02 Informed


Michelle’s Message


Following a meeting with Jeremy Wright, the Culture Secretary, Michelle Stanistreet joined a DCMS round table of news organisations and academics to discuss how the NUJ can play a role in improving media literacy, so young people can learn to read news they can trust.


When I was at school, information about news and current affairs came from books, TV news, bulletins on the local radio station and, in my house, the contents of the Liverpool Echo. Today, despite delivering newspapers every morning my 15-year-old son’s starting point for what’s happening in the world hails from channels on Youtube, clips shared around via Snapchat or closed groupchats on WhatsApp. We regularly have exchanges about something that sounds so outlandish and to my mind obviously daſt, yet the answer to my dismissive assertion of it being rubbish is met with – it’s true, it’s on the internet! Look, let me show you! And so it is. Tere’s brilliant content to be had online, but there’s a lot of dross as well. Te problem is that without context it can be hard to work out what’s true and what’s not, what’s exaggerated or just made up, whether an image is manipulated or real, and whether the


Michelle with culture secretary Jeremy Wright


individual or entity behind these stories and images have a vested interest or malicious motivation in dressing them up as fact or circulating them on social media in the first place. So small wonder that political and industry atention is now focussed on media literacy in schoolchildren and teenagers as never before. In a recent meeting with Jeremy


Wright, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the issue of fake news and misinformation led us on to discuss media literacy and what more can be done to hone those critical faculties and to tackle misinformation from an early age. We talked about my desire to get NUJ members engaged in this work, building on our links with journalism students in colleges and universities, and developing the ad-hoc initiatives that many of our members and officials have engaged with in schools. Raising awareness of the vital role that journalism plays in our communities would have other benefits too – focusing atention on journalism as a career option at an early age for young people from diverse backgrounds who currently would never dream of it as an


option for them. At a roundtable meeting convened this week by Margot James, minister for the digital and creative industries, there were wide-ranging discussions about how to tackle these issues, and enthusiasm for how the members of an organisation like the NUJ could make a real difference to the range of great work already happening in some schools. Initiatives including the Media Literacy Trust’s Newswise campaign, Charlote’s Project which carries out sessions on fake news with sixth-formers, Shout Out UK, and Doc Academy which provides lesson plans and documentary clips for teachers. ITV, Channel 4, the BBC, Google and Twiter all spoke about the work they’re engaged in. Ofcom outlined its significant research on these issues – most recently on the surveys on children’s media use and atitudes, life on the small screen, exploring the relationship children have with their devices, with more research planned on issues including the nature of advertising online. Academics from the LSE and Goldsmiths are engaged in work to research the challenges, point to


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