There is a study released today about news consumption habits by young people 8-12 and 13-16 years old: News and Australian Children: How Young People Access, Perceive and are Affected by the News.
The first point made in the key findings of the report is about how young people receive news from family and friends, including teachers (from the infographic). Trust is extremely high.
My problem with the reporting in the Conversation is focuses on ‘fake news’. ‘Fake news’ has tabloid ‘outrage’ news value among an educated audience, but it is not actually that interesting from a research perspective.
After being part of three Digital News Reports (2015, 2016 and 2017) the key critical question for me is, how do children and young people develop news literacy and their own sources of news as they mature? If they are accessing news via their family and friends, does this mean this is how they also develop news literacy? By imitating the critical relationships based on cultural values and social norms of their parents? In our research low levels of trust in mainstream news have been interpreted as relatively high levels of critical news literacy. How does this work in the context of young people developing their own news literacy if they have extremely high levels of trust in their primary sources of news?
Critical News Literacies?
What is the relationship between perceptions of bias (key finding 3) and the capacity to spot ‘fake news’ (key finding 4)? Arguably ‘fake news’ is irrelevant compared to the ideological framing of most of the mainstream news. The key development of 8-12 to 13-16 year olds seems to be the radical reduction in the percentage share of those responding to the survey who don’t know about various measures of bias (Figures 18-20). That is, there is roughly half the number of young people who responded ‘I don’t know’ to questions 13-16 year olds compared to 8-12 year olds. Rightly or wrongly having a view on the bias of news representations demonstrates critical or discerning engagement and this increases.
Good points! Fake news is old news. Very old news. And, ironically, a pretty badly formed concept.