How Disinformation Reshaped the Relationship between Journalism and Media and Information Literacy (MIL): Old and New Perspectives Revisited

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• News literacy
• disinformation
• journalism
• fact checking
• media and information literacy
• transliteracy
• information and communication sciences
• public policy

Since its massive advent on the public and political scene, from 2012 on, the rapid dissemination of disinformation, from fake news to deep fakes, has shaken both the integrity of information and the integrity of democracy. Disinformation ranges from fabricated falsehoods and alternative facts to any information in disagreement with one’s beliefs (Wardle and Derakhshan 2017). It combines initial malevolent intent with end-user amplification and gets spun around with the virality and velocity of algorithm-driven mass and social media. Disinformation has also become a complex paradigm where specific segments like political propaganda, commercial click-bait, and hybrid cyber-threats are conjoined by a flow of news, networks and businesses in a transborder and transmedia environment (Frau-Meigs 2019a).

To counter those perceived threats caused by disinformation, public policies have pushed for a two-pronged response, relying on two professions with their attendant practices: journalism, broadly defined as the act of gathering and presenting information in a way that organizes the chain of news value in a series of issues dealt with investigative techniques (Bradshaw and Crook 2018); media and information literacy (MIL), defined as the discerning means that enable people to engage critically with information and diverse types of media messages and audiences (Carlsson 2019). Their inter-relationship is old as they share in common an interest in information and a passion for freedom of expression but they have traditionally kept each other at respective distance as they tend to belong to two different sectors and identifiable social institutions, business for journalism, education for MIL. Whereas journalists have historically evolved in commercial enterprises with their self-regulatory standards, MIL practitioners historically belong to civil society organizations that interact with schools and comprise educators, youth workers, librarians and, increasingly, teachers as Ministries of education have incorporated MIL as a transversal subject in schools.

Against this rather settled backdrop, new opportunities elicited by the rise of disinformation have brought the two fields in closer relationship. They have been thrust together as the best solutions to forestall intrusive foreign interference, disruptive platform business models, and obtrusive amplification by users. They are expected to restore trust and revitalize the public sphere with recognized mechanisms such as journalism independence and media education competence. Newly formed fact-checking networks (IFCN…), in-service verification sections (AFPfactuel…) and data analytics firms (Graphika, CheckFirst…) have emerged to shake the foundations of journalism. Similarly, recently created news literacy associations like Lie Detectors and Faktabaari, literacy enabling networks like Savoir*Devenir and ERIM (Equal Rights and Independent Media), and crowd-sourced platforms like Mind over Media and Hive Mind have appeared besides long-time existing MIL operators. Additionally, there has been a rise of initiatives and projects like YouCheck! and YouVerify! that connects journalism and MIL, as journalists, fact-checkers, data scientists and media literacy practitioners come together to verify and rebut “fake news” using smart tools such as InVID-WEVERIFY, in classrooms, libraries and youth centers (https://youverify.eu/en). This process affects both fields, in terms of organizations, operations and practices as participants provide feedback to the developers and journalists explain their investigative methods instead of delivering their stories.

The opportunities provided by changes in policy, regulation and industrial innovations such as social media platforms attract expertise from various disjoined fields and enable new actors from the margins to enter a professional field where old actors like government ministries, professional organizations and civil society associations are weakened and under pressure for change (Frau-Meigs, Velez, and Flores Michel 2017; Carlsson 2019). In that sense, disinformation is affecting the field of information, creating opportunities for new agile entrants and reshuffling the cards with old stodgy incumbents. It takes on the trappings of a scientific field, as exemplified by its own journal, the Harvard-based Misinformation Review with its own controversies and debates as for instance the link between the pandemic and the infodemic during Covid-19 (Bridgman et al. 2020).

Using information and communication sciences research on policy and organizations (Landry 2017; Hoechsmann and Poyntz 2012) and on the interplay between agency, platforms and networks (van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal 2018) can shed light on this field evolution, still understudied from the MIL perspective. The main criteria coming out of that research deal with, inter alia, 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 (Kellner and Share 2005; Frau-Meigs, Velez, and Flores Michel 2017).

