about the harmful effects of popular screen genres on culture. Postman (1985), for instance, argued that television news was necessarily much less useful as an aspect of public discourse than printed newspapers, because of the lack of debate, scrutiny and in-depth reportage on the medium (pp. 89–92). Despite these concerns, the popularity of media production among students, and discourses of progressive student-centred learning, led to an increasing focus on creative production of popular genres in schools (Buckingham et al., 1995). Most often, production within media education frameworks has aimed to develop students’ conceptual, abstract knowledge rather than media production skills. The focus of media production, particularly in secondary schools, has tended to be creative narrative or documentary video production, and has become increasingly aligned to Arts Education (Dezuanni, 2015b; Tyner, 1998: 153). It less often involves news production, perhaps because it is assumed that it is less attractive to students, and perhaps because the news is not considered an ‘art form’. There is also a deep suspicion among adults that young people are not interested in the news, leading to a lack of news produced for young people (Buckingham, 2000; Carter, 2009).

The concurrent focus on the ‘key concepts’ approach within media literacy education, its normalisation as a curriculum area and the move towards Arts-based media production has tended to sideline news media literacy, particularly in the United Kingdom and Australia. Indicative is the BFI’s 450-page omnibus collection of media education publications, which dedicates just 10 pages to news media and journalism, instead focusing mostly on film and television education (BFI, 1991). Similarly, a UK book on Media Studies for teachers, underpinned by the ‘key concepts’ and produced around the same time dedicates only a handful of references to news media, mostly in the chapter on ‘institutions’ (Lusted, 1991). A special issue of the Australian journal Continuum dedicated to Media Education, with articles from around the world (Quin and Aparici, 1996), includes almost no reference to news media. Within the United States, there has been slightly more focus on news literacy education, particularly aligned to civics education (cf. Mihailidis, 2011; Moore, 2013; Powers, 2010). In general, though, news literacy gains much less attention than contemporary concerns like ‘digital literacy’, which is often more focused on technology education than communications or media education (Buckingham, 2007).

The neglect of news media in media literacy education over the past three decades is surprising, given the extent to which digital media has disrupted the news industries and journalistic practices. Buckingham’s (2000) book The Making of Citizens: Young people, News and Politics is one of only few scholarly works to provide a comprehensive treatment of young people’s interpretations of news media, and it reports on data collected during the 1990s. There is little current scholarly work on news media literacy, particularly as it is approached in school classrooms. There exist a handful of recent exceptions. Jennifer Fleming (2010) provides an outline of examples of curriculum interventions for ‘media literacy in a post-fact society’ (p. 132), albeit with university students. Her aim was to blend contemporary journalism education with critical media literacy with the aim of developing students’ critical habits of mind (p. 143). Mihailidis (2012: 8) outlines a model for 21st-century news within the context of news literacy education for university journalism students and for citizenship. The model includes ‘journalist’ and ‘citizen’ as participants on mobile platforms, engaged with digital participatory tools and the spreadability of news in digital contexts. Hobbs (2010) provides a rare example of a news literacy intervention from a primary school classroom, with commentary on the more and less successful aspects of the project. In Hobbs’ example, students considered how a recent event – where African American young people had used social media to form ‘flashmobs’ in public places, some of which led to public violence – was reported on in the media. The students analysed how the events were reported, they visited a local newspaper to learn about the production process and they made their own media in response. Most recently, Bulger and Harrison (2018) review media literacy efforts in the United States (with some analysis of the United Kingdom). In the United States, they find that there is no standardised national curriculum and while studies have shown that media literacy can be effective, this very much depends on the approach and content.

