In today’s complex and potentially harmful media environment, there is a growing recognition of the critical importance of news literacy education. Learning how to reliably navigate news and information, in our hyper connected world, has become an urgent and indispensable modern life skill. Considering the growing threat posed by misinformation online, traditional news literacy programs have prioritized teaching students how to spot false information and cultivate critical thinking skills to protect against its harmful effects. While this remains crucial, it is equally important to empower students to competently address other significant factors that contribute to a misinformed worldview. Most notably the negativity bias, the pace of production, the algorithmic priorities of online platforms and the inner workings of our own minds.
Of all of these, my work has most significantly focused on the negativity bias. This bias describes the excessive prioritization of negative news stories in news cycles. This bias is more casually described as “if it bleeds, it leads.” As a result, audiences are provided an abundance of coverage of problems, conflict, violence, corruption, and disasters and very few of stories of solutions, progress, and development. As John Sommerville, US author and academic, adequately sums up: “The news is not, in fact, a reflection of everything that goes on in the world, it is a reflection of everything that goes wrong in the world.”
This hugely imbalanced coverage gives us an incredibly distorted picture and misrepresents reality, which contributes to a false understanding of the world. Gapminder, a data visualisation organisation, demonstrates how wrong most of us often are about big global trends by testing our knowledge about some big global trends using a quiz. This quiz consists of 12 questions with multiple choice answers of A, B, or C. The results of the people who took this quiz are then compared to the performance of chimpanzees. Humans are shown to consistently underperform in our general knowledge compared to our intelligent and uninformed primates. On average, a monkey picking answers at random would mark a score of 4 out of 12, while the average score of humans was 2.2. Whilst humans may not be uninformed, it shows how we are systemically misinformed and how frequently we perceive the world to be in much worse condition than it actually is.
Our misinformed perception of the world is not only inaccurate but has been shown to contribute to feelings of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness. According to the Good Childhood Report only 36% of children felt positively about the world. While the primary goal of news isn’t centred around how it makes us feel, it’s essential to incorporate emotional understanding into news literacy education.
Whilst high levels of news literacy have been shown to offer some protection against false information, research has shown that it does not protect us from the impacts of the negativity bias.
However, this bias has been shown to be effectively mitigated when solutions are made available. These insights have been integrated into our curriculum at News Literacy Lab whereby students are introduced to the principles of solutions journalism as a as well as being asked to seek solutions for themselves in between sessions. Solutions journalism is a form of reporting that goes beyond reporting solely on problems to investigate progress and examine the efforts being made to create solutions. Students are asked to submit these stories they find along with a written reflection of why they picked them, why they matter, and how each story made them feel. This approach aims to provide a layer of experiential learning to ensure that students don’t merely grasp the intellectual importance of solutions journalism but also experience it first-hand.
Students that took part in this curriculum demonstrated that the value of including solutions into their media diet extended beyond helping them develop a more balanced and accurate picture of the world, it helped students feel more hopeful about society and the world, and their role within it. This hope is a critical ingredient for civic engagement and has a profound impact on driving positive social change. This is because people who believe the future can get better tend to more competently engage with negative information and are able to use more active coping strategies that enable them to approach the problem, as well as persevere if it is not immediately solved.
Conversely, if we are hopeless, we become less inclined to make efforts towards desired outcomes. The real drawback of lacking hope, therefore, is not just feeling depressed; it lies in the practical consequence that without hope, we won’t actively pursue the positive changes we want to see in our lives and the world around us.
It’s essential to emphasize that these findings do not advocate for the artificial manipulation of news to create a sense of hope. Likewise, this approach does not involve turning a blind eye to problems or negative information. Hope occurs as a natural side effect from having a more accurate understanding of the world, by learning from both problems and solutions. This approach emphasises balance whereby it advocates news should provide us with stories that help us understand the causes of failure, as well as the proven methods for progress.
By widening the media lens to include stories of progress, it does not undermine or soften our understanding of a problem; these stories can help strengthen our engagement with it because progress and possibility makes inaction towards a problem unacceptable. At a time when we are facing enormous problems, we cannot afford to deprive ourselves of solutions and hope. As one student said: ‘If people read more positive news about the environment, it might encourage them to support the cause rather than just feel defeated.’
While fake news remains a grave concern for our society, we must not underestimate the impact of the negativity bias on our worldview. News literacy programs must evolve to address this bias and its associated feelings of hopelessness.
By expanding our approach to delivering news literacy, we expand its potential to help empower the next generation of informed, engaged, and hopeful global citizens. After all, news literacy is more than just helping young people make sense of the world. It is about empowering them to be able to participate constructively within it. Margaret Mead’s inspiring words remind us that positive change often stems from a small group of dedicated individuals, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtfully committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
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