Be aware: Elevate your news evaluation: Emphasizing media literacy, one library’s initiative

Abstract

The following article outlines the University of California-Merced Library’s unfolding news evaluation campaign,¹ shares our strategies, and reflects on our efforts. The impetus for this campaign came when a colleague shared Vanessa Otero’s News Quality Chart, a graphic that places news sources on X and Y axes, representing quality and partisan bias.² Otero’s work, combined with increasing public concern and conversation about the legitimacy of news, propelled my colleagues and I to start discussing how we might emphasize media literacy, especially news evaluation. We started our discussion just prior to the spring semester, and we launched our campaign a few weeks later. Though this meant limited time for planning, we wanted to capitalize on this opportunity to promote information literacy by initiating and participating in a broader campus conversation about news evaluation.