A challenge for media literacy education is that there have thus far been very few efforts to reconceptualise media literacy for digital contexts within educational policy. Since media literacy education was developed in the predigital era, the resources available in many schools continue to be informed by understandings about legacy media and communications. Although media production practices, institutional and industrial organisation and audiences’ relationships with media have been fundamentally disrupted by digital media, curriculum reform has not kept pace. As Livingstone (2004) noted well over a decade ago, established approaches to media literacy education, including key knowledge framed as conceptual understanding, are inadequate in the digital era. Social, networked and digital media necessarily change how we should think about media. Where media literacy education has responded to digital media, it has tended to focus on young people’s ability to make and distribute their own and others’ media (Burn, 2009; Potter, 2012). There is less focus on critical literacies in digital contexts. This is a problem in the current historic moment when there is widespread recognition of the threat of misinformation on digital media platforms. Jenkins (2006: 270) challenges media literacy advocates who, he argues, act as if the role of media has remained unchanged in the digital era and calls for more focus on constructive (and critical) participation with media. Controversially, boyd (2018) questions the effectiveness of established media literacy approaches applied to social media, asking if media literacy has ‘backfired’. Her argument is that the ‘social’ nature of social media platforms makes redundant much of the learning from previous media literacy approaches that focus on ‘being critical’ according to normalised perspectives that potentially exacerbate social polarisation on social media platforms. This becomes particularly problematic when ‘being critical’ is focused on the analysis of content from news media organisations rather than on the many diverse actors now responsible for news media production and circulation. Livingstone (2018) goes further, arguing that given that media and technologies now mediate so much of our lives, media literacy needs to move away from a focus on the media per se to instead be reconceptualised as being about how people engage with society through the media.

As noted, within this broad context of the historical and ongoing development of media literacy education, we wanted our study to better understand contemporary young Australians’ news practices. The next section outlines the methodology we deployed to achieve this.

Methodology

In September 2017, we employed one of Australia’s largest and most established online survey companies to survey 1000 young people, aged 8 to 16 years,² about their news consumption, engagement and experience. As academics from two different institutions, we collaborated with Australia’s only national newspaper for children, Crinkling News.³

To ensure widespread representation, we used representative interlocking age (8–12 and 13–16) and gender (boy and girl) categories. We also included representative interlocking state (NSW/ACT, VIC/TAS, QLD, SA/NT, WA) and region categories (metro, inner regional, outer regional/remote). Targets for each of these categories were set according to Australian Bureau of Statistics proportions.

The participants are broken down in Table 1 by a number of these categories (excluding regional categories).

Table 1.

Number of participants.

	Total	NSW	VIC	QLD	WA	SA	TAS	NT	ACT
Total	1000	316	236	213	102	72	29	12	20
Gender
Boys	510	160	120	105	56	36	16	8	9
Girls	490	156	116	108	46	36	13	4	11
Age
8–12 years	546	160	151	118	44	41	17	5	10
13–16 years	454	156	85	95	58	31	12	7	10

Most of the questions in our survey were based on a survey designed and implemented in the United States by Common Sense Media (Robb, 2017) and were adapted with permission. The Common Sense survey was in turn based partly on a survey designed and implemented by Pew Research Centre for an adult population. After preliminary testing with young Australians, we adapted many of the questions for a local context. We also added additional questions to assess news media literacy training in schools and use of Australian made child-focused news media.

In our analysis, we examined the results based on age by looking at the results for children (aged 8–12 years) and for teens (aged 13–16 years). We also looked separately at the results for girls and boys and in some cases considered the different results based on geography (metropolitan vs rural/remote).

After carrying out our analysis, we published a report which we launched at a national Media Literacy event organised by our research partner, Crinkling News (see Notley et al., 2017). This event, MediaMe, was held over two days in November 2017. It brought 35 young Australians together to examine the findings and to make recommendations on changes to advance young people’s news media literacy. The recommendations made by young people, working in collaboration with journalists and others, were published as an ‘Action Plan⁴’. This plan, along with the report we authored, was then presented at a public event that included government ministers, the Australian Children Rights Commissioner as well as representatives from news publishers and digital platforms, including Google and Facebook.

Survey key findings: young people consume a lot of news and this is a social experience but most do not feel confident about spotting fake news

When asked about the previous day’s activities (Figure 1), young Australians said they accessed news from a range of sources, including from family members (42%), television (39%), teachers at school (23%), friends (22%), social media (22%) and the radio (17%). Fewer young people accessed news the previous day from websites or mobile apps (14%), or from newspapers (7%). Almost one-fifth (20%) did not access news from any of these sources on the previous day.

