FCC's Copps calls for news education in schools

Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps called for schools to teach K-12 students news literacy during a speech to the National Newspaper Association. "If we expect there to be a demand for quality news, then we need to teach the lessons on how to determine quality," Commissioner Copps said, stressing that the programs would be voluntary for local schools. "Who knows? Maybe we could actually move from the Information Age to the Comprehension Age."

He argued the decline of local and print journalism has helped degrade the discourse, while the Web has given rise to a host of new information sources that require greater scrutiny to parse what is credible and what isn't. "We need to be a news literate people. Our goal should be that every American possesses the skills to discern news from infotainment, fact from opinion, and trustworthy information sources from untrustworthy," Commissioner Copps said.