Abstract
Interest in news literacy inside and outside the academy has grown alongside related concerns about the quality of news and information available. Attempts to fully define, explicate and operationalize news literacy, however, are scattered. Drawing on literature across journalism and mass communication, we propose a definition of news literacy that combines knowledge of news production, distribution and consumption with skills that help audiences assert control over their relationship with news. We propose that knowledge and skills should be conceptualized across five domains: context, creation, content, circulation and consumption. This explication offers a clear, concise and cohesive path for research about news literacy, especially empirical testing to evaluate news literacy and its effectiveness in contributing to relevant behaviours. This framework also offers a consistent, yet flexible, approach to measuring news literacy across diverse contexts.
Keywords
Concerns about the ability of global audiences to navigate contemporary news environments prompted researchers, educators and librarians to create news literacy initiatives well before concerns about ‘fake news’ rose to a fever pitch in recent years. Researchers from a number of disciplines – for example, communication, media studies, political science, information science – have been working to better understand what it means to be news literate and how this literacy is linked to citizen competency (Ashley, 2020; Kahne and Bowyer, 2017; Mihailidis and Thevenin, 2013). However, these conversations rarely cross disciplinary boundaries, slowing progress in theoretical and empirical research. In addition, a number of related ‘literacies’ (e.g. media, news, information, digital) presume to tap into similar constructs and often overlap theoretically and conceptually (Jones-Jang et al., 2021) making comparative research difficult as researchers use different definitions, concepts and measurements (Potter and Thai, 2019).
With this in mind, we have two goals in this manuscript: (1) defining ‘news literacy’ based on relevant journalism and mass communication theories and concepts (e.g. gatekeeping, selective exposure, hierarchy of influences, hostile media effects); and (2) conceptualizing and operationalizing five dimensions of news literacy that can be used in research to understand and predict behaviours as part of a larger theoretical framework (Vraga et al., 2020). First, we develop the rationale for and propose our definition of news literacy. We emphasize the importance of knowledge and skills, which aligns with existing news literacy research that finds knowledge plays a powerful role in predicting a range of outcomes, including rejecting conspiracy theories and consuming news from a broader number of sources (Amazeen and Bucy, 2019; Craft et al., 2017; Newman et al., 2018). We also review a framework in which news literacy can be assessed with other key variables to examine its relationship to behavioural outcomes (Vraga et al., 2020). Second, we elaborate on how news literacy should be defined and distinguished from related literacies. To that end, we propose the 5 Cs of news literacy – context, creation, content, circulation and consumption – as the building blocks of news literacy and offer suggestions for operationalizing these domains for developing theoretically sound empirical studies that can be adapted to global contexts and news systems.
Defining news literacy
Our approach to news literacy is rooted in the recognition that news is a constructed representation of the realities of daily life, and its production and consumption are constructed processes, where shared meaning is created only through the complex interactions of a range of influences and forces. The broader field of media literacy has long embraced the constructed nature of media products, going back to at least the 1992 National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy, where an international group of scholars and experts found consensus around this core idea (Aufderheide and Firestone, 1993). By contrast, news literacy is sometimes narrowly framed as the transfer of verification skills so consumers can check facts and sources and identify misinformation. While these are valuable outcomes of news literacy education, we contend that the concept of news literacy and the relevant body of knowledge and skills that make someone news literate are distinct from outcomes that might be produced (Vraga et al., 2020). The variety of ways to approach news literacy and its assessment demonstrates the need for greater precision in scholarly treatment of the concept and the methods surrounding its measurement and relationship to relevant outcomes (Amazeen and Bucy, 2019; Ashley et al., 2017; Jones-Jang et al., 2021). Given competing research and educational efforts dedicated to news literacy, we clarify what we mean by news and literacy before proposing our definition of news literacy.