Figure 1.

Young Australians news sources and consumption on a single day.

Teens were much more likely than children to access news on social media the previous day (35% compared to 10%) and websites or mobile apps (21% compared to 7%). Teens accessed more news the previous day than children: while one-quarter (25%) of children had not accessed news from any source, the figure for teens was 14%.

A significant number of young Australians indicated that they access the same news as their parents or guardians (Figure 2), with 53% saying they sometimes do this and 20% saying they often do. Interestingly, children access the same news as their parents and guardians almost as much as teens: 49% of children sometimes access the same news, compared to 56% of teens, and 22% of children often access the same news compared to 19% of teens.

Figure 2.

Who young people access news with.

When asked if they use news media made for young people (Figure 2), a significant number of young Australians say they do not (56%). Behind the News (BtN), which has been broadcast for close to 50 years in Australia, is the most popular news source directed at young Australians, particularly children, with 34% of this age group saying they use it. ABC Me is used by 28% of children to access news. Teens, however, are less frequent users of BtN (14%) and ABC Me (10%). A very significant number of teens (72%) say they do not access any news specifically made for young people, perhaps the result of so few Australian news media publications directed at this age group.

News is a social activity for young Australians. Most frequently, they consume news with their parents or guardians (52% sometimes, 21% often; see Figure 2). They also access a significant amount of news with their teachers at school (50% sometimes, 8% often). However, 14% of young Australians say they never access news with their teachers at school (and for children, this figure rises to 16%). A significant number of young Australians access news stories by themselves (34% sometimes, 10% often) and with friends (34% sometimes, 7% often).

When it comes to using social media to get news (Figure 3), the practices of children and teens are very different. Just under half (46%) of all children reported that they use social media to get news while around three-quarters (75%) of all teens did so.

Figure 3.

The social network sites young people use to get news.

For teens, Facebook was by far the most popular social media site for getting news with over half (51%) using it for this purpose. This was followed by YouTube (30%), Instagram (22%) and Snapchat (15%). We found some significant gender differences in the results with boys using YouTube more for news when compared to girls (38% vs 21%). Teen girls use Snapchat far more for news when compared with boys (18% vs 4%).

For children, YouTube was by far the social media platform used most for news: 37% get news from this site. This was followed by Facebook (15%), Instagram (10%) and Snapchat (6%). Again, girls were using Snapchat more than boys to get news (9% compared with 4%).

We asked young people how much they trust the news they get from four different sources: news organisations, friends, family and teachers. Of these four sources of news, young people trust their families first, followed by teachers, news organisations and, finally, friends. Just 23% of young people said they trust the news stories they get from news organisations a lot, compared with 58% who trust the news they get from families.

Potentially connecting with low levels of trust in news media, our survey shows that many young Australians do not feel confident they can identify fake news from real news (Figure 4). The number of young Australians who say they can distinguish fake news stories from real ones (34% strongly agree or agree) is only slightly higher than those who say they cannot (32%). More Australian teens (42%) report being able to tell fake news from real news than children (42% compared to 27%). The percentage of children reporting ‘I don’t know’ nearly doubles that of teens, indicating they either do not know the term ‘fake news’ or are unsure of their ability to identify it.

Figure 4.

‘I know how to tell fake news stories from real news stories’.

We found there are clear age disparities when it comes to checking the veracity of news for those who consume news online (Figure 5): 13% of teens often do so, but just 7% of children do. A much larger proportion of teens sometimes check accuracy (42%), while for children it was 32%. The teens’ figure for never checking was 15%, but it was much higher for children at 31%.

Figure 5.

‘How often do you try to work out if news stories you get on the Internet are true?’

