Journalists Struggle to Understand Americans' Relationship to News

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“The four elements of literacy—the ability to find, understand, create and act on information—are part of the ‘new literacies’ of the modern era: information literacy, digital literacy, media literacy and news literacy. … No one is born with these literacies. Education matters,” writes the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Eric Newton for the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy. "Whose job is it to help a community understand news?” Journalism is an inextricable component of a healthy democracy. But unlike running water or the Red Line, people can’t use it properly without understanding how it works. But journalists might actually feel a little relief knowing that they’re not in this alone. No one expects members of Congress to spend their days teaching constituents how the government works. Similarly, we shouldn’t leave the explanation of how journalism works only to journalists. All citizens need a baseline understanding before they’re pushed out into the world and left to fend for themselves.

[Glendora Meikle is an independent consultant based in Washington, DC. She was previously the deputy director of the International Reporting Project.]


Journalists Struggle to Understand Americans' Relationship to News