Jeff Jarvis, CUNY Professor and Director of the Tow Knight News Integrity Initiative, on Shifting Away from Media-Centric News Literacy
As the founder of the News Integrity Intiative, Jeff Jarvis wants to shift the conversation away from identifying bad content, i.e. "fake news," and look at how misinformation propagates to learn from it and get ahead of it.
"The truth is that we are being manipulated by an array of actors, who have related but separated motivations... what they share is technique and tactics," said Jarvis. He gave a PHIL Talk that not only illustrated how these bad actors have been so successful, but also how the mainstream media's failure to adapt to new means of communication plays into internet malcontents' ability to spread lies so quickly.
"The techniques are similar because they are learning from each other, and we in institutions aren't learning from them," explained Jarvis. "We are holding ourselves back and above and separate from it saying 'well, they're playing that dirty little game,' but they're having a conversation with the public that we're not having... I'm concerned that news literacy is media-centric and says to the public 'if you read our news, you're literate, and if you don't, you're not.'"