Focusing on the European Union as main terrain of analysis due to its pioneering initiatives, this commentary first pays particular attention to how disinformation as a field-configuring process, at macro level (organizations and programs)—with external push—and micro level (individual or group actions and projects)—with internal pull—may explain some of the synergies currently at work. Second, it considers the most important challenges to this ongoing response to the disinformation threat: 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. This commentary finally looks at the implications for the future as they rest on the capacities of the actors to effect real field change in MIL and journalism while reinforcing their ethics and social utility.

MIL And Journalism Mutual Benefits from the Fight against Disinformation

At the macro-level of external pushes from policy and organizations, the EU has taken a series of initiatives, like the 2018 EU Action Plan with guidelines for social media platforms, the Audiovisual Media Services Directive with obligation for member states to implement media literacy and report about it, and the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) to fight against disinformation via fact-checking and media literacy. These pushes have percolated and transposed in national and regional legislations and organizations, such as the eight EDMO hubs that network initiatives across more than fourteen EU countries. This coordinated action has led to unusual amounts of funding for journalism as well as MIL, at federal and national level, as exemplified by the “Media Education for all” program by DG-connect, from 2016 to 2021. Additionally, both have received supporting funds from the main social media platforms, namely Facebook and Google, under heavy public criticism, especially from MIL practitioners preoccupied with media independence.

At the micro-level of internal push, fact-checking has moved from internal, pre-publication, a priori accountability checks within media institutions to external, a posteriori claims redress and debunks outside media institutions, focused on social media platforms. The advent of external fact-checking has brought new actors from other fields that challenge professional practices with other profiles like data scientists, developers and researchers, values like transparency, and other tools including dashboards, verification plug-ins and pattern recognition. As fact-checkers do not necessarily come from the same training grounds as journalists and politicians, they tend to be more willing to establish a distance, or even contradiction (including via frontal or radical titles and qualifiers) towards political representatives, much more so than their political journalistic colleagues—who were, and still are, reproached with a certain connivance with them (Bigot and Nicey 2021).

Such new entrants modify the field, re-injecting a degree of canon-building among journalists as exemplified by Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) with its “Journalism Trust Initiative” and its standards, or the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) with its “code of principles” with its strong emphasis on transparency for journalism. They have their organizing events and showcasing websites (e.g. Fact Check.org, PolitiFact and AfpFactuel). They have created their own monitoring bodies, with the publication of a yearly report since 2018, The State of Fact-Checking.

As for MIL, it has also moved from practices that considered both information and fiction as social learning with a strong emphasis on citizenship, participation and creativity alike across all mass and social media (Jenkins 2006) to a major focus on information disorders such as disinformation, hate speech, online youth radicalization, and cyber harassment (Frau-Meigs 2019b). This has put an inordinate emphasis on news literacy, with the advent of new actors from other fields, especially from journalism. Many initiatives from the press and publishers have led to interventions in classrooms, challenging pedagogical practices, bringing new technological tools and professional practices such as source verification. Other multi-stakeholder initiatives have led to the production of materials such as the MOOC Disinformation Step by Step (YouVerify.eu) or games such as Go Viral. The Poynter Institute and InVID-WEVERIFY, for instance, offer fact-checks and media literacy on their websites.

MIL has also undergone a process of institutionalization and professionalization, with a certain degree of canon-building. Several frameworks are in competition, with a huge stress on competences and evaluation of effectiveness. These frameworks have moved from being internally produced (Potter and Christ 2007; De Smedt and Fastrez 2012) to being externally driven by the EU and UNESCO (2021), moving MIL within the perimeter of Digital Competences (Vuorikari, Kluzer, and Punie 2022). The trend has shifted from mappings of best practices and consultation of experts (EAO 2016) to operational indicators of competences (McDougall et al. 2018). This is paving the way to embedding MIL in the EU Digital Education Action Plan.