‘News’ is a broad term that means different things to different people and in different contexts (Armstrong et al., 2015). News is not necessarily the same as ‘journalism’, which can be thought of as a specific set of practices for gathering and synthesizing information with the goal of providing a representation of reality for the benefit of the public (Diakopoulous, 2019). The definition of ‘news’ has long been broader than that of journalism, and social media further extend this definition to include a variety of claims, stories and information about public affairs. In this hybrid media environment, placing greater emphasis on audience definitions of ‘news’ and de-emphasizing production-oriented definitions based on professional journalistic norms is gaining scholarly traction (Edgerly and Vraga, 2019).
Moreover, in the digital news landscape, individuals are faced with a barrage of content that looks like news but could in fact be propaganda, marketing, or misinformation, which complicates attempts to figure out what news is, what it isn’t and what it ought to be (McGrew et al., 2018). We argue that knowledge of this messy landscape is critical to distinguishing high-quality news and information from low-quality content and misinformation (Bulger and Davison, 2018; Craft et al., 2017; Kahne and Bowyer, 2017), and we suggest that ‘news literacy’ should be defined with this in mind. This approach aligns with how audiences perceive news (Armstrong et al., 2015; Edgerly and Vraga, 2019) and considers the need to continuously adapt to changing media environments.
Our definition of ‘literacy’ is fundamentally about knowledge and skills. The understanding of literacy in much information literacy research echoes these knowledge- and skills-oriented definitions (Jones-Jang et al., 2021; Stordy, 2015), while the focus in media literacy has often been on beliefs and attitudes towards media (Potter and Thai, 2019). Information literacy programs, for example, have employed and extended the CRAAP Method (Currency, Reliability, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose) for evaluating information with an increased focus on using CRAAP for lateral reading (Fielding, 2019), an approach that prioritizes evaluating content but does not address the broader environment (Ashley, 2020). News literacy research has tended to examine knowledge, beliefs and attitudes, although there is inconsistency in these approaches (Amazeen and Bucy, 2019; Maksl et al., 2015; Vraga et al., 2015). For one, researchers have struggled to create news literacy measures that adequately capture essential knowledge and skills. For example, it has been difficult to create knowledge measures free from normative assumptions about news and journalism or that are adaptable to changing news environments or global contexts (Ashley et al., 2013).
Despite these challenges, research has consistently found a relationship between knowledge – defined and measured in various ways – and relevant behaviours, like recognition of false news and rejection of conspiracy theories (Amazeen and Bucy, 2019; Craft et al., 2017). Less work has examined skills, although research and practice in this area are growing (e.g. Civic Online Reasoning at Stanford) with increased interest in defining and measuring skills that enable audiences to be mindful and critical news and information consumers (McGrew et al., 2018; Potter, 2004).
Importantly, we conceive of news literacy (knowledge and skills) as a precursor to behaviour, just as being able to read and write is only a first step and does not determine if someone actually reads or writes. According to the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), to predict ‘behavioural intentions’ and subsequent behaviours necessitates examining attitudes towards the behaviour, norms regarding the practice and a sense of perceived control over the behaviour (Ajzen, 2002, 2011). Building on the TPB, we separate the knowledge and skills that constitute news literacy from attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control and suggest that each of these components contribute to putting news literacy into action (Vraga et al., 2020). We propose that news literacy provides the foundation on which relevant behaviours, such as curating a diverse news diet and engaging in processes of verification, are built. This proposition is supported by existing research, which has found positive relationships between news knowledge and current events knowledge, political activity, political self-efficacy and the identification of fabricated news (Amazeen and Bucy, 2019; Ashley et al., 2017; Maksl et al., 2015), as well as a negative relationship between knowledge and endorsement of conspiracy theories (Craft et al., 2017). Moreover, in a leading textbook on media literacy, Potter (2019) argues that knowledge and skills and personal locus of control are the fundamental building blocks of media literacy. We propose that knowledge and skills comprise news literacy, and attitudes and beliefs are essential for applying news literacy, a slight but necessary distinction from Potter’s (2004) conceptualization and one that builds on the TPB (Ajzen, 2002, 2011; Vraga et al., 2020).