We also asked young Australians how much attention they pay to thinking about the origin of news stories, particularly those they access online (Notley et al., 2017, Figure 14). A significant number indicated they pay at least some attention (44%) or a lot of attention (10%) to the source of news stories. However, 32% say they pay very little attention and 14% say they pay no attention at all.

We explored young Australians’ news literacy development at school, by asking about their critical engagement with news stories and the opportunities they are afforded to create their own news stories. When asked if they had lessons during the past year to help them decide whether news stories are true and can be trusted, just 20% said yes, while another 26% were unsure (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

News media: ‘Have you received lessons in school in the past year to help you …?’

While 24% of teens say they were exposed to critical thinking about the veracity of news during the past year, only 17% of children say they had this experience. A higher number of young Australians (34%) say they participated in lessons at school over the past year to help them create their own news stories. This includes 30% of teens and 37% of children.

In discussing the survey findings with young Australians at the MediaMe Literacy event, we found that the young participants were adamant that reforms were needed. The Action Plan created from the working groups they formed at the event states that media literacy education should be compulsory and regular and it should include education and training on the use of social media. In the Plan, the students expressed their support for an industry code of ethics for social media platforms and they expressed the need for a national news fact-checking verification system. In addition, they wanted both social media and news media organisations to be more transparent: about the labelling of both advertising and opinion-based content, acknowledging false news when identified, platform practices, terms and conditions. The students also argued that guidelines and support were required to ensure journalists respect and include young people in the news. This was supported by our survey finding that 63% of young people felt news organisations have no idea what their lives are like, while more than a third (34%) felt news media does not include young people on issues that affect them. This is significant in light of qualitative research that has found ‘public trust collapses when journalists are perceived to be reporting on social groups, areas and practices that they do not understand’ leaving the public ‘feeling like outsiders looking on at a drama that even the leading performers do not care if they really comprehend’ (Coleman et al., 2009).

Developing young people’s news media literacies

Our survey has provided baseline data from which to start an informed discussion about young people’s practices and experiences of the news. Some of the survey findings challenge assumptions that in our work we hear being made about young people’s media use: for example, that are not interested in the news, that they do not consume ‘old’ media anymore, that social media are their preferred delivery platform. Our survey findings show that these are all inaccurate assumptions for most young people: news media are part of young people’s overall media and communications experience; television remains a dominant delivery format, after family; and family and TV are preferred sources of news before social media (Notley et al., 2017).

The survey shows that engagement with news is complex and multifaceted. It is typically social, starting in the family home. This is a significant finding when it comes to designing news media literacy materials since talking about news in a classroom context therefore relies on trust between students and teachers, as it is likely to involve discussion of personal viewpoints, family viewpoints and, potentially, sensitive topics. There is a danger in trying to aim for ‘correct’ or fixed knowledge in this context, without acknowledging personal experiences and diverse perspectives.

Furthermore, given the diversity of online platforms used for news consumption and discussion, it is difficult to develop media literacy interventions for the digital age. One key challenge teachers face in teaching news media literacy in the Australian government school system is the unwillingness of those making decisions to engage meaningfully with social media. Students need to be able to discuss their experiences of news content on social media in classrooms and teachers need to be trusted to be able to do this. The current risk-averse approach of effectively banning or highly restricting social media from schools through the use of statewide filtering systems is denying students and teachers valuable and critical opportunities for learning. Added to this, as our survey shows, the use of social media platforms for news consumption is fragmented, with different uses for different age groups and genders. However, the 2017 Australian MediaMe conference highlighted to us that discussion is a good starting point for engaging young people around news literacy and one of the best starting points is potentially young people’s existing knowledge of their own practices and experiences.

One way to have young people engage with news media is to have them participate in the production of news media in critically reflective ways. We agree with Jenkins (2009) that media literacy should include active participation. Media production in schools is often focused on creative expression within an Arts curriculum framework, including the development of knowledge about genre narratives and fictional storytelling. However, there is no reason for news media production to be excluded from this experience. In the Australian Curriculum, Media Arts is not constrained to fictional storytelling. According to our survey, just over a third of young people have had this opportunity and so there is an opportunity for much more of this to occur. What is key, however, is that this production is meaningfully connected to broader learnings about news media production and circulation.