MIL has also developed its own organizing events and showcasing opportunities with yearly High Level Expert meetings, at DG-Connect. Global MIL Week started in 2012, with UNESCO MIL Alliance and other partners, has been part of the UN and the EU calendar since 2019. It delivers awards and highlights all sorts of projects and “sensible” practices, which allows them to be close to their audiences and communities. Since 2017, MIL has also had state of the art monitoring, with the Media Literacy Index that purports to evaluate resilience.

Therefore, under the pressure of disinformation, both MIL and journalism have reinforced some of their historical strands, source verification and freedom of expression. They have both leap-frogged into much-needed updates and upskilling in data journalism and algo-literacy, adding them to their repertoire of actions and practices (Bradshaw and Crook 2018). They have learnt from each other about content credibility and about inspecting the code, be it analog or digital. They have added cognitive, psychological and technological tools for their analysis and interpretation of facts and events, if not opinions. They have built fact-checking and news literacy as a corrective mechanism that can lead to more educated populations and more media- and data-savvy citizens overall. They have reconnected with their audiences, with collaborative sites to investigate better like helpmeinvestigate.com and calls on users to signal “fake news” and/or contribute to their debunking.

Challenges for Journalism and MIL

The field-configuring criteria (i.e. policy rules and professional standards, showcasing events and projects, interactions with audiences) also reveal tensions, in spite of mutual benefits and cooperation. These tensions have to do with changes in the substance and nature of MIL and digital journalism, especially as research on their effectiveness is not fully conclusive and as professional recognition and field reconfiguration meet resistance from reluctant long-established actors.

MIL Cannot Be Reduced to News Literacy

In spite of their scope and diversity, many projects tend to cast MIL as a quick fix for fighting democratic risks by reinvigorating digital news literacy. The research findings show however that news literacy messages are able to alter disinformation perceptions and beliefs, but not with a single message, suggesting the need to develop tailored and targeted news literacy programs and campaigns that feature multiple messages (Tully, Vraga, and Bode 2020). This is coherent with prior research evaluating the effectiveness of media literacy interventions, showing that the media-related ones (i.e. knowledge and criticism) are more effective than the behavior-related ones (i.e. attitude change) (Jeong, Cho, and Hwang 2012). Research also confirms that the successful impact of media literacy interventions increases as a function of the number of sessions, with programs reinforced through multiple sessions (Nygren et al. 2021; Scheibenzuber, Hofer, and Nistor 2021).

This emphasis on effectiveness has re-opened theoretical controversies over media effects that were deemed solved. Such is the case with “inoculation” (Cook, Lewandowsky, and Ecker 2017; Roozenbeek and van der Linden 2020; Basol, Roozenbeek, and van der Linden 2020) and “prebunking” (Kahne, Hodgin, and Eidman-Aadahl 2016; McGrew et al. 2017). Inoculation is presented as a technique that creates “mental antibodies” to resist future persuasion by being exposed to weakened versions of “fake news”, by exposing people to the major mechanisms of disinformation (distrust of government, danger of alien plot…) via games such as the Bad News game (getbadnews.com). Prebunking tries to address and prevent audience amplification by creating new heuristics, or short-cuts, in the mind. Often associated with “online civics”, prebunking is more akin to educational preparedness than inoculation and more pedagogically sustainable, especially if taken in a larger MIL curriculum as often requested by teachers, taking also into account context and culture (Nygren et al. 2022).

These theories and attendant interventions hark back to communication reception theory, with the hypodermic needle model (Lasswell 1927), long displaced by more sophisticated effects approaches such as “cultivation” theory (Gerbner et al. 2002; Bryant and Oliver 2013). They tend to ignore the decades-long fights among MIL educators and practitioners to bring in competence-based initiatives, with state-wide support operators like CLEMI (France), Mediawisj (Belgium) or the Media Council for Children and Young People (Denmark). For them, speedy re-education by games or “one shot interventions,” like sending journalists in classrooms, do not build a curriculum or a consistent sustainable strategy over time. It takes training to foster user awareness, to raise information resilience and to produce effective rebuttals and counter-narratives.