Approaches to measuring news literacy focusing on knowledge, such as the one developed by Maksl et al. (2015) built on Potter’s (2004) cognitive theory of media literacy to develop a scale assessing knowledge about news content and coverage (e.g. trends in election coverage, coverage of minorities), industries (e.g. news media ownership, news aggregation), and effects (e.g. third-person effect, agenda-setting). Amazeen and Bucy (2019) similarly focus on knowledge, but propose a measure excluding knowledge of media effects. These knowledge-based measures are a step in the right direction, but their usefulness is limited given the ongoing need to update items and the challenge of creating items that are both theoretically robust and applicable across global contexts and studies. Despite these challenges, existing research supports the value of knowledge for predicting relevant behaviours, suggesting that the operationalization of the measures, not the conceptualization of news literacy as knowledge and skills, is what needs to be refined and updated to provide a foundation for robust theoretical and empirical research.
Given the existing research, we define news literacy as
The 5 Cs of news literacy
We propose that five knowledge and skills domains – context, creation, content, circulation and consumption – make up the core of news literacy. These domains connect to our definition of news literacy as they address discrete knowledge and skills related to news production, distribution and consumption and the role of news in society and build on existing work arguing that news literacy requires an understanding of both the content and contexts of news production and consumption (Amazeen and Bucy, 2019; Ashley, 2020; Maksl et al., 2015; Vraga and Tully, 2015). Moreover, these domains are designed to address news environments characterized by increasing reliance on digital and social media for news production, distribution and consumption and to be adaptable to differences or evolutions in news ecosystems.
While we define and present these domains individually, we recognize that they are connected and mutually constitutive. We suggest that news literacy scholars develop knowledge and skills measures that adequately address each domain, while acknowledging their interconnected nature. Additionally, we believe this domain conceptualization allows scholars to examine news literacy at multiple levels of analysis. For example, understanding that the socio-political environment and actors involved in newsmaking influence news content and how that content reaches audiences who then interpret it based on their own positionality foregrounds the constructed nature of this process. So, while it is important to conceptually distinguish between each of these domains, empirically there may be overlap – a proposition that must be tested. Next, we define each domain and propose knowledge areas and related skills that could be measured to gauge news literacy.
Context
We define context as the social, legal and economic environment in which news is produced. This includes the organizational context in which journalists and news creators work, the broader societal structures that constrain content producers within and outside organizations, and the economic forces that shape these practices. We build from traditional news sociology scholarship, such as gatekeeping theory (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009) and the hierarchy of influences model (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014), with particular focus on influences from organizations, social institutions and social systems on news content to consider how the evolving media landscape reinvents who can produce news and where.
Within news organizations, issues like ownership, distribution platform, target audience, advertising and market competition all shape how news is produced, as well as more general characteristics such as policies, goals, membership and interactions with other organizations (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014). Among organizational influences, the economic imperative to turn a profit is often one of the strongest, especially in modern newsrooms where barriers between the business and editorial functions of a news organization are less pronounced than in the past (Bagdikian, 2004). However, our inclusive definition of news recognizes that its production is not limited to only news organizations. Blogs, data-driven journalism and sharing personal experiences on social media all increasingly contribute to the ‘news’ landscape (Coddington, 2019). While some of these production routes may be formalized – as exemplified by the rise of FiveThirtyEight.com or The Huffington Post – into media organizations that experience similar internal pressures, others remain outside or adjacent to these structures.
Traditional and newer forms of news production remain sensitive to external pressures that shape content. What Shoemaker and Reese call ‘social institutions’ includes influence from advertising, technology, government, public relations and audiences, among others. For example, the role of social media companies in news consumption creates pressures on content producers to be sensitive to what ‘works’ on these platforms to monetize their efforts.