It is also important to note that research relevant to media literacy in the current epoch now exists across a range of academic disciplines. Bulger and Davison (2018) argue that media literacy education needs to extend beyond the evidence, approaches, concepts and methods favoured by cultural studies and communication studies scholars. They point out that outside of those fields, social psychology provides valuable insights regarding decision-making, political science provides insights about motivated reasoning and partisan positions as well as understandings about why and how rumours and false information spread, while sociology can show us how fear impacts our thinking and how internal biases develop and operate. To this body of cited work, we would note the value of drawing on work and research from the fields of sociolegal studies to ensure students understand current media legal and regulatory issues; computer science to explain technology ethics and the inner workings of black box technologies; journalism to understand evolving fact-checking processes in a digital age; and economics to increase knowledge about platform business models. We therefore concur with Bulger and Davison about the need to improve cross-disciplinary collaboration in the process of reviewing, revising and updating media literacy education. However, unless scholars are provided with the opportunity and resources to meaningfully develop new cross-disciplinary concepts, frameworks and associated curriculum, it is likely any efforts to ‘fix’ media literacy will be hasty, piecemeal ‘add-ons’ rather than offering a substantial rethink.

Conclusion

Our survey analysis finds that young Australians consume a lot of news regularly and they get this news from many different sources. However, many young Australians do not trust news media organisations. While social media is popular for getting news, only one-third of young people are confident about spotting fake news or disinformation online while more than half never or rarely try to work if news stories they encounter online are true or not. Our national survey shows that not enough young people are being given support to critique news in the classroom given the current context and concerns about the impact of disinformation: just one in five had this experience in the year prior to the survey.

By highlighting how young Australians aged 8 to 16 years access, classify, experience, consume and critique news media in this report, we hope to open up a conversation about news media literacy in Australia. We want the survey findings to support evidence-based discussions – with governments, schools, parents, news producers, online platforms and, most of all, with young people themselves – about what needs to be done to ensure young Australians are able to access news, use news and participate in news in ways that meaningfully support their participation in society.

In order to begin this discussion in the Australian context, in this article we have reviewed the historical development of media literacy education. We have identified that various arguments have been made about the value and purpose of news media literacy and this has changed over time in line with the development of news media technologies and related anxieties about young people’s media use. However, in its current state, the Australian media literacy curriculum is too vague about the way news media literacy should or can be included. Added to this issue, we note that statewide school filtering systems still prevent students and teachers from accessing social media sites and in this way prevent or restrict kind of teaching and learning that is required.

We argue that digital technologies have fundamentally changed news media production and circulation. One concern that has emerged with these changes relates to the impact of the circulation of false and misleading information that is disguised as news. We argue that these concerns provide an important opportunity for Australian academics and educators to reassess media literacy broadly in order to identify the most appropriate way to teach and learn news media literacy. One critical step in this process, we argue, is to broaden the discussion about media literacy away from research, frameworks and methods dominant in media studies and cultural studies and to instead acknowledge the important relevant work taking across a range of fields, including economics, social psychology, computer science and sociolegal studies. Investments are required to advance a multidisciplinary approach to news media literacy alongside a willingness for scholars and teachers to move on from past approaches in order to develop new ones. At the same time, our study has also shown that first and foremost young Australians get their news from their families. Educators and governments need to therefore consider how they can recognise the role news plays in our society and how they can support parents and carers to engage in discussions around the news in ways that advance young people’s capacity to critique the news. Finally, like other scholars and practitioners, we recognise that media literacy is not a panacea to stop the flow of fake news. Young people must be meaningfully engaged in the design of policy and regulatory changes that seek to address the scale and impact of widespread disinformation. The Action Plan we report on in this article shows that young Australians have advanced ideas about what is required to increase the quality of the news, their participation in news and their trust in news media organisations.

Footnotes

Funding

The survey reported on in this paper received funding from Crinkling News.

Notes

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