When Steve Fox’s undergraduate news literacy students attended class Tuesday morning at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, they wanted to talk about how much time St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch spent blaming the media the previous night for difficulties in the investigation of the shooting of Michael Brown.
McCulloch spoke for nine minutes and 27 seconds before delivering the news that the Grand Jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson. In that time, he detailed the investigation process, chided both the news media and social media users for circulating unverified rumors about the shooting, and pointed to the the “insatiable appetite” of the 24-hour news cycle as an obstacle to the investigation, calling his commentary “a caution to those in and out of the media who will pounce on a single sentence or a single witness and decide what should have happened in this case based on that tiny bit of information.”
In other words, McCulloch began his Grand Jury announcement by criticizing both journalists and the public for complicating the process by failing to practice basic news literacy skills.
“I think a lot of [students] were stunned about how much time the prosecutor spent on that,” says Fox of McCulloch’s media critique.
Regardless of the efficacy of McCulloch’s remarks, news literacy educators have for months been urging students to use applicable skills when following the case, to develop a healthy sense of skepticism toward news coverage by using methods like examining sourcing within a piece, cross-referencing stories across news outlets, and noting disparities.
McCulloch characterized evidence and eyewitness accounts of the shooting as information that should be exclusively available to law enforcement officials and the Grand Jury (though it’s finally all public post-decision), disempowering the public and the press from making sense of the case on one hand while criticizing them for (accordingly) incomplete reporting on the other.
Such a critique can be likened to reporter intimidation, which is a topic that has come up in Fox’s class before. They discussed, too, self-censorship and the chilling effect this type of criticism could have on the press, as well as their responsibilities as both budding journalists and news consumers. In contrast to McCulloch’s critique, news literacy educators see a role for both the press and the public to play together, particularly in breaking news environments.
“It’s the responsibility of journalists to do the story,” says Fox. “But it’s also the responsibility of the news consumer to seek out context.” His course is modeled after the curriculum developed by Stony Brook’s Center for News Literacy and he encouraged his students to watch and compare coverage on broadcast and cable channels, on news sites and on social media in the aftermath of the announcement.
Similar efforts have abounded in the field. In early November, Peter Adams, senior vice president for educational programs at The News Literacy Project, published a video highlighting examples of misinformation related to the shooting of Michael Brown, encouraging educators to use them as a tool to teach students how provisional information can be in a breaking news environment.
Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the circulation of unverified claims, particularly on social media but also from journalists, is arguably inevitable in a story like this one. The trick is in learning how to find and evaluate it, keeping mindful of what Zeynep Tufekci has called “algorithmic censorship”–the fact that readers can miss information based on the automated workings of various sites and platforms. From a news literacy perspective, awareness of how algorithms affect what we do and don’t see on social networks is just as important as awareness of how network news channels source and spin their stories.
Rather than avoiding the untethered bits of information we find on social media, we need more of it, and also better skills to process and contextualize it all.
“The Ferguson story underscores why it is vital for the public to have the tools to discern what information is reliable in the midst of such fast-breaking and highly charged news events,” NLP founder and president Alan Miller said after reviewing the McCulloch statement, “and why people need to look for a variety of credible sources and follow a story over time as verified facts emerge.”
Funding for this coverage is provided by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
Jihii Jolly is a freelance journalist and video producer in New York City