Additionally, the social system level of influence includes broader ideologies and structures that pervade the worlds of everyone in the social system, whether news producers or audiences. In this context, news literacy should focus on the political and economic contexts of media, including legal frameworks and economic systems. Studies using this approach can focus on questions of profit imperatives and ownership, as in the news literacy scale developed by Maksl et al. (2015), which asked respondents about their knowledge of various influences, such as knowing that the majority of U.S. media outlets are for-profit entities or that media ownership has become more concentrated in the past few decades.
We propose that knowledge about contexts includes identifying dominant business structures of news organizations, social media and technology firms, the roles other organizations like public relations and government play in influencing content, and the legal protections and constraints in which content producers within and outside of news organizations operate in global contexts. It also includes understanding the broader social system in which news producers operate, highlighting the ways in which news literacy needs to be expanded beyond democracies in most of the West. For example, questions about the FCC and other federal regulators, knowledge of economic models, including public media models, that are used to support journalism domestically and abroad, and the freedom afforded journalists by the First Amendment are germane to assessing knowledge of context in the United States but may not apply in other contexts. Therefore, measures should be developed to capture these differences. Comparative research shows that cross-cultural differences exist regarding journalists’ levels of editorial autonomy and the sources of various outside influence on their work (Hamada et al., 2019; Hanitzsch et al., 2019a). Extending those questions to engage with regulation, business models and freedom of the press as components of news literacy allow for much needed cross-country data gathering and comparison and would build upon existing work, which has already begun to address news literacy across contexts (Newman et al., 2018).
Skills relating to news contexts include how well individuals interpret constraints to expressive behaviour, whether that’s evaluating terms of service for social media sites or deciding if constitutions or laws would protect objectionable speech. This skill, in particular, allows individuals to exercise some control over their relationship with news, an essential part of news literacy as we define it (Vraga et al., 2020). Some scholars have suggested those perceptions can have effects on individual expression or interpretation of speech (Sarapin et al., 2017). These types of constraints contribute to the context in which news is created and communicated; therefore, skills in researching and assessing such rights and constraints are important to give audiences some control over the influence of those contexts.
Creation
We define news creation as the process in which journalists and other actors engage in conceiving, reporting and creating news. This process includes a variety of individual decisions and social forces that influence creation. Like with context, we draw on gatekeeping theory (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009) and the hierarchical influences model (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014), with particular focus on the individual and routine levels of influence. Additionally, we consider news creation from a range of actors beyond traditional journalists, including citizen journalists, bloggers, influencers, aggregators and machine-generated news from algorithms (Coddington, 2019; Diakopoulos, 2019). As more news is created by human and non-human actors outside of newsrooms, it will be increasingly important to recognize the process of creating such content.
A number of personal factors influence news creation. On an individual level, that may include the backgrounds of news creators, such as their demographic characteristics, educational attainment and socioeconomic status. For example, U.S. journalists are often not representative of the communities they serve, as they are more likely to be white, male, middle-aged, better educated and better paid than the U.S. population (American Society of News Editors, 2017), raising questions of representation. This issue is exacerbated in newsroom leadership in the U.S. and around the world, in which white editors dominate newsrooms (Nielsen et al., 2020).
The individual level also includes professional values of the creator. Role conception research has focused on journalists’ views of their roles in society, and a few studies have explored audience perceptions of journalists’ roles (Gil de Zúñiga and Hinsley, 2013; Van der Wurff and Schoenbach, 2014). For instance, the notion that journalists should be ‘objective’ is held by many American journalists and audiences alike (Heider et al., 2005), although others criticize this standard and expose its limitations (Callison and Young, 2020). In this domain, audiences should be able to identify dominant attitudes that journalists have about their roles and the values that undergird their work to better understand what guides decision-making and what explains dominant perspectives that pervade news coverage. Much of this work has focused on traditional journalists; however, importantly, research suggests that citizen journalists, other news creators and consumers are often guided by similar sets of norms or expectations (Craft et al., 2016b; Vos et al., 2012), although others challenge traditional approaches (Figenschou and Ihlebæk, 2019). Given the rapid expansion of opportunities for citizen participation in news creation and distribution, the values and motivations of non-traditional news creators deserve attention in this domain.