Professionally, reducing MIL to news literacy also tends to ignore several subfields within MIL like information literacy, conducted mostly by librarians rather than journalists, with an altogether different take on documents and sources, their authentication and their curation as well as their scientific verification (Sample 2020). They also sideline digital literacy in its overlaps with MIL and digital citizenship education as often practiced by youth workers in informal settings (Hoeschmann, Thésée, and Carr 2021). For experts and practitioners in the field, the creation of a certification for journalists to go into classrooms, opening venues for jobs in MIL for journalists, is considered with mixed feelings as in the case of France where the CPNEF (Commission paritaire nationale emploi et formation) of both the printed press and audiovisual media have launched in 2022 a "Certificat de compétences professionnelles interbranche" (CCPI) in MIL.

Digital Journalism Cannot Be Reduced to Fact-Checking

Research about the effectiveness of fact-checking is inconclusive. There is little evidence that it changes the behavior of politicians, who either circumvent verification by an increased vagueness of discourse or staunchly maintain their alternative reality stance, as in the case of the Ukraine invasion narrative of alleged “denazification” by Russia. With regards with interactions with audiences, there is growing evidence that fact-checking can affect beliefs and correct political disinformation but these effects weaken substantially due to users’ preexisting beliefs, ideology, and knowledge (Walter et al. 2020). Fact-checking can also have counterproductive effects such as leading users to believe that everything is fact-checked when it is not an exhaustive process (Christenson, Kreps, and Kriner 2021) or triggering the bias of continuous influence (or boomerang effect) that reinforces entrenched or radicalized communities’ beliefs instead of inducing mind-change (Frau-Meigs 2019b).

Winning the trust of the audience is key and strategies put in place to engage users are as important as the quality of debunked contents. Fact-checking may appear as a much-needed “echo chamber” for journalists (Frau-Meigs 2019b), in which they have been able to share their internal processes and prove the utility of their profession (Humprecht 2020). But not all external fact-checking outlets show the same level of professionalism or benefit from the same organizational conditions, as assessed in the COMPACT report (Pavleska et al. 2018). Some fact-checkers have been accused of selection bias and partisanship, as exemplified in anti-fact-checking campaigns in Brazil. Additionally, the financial dependence on digital platforms can be damaging to the reputation of the field as Google and Facebook have been whitewashing their brands with funds that hardly affect their annual turnover (Full Fact 2020). The State of the Fact-checkers report (IFCN 2021) shows that the field is heavily financed by Facebook, via its Third Party Programme, mostly for internal use on its own platform.

Professionally, the institutionalization of fact-checking and the strength of its networks are essential to the success of its anti-disinformation mission. Yet fact-checking meets some reluctance in being recognized as a separate practice in journalism schools, with notable exceptions, such as Factoscope at the University of Tours in France as shown in Fact-Checking project (factcheckingeu.com). The sense is that fact-checking should be integrated in “business as usual” journalism, while gradually integrating data analysis in the media organizations (Kueng 2017). There is also resistance to include fact-checking in professional negotiations for labor contracts: it is not mandatory, with the notable exception of the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Portugal.

Disinformation Discourse Cannot Downscale the Emphasis on Information

It may be timely for journalists to turn the issue on its head, resisting as it were the disinformation fallacy: beyond the media panic and the disinfodemic, it may be worth considering the relatively limited place of disinformation in the global media fare, not to mention its actual reach (Fletcher et al. 2018). Working on reliable news sources and buttressing viable business models of information production could reduce the share of disinformation and the sharing of its amplification. This is supported by recent research suggesting that more resources should be devoted to improving acceptance of reliable information, relative to fighting disinformation (Acerbi, Altai, and Mercier 2022).

Downscaling the emphasis on disinformation also fits the holistic and long-ranging approach of MIL practitioners, who exert their critical thinking on the information factory as a whole and offer insights in the systemic organization and concentration of media, in the ownership and control of platforms and in the geopolitics of information flows (Landry 2017). This may also be beneficial in diminishing effectively amplification, one of the main targets of MIL in relation to users who need to be trained on their opportunities for online presence and creativity, for data privacy and online safety. The emphasis on risk, valid as it is, can detract from other identity-building and online wellbeing opportunities, with more hope than fear at stake, especially among young people.

