The fight against rampant disinformation has triggered two major answers: fact-checking and news literacy. These affect the established fields of journalism and of Media and Information Literacy (MIL). They create opportunities for new entrants from the margins to enter professional fields in need of revamping. Using information and communication sciences research on policy and organizations and on the interplay between agency, platforms and networks, this analysis focuses on three main criteria for evaluating the field-configuring role of disinformation: policy rules and professional canons (to regain some lost political and economic ground), key events and projects (to provide sense-making strategies), and interactions with audiences and communities (to restore trust and reputation). Focusing on the European Union as main terrain of analysis due to its pioneering initiatives, this analysis first considers the mutual benefits afforded by the fight against disinformation. Then considers three main challenges: MIL risks being reduced to news literacy, digital journalism risks being reduced to fact-checking, and the disinformation discourse risks downscaling the emphasis on information. It concludes with the implications for the future for all actors to effect real field change in MIL and journalism.
The study examines the role of emotion in news consumption, arguing that traditional news literacy education’s focus on facts and verification is no longer sufficient. It explores how emotion and emotion-analytics technologies shape the spread and impact of fake news in digital environments.
The article examines news literacy needs in K–12 education in the context of growing concerns about fake news. Drawing on the perspectives of in-service teachers and school librarians in California, it assesses students’ perceived news literacy skills.
The article addresses the growing concern over fake news and its threat to democracy and journalism in the contemporary media environment. It situates this problem within the emerging field of news literacy, arguing for the need to reconceptualize fake news both theoretically and practically.
The study focuses on strengthening the assessment of news literacy in response to growing concerns about fake news, misinformation, and changing digital news consumption practices. It aims to update existing news literacy measurement tools by introducing two new scales: the Headline Literacy Scale and the Hard News Standards Knowledge Scale.
The study examines which factors encourage early adolescents (12–15 years) to apply news literacy in practice, rather than merely possess it. The findings show that motivation, skills, and valuing (news) media literacy are more important than production knowledge, and that news consumption and news literacy application are strongly interconnected.
The article examines teenagers’ understanding of news and their news consumption practices. It explores how teens define news, encounter it—largely incidentally through social media or parents—and perceive its relevance to their lives.
This article investigates news literacy among early adolescents by foregrounding their own views and experiences with news. It shows that while adolescents recognize the importance of reliable news, their engagement remains mostly passive and weakly critical.
This study explores news literacy from the perspective of young people’s everyday news use on social media, rather than formal educational models. The study highlights news literacy as a situated, practice-based process, shaped by users’ experiences, motivations, and perceived agency in digital environments.
The study investigates how foundational literacy influences online fact-checking behavior among college students, with news literacy acting as a mediator. Findings show that stronger foundational literacy improves fact-checking through enhanced news literacy, but reliance on heuristic (shortcut) thinking weakens this effect. The study highlights the impact of cognitive biases in social media contexts and emphasizes the need for journalism education to integrate critical news literacy, reflective media engagement, and awareness of digital information environments to support responsible digital citizenship.
Marking biased texts effectively increases media bias awareness, but its sustainability across new topics and unmarked news remains unclear, and the role of AI-generated bias labels is untested. This study examines how news consumers learn to perceive media bias from human- and AIgenerated labels and identify biased language through highlighting, neutral rephrasing, and political orientation cues. We conducted two experiments with a teaching phase exposing them to various bias-labeling conditions and a testing phase evaluating their ability to classify biased sentences and detect biased text in unlabeled news on new topics.
We find that, compared to the control group, both human- and AI-generated sentential bias labels significantly improve bias classification (p < .001), though human labels are more effective (d = 0.42 vs. d = 0.23). Additionally, among all teaching interventions, participants best detectbiased sentences when taught with biased sentence or phrase labels (p < .001), while politicized phrase labels reduce accuracy. The effectiveness of different media literacy interventions remains independent of political ideology, but conservative participants are generally less accurate (p =.011), suggesting an interaction between political inclinations and bias detection. Our research provides a novel experimental framework into assessing the generalizability of media bias awareness and offer practical implications for designing bias indicators in newsreading platforms and media literacy curricula.