In addition to professional values, work routines influence content creation. Routines, according to Shoemaker and Reese (2014: 165), are the ‘patterned, repeated practices, forms, and rules that media workers use to do their jobs’. For example, many journalists use standard elements of newsworthiness to determine if information or an idea rises to the level of needing to be reported and developed into a story, including characteristics like impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence and oddity (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007). These routines influence not only what is chosen as news but also how news is presented, with the use of drama or narratives to help capture and keep the audience’s attention (Cline, 2009). Further, as social and web analytics have become widely used as measures of success, news creators increasingly look to what is most popular among audiences to inform their decision-making about what stories to produce. As more news is machine generated, it will be necessary to interrogate the values and human influence that are built into these algorithms and to push back against the assumption that algorithms are neutral (Diakopoulos, 2019; Noble, 2018).
It is unclear what audiences know about the process of news construction and the values and routines that influence it, as research on such knowledge is scarce. A survey from the American Press Institute and the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research (Media Insight Project, 2018) found that many Americans misunderstand important journalism terms. For example, 43% of the American public says they are not at all or only a little familiar with the concept of ‘attribution’, and while the majority know what anonymous sourcing is (58%), nearly a third (29%) think that the term refers to information from sources unknown to the journalist. Within news literacy work, some scholars have measured audience knowledge of journalistic norms and routines. Maksl et al. (2015), for example, asked questions about what role in a TV newsroom (the producer/editor) would be most influential in choosing content and what the journalistic norm of objectivity means; however, this work needs to be expanded to address more influences on traditional news creation and to include newer modes of creation, such as the use of algorithms to create news (Diakopoulos, 2019).
We propose that knowledge about news creation includes knowledge about the characteristics of news creators (e.g. journalists, editors, bloggers, algorithms), identifying the common normative conceptions the role of news creators in society, and the routines in which journalists and others engage in the creation process. Roles such as informer, reporter and watchdog are still widely employed across the globe, though the degree to which journalists aspire to be more collaborative or interventionist in their approaches to journalism and their integration with other social institutions varies cross-nationally (Hanitzsch et al., 2019b). While demographics, norms and routines of professional journalists are essential to defining knowledge of news creation processes, knowledge of the roles other content producers play is also critical, especially when anyone with a smartphone can communicate over digital platforms with relative ease. As such, audiences should also know about processes of social media news creation.
Content creation skills involve the ability to use the most newsworthy information in the creation of a message, such as writing a tweet to share a news story on Twitter. Though most audiences would be unlikely to create news in their everyday lives, they do regularly curate and share news and other information and can apply their knowledge of news values and quality when creating those messages and can exercise control over the messages they create and share. They can also look for evidence of the journalistic process to evaluate the quality of news and information.
Content
We define content as the qualitative characteristics of a news story or piece of news that distinguishes it from other types of media content. Recognizing ‘news’ includes knowing how it differs from other types of content (e.g. an opinion column or advertisement), how the features of an event or issue, or perceived ‘news values’ (e.g. timeliness, proximity, conflict) shape what is conceived and presented as news. We also consider how the individual components of a piece (e.g. sources used, evidence presented) distinguish news from other types of content. We draw on research that defines news, differentiates it from other content, and explores the effect of news attributes on audience behaviours and perceptions (Shoemaker and Cohen, 2006).