The focus of journalists should shift on forging a renewed “information contract” with their audiences, based on issues treated with evidence and transparency, with media stories tightly knit with data paths and document integrity. They need to rework this information contract with the communication “sharing contract” established by social media, based on scandals to elicit attention and treated with proximity and authenticity to touch online communities (Frau-Meigs 2019a). MIL practitioners also need to embark both contracts in their critical thinking and their learning events as they address publics lacking in MIL competences, that tend to confuse both. Only with more explicit clarification of such underlying mechanisms can they bridge the trust divide and the digital divide. This pleads for a three-pronged transliteracy approach, where knowledge about media, data and documents is taught via full-fledged MIL programs, not only as a transversal domain but also as a full core curriculum subject, including in journalism schools (Frau-Meigs 2012, 2023).

A Way Forward

The evolution of the field needs to be monitored, as the scope of disinformation is gradually digested by all actors. The direct funding for fact-checking and news literacy seems to have reached a plateau as it is being relayed by comprehensive programs such as Creative Europe, Horizon Europe and Digital Europe. Absorbed in issues such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) against disinformation and Advanced Digital skills, the initial radical disruption of disinformation is being diluted. The consolidation of MIL and journalism needs to build on the acquired strengths and the capacities of the actors in terms of policies, operations and audiences while navigating a future where AI is going to introduce yet another actor, non-human agents, in the process of fighting disinformation.

In terms of policy, actors in both MIL and journalism, at their respective levels, play the role of watchdogs as they exert their critical thinking onto the process of disinformation. They should keep their distance from politicians, social media platform barons and mass media moguls, who are increasingly concentrated and present a direct threat to the independence of the press and freedom of expression. They should ensure their visibility as watchdogs by means of professional norms and standards for transparency. They should push for co-regulation, since self-regulation has reached its limits, and hold their place among all the other stakeholders, on equal footing, requiring accountability mechanisms and monitoring social corporate responsibility.

In terms of networks and their operations, small independent organizations have taken a foothold in the fields of MIL and journalism, bringing new agile norms and practices and speeding the digital transformation of older incumbents. They nonetheless cannot work in isolation and need to rely on larger institutional organizations to help scale up the fight against disinformation. These in turn need the agility of new entrants to change in incremental ways and to provide a sustained response that can hopefully increase trust in information. Both new and old parties should overcome their reluctance to be aggregated altogether (for fear of losing their independence). They should embrace permeability as a key strategy in this interchange between external forces and internal ones and embrace new configurations and dynamic coalitions where researchers, fact-checkers, educators and journalists work together.

In terms of audiences and communities, one blind side of all these efforts is the senior population as disinformation tends to be spread by people who are older, less computer literate and less literate overall (Hunt and Gentzkow 2017). Journalists should practice media literacy in their newspapers and audiovisual outlets, to train their adult readers and viewers (rather than going in classrooms). They have ideal access to older generations that are the most in need of fact-checking and news literacy and are harder to reach by other professions and other actors. As for MIL practitioners, they have a blind side too as they need to focus on user-agency and content-creator agency, especially among young people. This should lead them to focus more on helping young people control amplification and recommendation, by design, instead of leaving them in the hands of the social media platforms, as exemplified by projects such as YouChoose.ai.

In conclusion, the evolution of fact-checking and news literacy shows the changes in the fields of journalism and MIL, with new spaces that foster new collaborations and new systems of meaning. They modify modes of governance as it is not just formal from the top (institutions) but also informal from the bottom up (networks), with co-regulatory opportunities. Such a rapid evolution has led to some attitude change in the implicated professions, and collective sense-making with shared systems of meaning that recognize, inter alia, the role of data and algorithms, the need for source verification and critical thinking, the agency of audiences in amplification. Both actors working in the respective fields of journalism and MIL have become more aware of the need to show their internal core processes (how to check claims and verify sources) and not just the end product (the final stories) to audiences that are expecting more than the traditional information contract but also the communication sharing contract. This evolution holds the potential of strengthening journalism and MIL and reversing the flow of disinformation in favor of information.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.