Understanding news content and how it is distinct from other media content has been at the core of many attempts at defining news literacy. For example, Malik et al. (2013) define news literacy, in part, as being able to find, identify, recognize and analyze news. News literacy curricula often focus on teaching and fostering knowledge and skills related to identifying, evaluating, analyzing, engaging with and sometimes appreciating news (Fleming, 2014). Several large-scale news literacy initiatives place a significant emphasis on analyzing content. For example, according to their website, the Center for News Literacy (2016) at Stony Brook University, aims to teach ‘critical thinking skills in order to judge the reliability and credibility of information’, with a focus on ‘analyzing news as well as new forms of information that are often mistaken for journalism’. It includes lessons on distinguishing between news and opinion and between assertion and verification, and assessing the quality of evidence presented in media content (Fleming, 2014). Checkology, the News Literacy Project’s virtual classroom used by tens of thousands of teachers, focuses on helping teachers ‘equip their students with tools to evaluate and interpret information and to determine what they can trust, share and act on’ (News Literacy Project, n.d.).
We propose that knowledge of news content includes identifying how news values are evident in news content; identifying different types of misinformation, such as satire, false content, or fabrication; identifying dominant frames in which news is often presented, such as episodic or thematic frames (Iyengar, 1994); and recognizing key features of news, such as use of sources and evidence of verification (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2007).
Skills related to identifying news and distinguishing it from other kinds of content include evaluating the quality of evidence presented and credibility of sources in a story by examining both the news content itself and engaging in additional research, such as using the CRAAP method and lateral reading, when appropriate (Fielding, 2019; McGrew et al., 2018). For example, classifying sources by the type of information they provide and the way in which their relevance to the story is contextualized is a skill that reflects knowledge of source types (e.g. expert, official, person-on-the-street) and how sources relate to processes of verification. These skills can help audiences identify types of news stories (e.g. straight, breaking, analysis) and content attempting to look like news and how different expectations are brought to bear in analyzing their credibility. In addition, recognizing how claims are supported or verified in news versus opinion would also be a useful skill that could be captured through an exercise in which individuals read, analyze, evaluate and annotate news and other stories (McGrew et al., 2018; Tully et al., 2020). This set of skills should enable individuals to recognize and distinguish news from other content.
Circulation
We define news circulation as the process through which news is distributed and spread among potential audiences. This process involves decision-making by both human and computer agents operating in a social system. We draw on gatekeeping, agenda setting and news networks research exploring the influence of these various actors – organizations, individuals and machines – on how news is circulated (Domingo et al., 2015; Singer, 2014; Thorson and Wells, 2015, 2016; Wallace, 2018).
Much research has explored the role of humans as both traditional and newer gatekeepers by examining the evolving environment in which news workers, technologists and audiences make decisions that influence news circulation (Singer, 2014; Wallace, 2018). In simple terms, ‘to be a gatekeeper means to exercise control over what information reaches society and how social reality is framed’ (Wallace, 2018: 274), and the theory has been updated, adapted and tested in changing news environments (Singer, 2014; Thorson and Wells, 2015). In contemporary news environments, organizations, journalists, audiences and algorithms all function as gatekeepers as they play a role in the selection, distribution and promotion of news. Research shows that both human behaviour, such as ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ and algorithmic decision-making contribute to how news and (mis)information spread online (Thorson and Wells, 2016). A growing body of research highlights the role of machines in news circulation with a particular focus on search, social and aggregation algorithms, which are also influenced by human behaviour (Coddington, 2019; Diakopolous, 2019; Domingo et al., 2015; Lewis and Westlund, 2015; Wallace, 2018).
The extensive research on gatekeeping often takes an industry perspective looking at newsrooms and other sites of news production and distribution (Singer et al., 2011). However, as more research looks at circulation from a news network perspective, we see a growing concern with articulating the role of various industry actors, audiences and technological agents in news circulation (Domingo et al., 2015; Lewis and Westlund, 2015). Algorithms that find, sort, filter and rank content based on a predetermined set of instructions that are adaptable to users’ behaviour and conditions of their network are increasingly important as more audiences get news on sites that rely on algorithmic decision-making (Nechushtai and Lewis, 2019; Noble, 2018). Newman et al. (2018) found that only 29% of survey respondents knew that the news they see on Facebook is determined by ‘computer analysis’ (algorithm); most (40%) responded that they did not know how these decisions were made, suggesting a lack of understanding about news circulation on social media.
Drawing on this research, we propose that knowledge about news circulation requires that news consumers recognize that news circulation is a process that is influenced by a variety of actors. Knowledge should incorporate an understanding that organizations (e.g. news outlets, social media companies, advertisers), humans (e.g. journalists, coders, audiences) and computers (e.g. search and social algorithms) affect the distribution and spread of news. For example, questions about traditional media circulation practices, how behaviour on the web and social media sites affect the visibility of stories seen online, and the role of search and social algorithms to adjust what is seen in search results and feeds would tap into this domain.
Skills related to circulation include customizing social media settings to influence what news is displayed, using a news aggregator, or recognizing the outcome of personalization in search and social feeds. These skills require that users understand that they can influence the content they see, but also that they are constrained by social media systems to tweak these preferences. Customizing settings and feeds to expose oneself to diverse high-quality news content would reflect that users understand circulation and are able to exercise some control over their exposure (Potter, 2004). These skills should allow users to curate a news diet that contains relevant, useful, quality news that is generally free from false information.
Consumption
We define news consumption as the personal factors that contribute to news exposure, attention and evaluation and recognition of the effects of such consumption. We build from selective avoidance, exposure and attention research as well as hostile media effects research to explore the influence of our personal predispositions (e.g. political partisanship, issue involvement) on news consumption behaviours (Messing and Westwood, 2014; Stroud, 2011; Vraga and Tully, 2015). Likewise, we draw on the media effects literature broadly (e.g. research addressing agenda-setting, framing, social cognition and stereotypes) to consider how these consumption choices produce individual-level change. Focusing on the role of individual choices in news selection and interpretation and media effects differentiates consumption from circulation, which considers systems and relationship between actors in a news network.
Predispositions and personal biases play an important role in news exposure and attention. This has been most prominently studied with regards to the influence of political partisanship and issue involvement in news exposure (Blom, 2021; Vallone et al., 1985) and has been exacerbated with increased political polarization that has contributed to individuals engaging with wildly different information sources in entirely distinct media and information ecosystems. For example, selective exposure to congruent content – news and information that matches one’s views – arises in part as people attempt to avoid the cognitive dissonance that can occur when they experience inconsistency in their views. As a result, people see information that matches their views as more credible than disagreeable information (Stroud, 2011; Taber and Lodge, 2006) and continue to seek such information, reinforcing their views. Reliance on digital and social media for news allows individuals to tailor news consumption, potentially reducing exposure to news and information that challenges existing views (Stroud, 2011), although such filtering is not absolute, given social pressures, information overload and circulation practices (Messing and Westwood, 2014; Nelson and Webster, 2017). While our existing attitudes play a particularly powerful role influencing news exposure, other heuristics (e.g. source cues, headlines, endorsements) shape news choices and evaluations (Bhandari, 2018; Messing and Westwood, 2014; Tully et al., 2020) and thus should be recognized.
Exposure and attention to news are the first steps in news consumption, with evaluation or making sense of the news as a next step. Similar to exposure and attention, our evaluation of news is influenced by predispositions and heuristics. Research into the hostile media effect (HME), for example, consistently shows that political partisans are poor judges of news as they often view neutral news content – content rated as unbiased by nonpartisans – as biased against their views (Gunther, 1988; Perloff, 2015; Vallone et al., 1985). Likewise, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) highlights the ways in which media cues and heuristics shape processing and thus media effects (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986). Research regarding cognitive dispositions suggests one’s ability to detect misinformation is related to one’s propensity to engage in cognitive reflection (Pennycook and Rand, 2019).
Finally, our choices and news consumption patterns contribute to media effects on both the individual and societal levels. For example, research addressing stereotypes and social cognition has demonstrated how distorted representations in television news influence social judgements about race and crime, such that exposure to the overrepresentation of Black people as criminals is associated with perceptions of Black people as violent and with harsher judgements of Black suspects’ culpability compared with white suspects (Dixon, 2008). The ELM speaks to the persuasive impact of media; agenda-setting theory suggests news coverage impacts public priorities; and framing theory highlights the ways in which news approaches to a topic can influence attitudes towards issues and figures in the story (Aruguete and Calvo, 2018; Moy et al., 2016). Recognizing this role of news and media effects is essential to being news literate.
Drawing on this research, we propose that knowledge about news consumption involves recognizing that our personal biases and predispositions affect news exposure, attention and evaluation and that media consumption can affect individuals and society in different ways. Interviews and focus groups with adults and teens suggest that people have a basic level of news literacy and are aware that their worldviews and biases shape their news choices but tend to rely on source cues and existing views about news outlets when actually assessing news (Craft et al., 2016a; Tully et al., 2020). Therefore, knowledge regarding media effects and their relationship to our own news consumption choices are essential to news literacy.
Skills related to consumption should focus on individuals’ ability to evaluate their own biases, especially how these biases influence news diets, and to curate a diet that contains diverse news sources. Consumption skills should also involve taking steps to minimize selective exposure by seeking out a range of news sources and developing interpretation skills that forefront the role of our biases and worldviews. These skills enable news consumers to be active agents in the consumption process to effectively seek out news and information (exposure), dedicate the time to news that is important or relevant to them (attention), and evaluate news critically but fairly recognizing the ways that their own biases influence the entire process.
A path forward
News literacy research and practice is at a tipping point. Public interest in news literacy and its potential to help audiences navigate tricky media environments – especially in distinguishing news and information from misinformation – offers scholars an opportunity to propose concrete guidelines to a receptive audience. To do so, however, requires agreement about what news literacy is and ought to be and how it should be measured and assessed.
We offer a definition of news literacy and explicate its core components as a pathway for future research. We propose that news literacy should be assessed across five domains. In addition to providing theoretical justification for these domains, we have proposed components of these concepts that can be measured to empirically test their predictive power. We suggest that this foundation is useful in developing frameworks and models for testing the effectiveness of news literacy to predict behaviours (e.g. curating a news diet, recognizing and rejecting misinformation, engaging in verification) and its relationship to other outcomes, such as political efficacy and participation (Ashley et al., 2017; Jones-Jang et al., 2021; Tully and Vraga, 2018).
News literacy, as defined and operationalized here, encapsulates the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate news environments. Moreover, we believe that the five domains that comprise news literacy have the benefit of being inclusive and flexible to application around the world, while still remaining theoretically grounded. For example, measures that tap into ‘circulation’ now may need to be updated as additional actors enter and influence news networks, but the basis for these measures should still be premised on the definition that we offer. As the definition of news continues to expand and as new actors enter news ecosystems, these five domains should continue to build on research and realities to adequately capture news literacy. Our proposed foundation will allow for the development of measures that will contribute to a cohesive body of work relevant to scholars in a variety of disciplines concerned with news and information behaviours.
Finally, although we argue that news literacy consists of the skills and knowledge that enable people to engage in various behaviours, we recognize that simply having that knowledge and skills is insufficient if they are not applied. Building on the TPB, we propose that news literacy must co-exist alongside attitudes, social norms and perceived behavioural control to predict intentions and relevant behaviours (Ajzen, 2002, 2011; Vraga et al., 2020). This model is predicated upon a clear definition and measurement of news literacy as we outline here to build a framework for assessing these relationships and behaviours. We acknowledge that ideological and psychological factors may enhance or inhibit the ability of news literacy to be effective, a proposition that our model can test. In addition, we recognize that some individuals may perceive they are news literate when, in fact, they are not. Others may have highly skewed views on what is quality news and information. We thus distinguish news literacy from perceptions of news literacy, and incorporate both in the model to understand their competing influences (Vraga et al., 2020). The measures of news literacy we propose will help researchers face the challenges of defining news literacy to understand its importance for news and information behaviours.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge Morten Kristensen for his assistance.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
