Enlighten Me

Rodney Crouther:
Hi, I'm Rodney Crouther.

Eddie Sanchez:
And this is Eddie Sanchez, and you are now listening to Enlighten Me.

Rodney Crouther:
Hey, Eddie, we both work in marketing here for Texas State University, but a lot of our conversation is about the modern media landscape and news is a big part of the conversation right now.

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah. And I know your background was in journalism and you did some work in Florida and I don't know where else.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, I was a newspaper reporter in Florida for about a decade.

Eddie Sanchez:
So, I'm sure that you've had firsthand experience seeing all the changes going from what we were in maybe the late '90s, early 2000s to where we are today.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, it's a completely different ballgame now. But it hit me that a lot of our students especially were born into this digital and social media age of getting news and information, so they have no clue what it was like when newspapers were the backbone of journalism.

Eddie Sanchez:
The dominant source of information?

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. I went to our great School of Journalism and Mass Comm here and talked to Dr. Chiecchi about the history of journalism and newspapers especially, how we got to where we are today.

Eddie Sanchez:
That's pretty interesting, especially where we are at today. Journalism is at a really critical point in time, so what did you end up talking to him about?

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, I talked to him about just how media was very different then, but there was a lot of similarity too. There was still a lot of pressure to get information out quickly and that sometimes led to bad journalism. That's not something that was invented with social media or the digital age, but he also had a lot of optimism about how digital media can still be good journalism.

Dino Chiecchi:
My name is Dino Chiecchi. I'm an associate professor of practice here at Texas State University. I teach a number of things such as newswriting, photo journalism, feature writing, anything under the journalism umbrella, there's a good chance I teach it.

Rodney Crouther:
Tell me a little bit about your background. What led you to Texas State?

Dino Chiecchi:
I began my newspaper career at the El Paso Herald Post in El Paso. An afternoon paper, when afternoon papers were thriving and competitive. I worked there for about four and a half years. Then I got a call one day from the Austin American-Statesman, and they said, "I understand that you are a bilingual police reporter." And I said, "Si señor, I am. Happy to do it." And they said, "Well, would you be interested in coming to work for us?" And I basically got the job over the phone.

Rodney Crouther:
Oh, great.

Dino Chiecchi:
Yeah. So, I've been working in newspapers and/or wire services for quite some time. I did that for about 33 years. I worked at the Associated Press in Dallas, a newspaper in Hong Kong. I worked at the San Antonio Express News, the Tucson Citizen, and the El Paso Times. I think I'm missing one somewhere along the way. I did that for a while and just loved daily journalism, but day journalism was evolving. It was changing. And I had an opportunity to go into academia at my alma mater, the University of Texas at El Paso. So, I taught there for about six or seven years, I believe. And then I got a call from Texas State and they said, "Well, would you like to come work for us?" I said, "Yeah, the time is right to come back to Central Texas."

Rodney Crouther:
I guess, what first got you interested in journalism? What attracted you as a career path there?

Dino Chiecchi:
When I was in fifth grade, I made my decision. I knew in fifth grade what I wanted to do the rest of my life. I wanted to change the world and what a better way to change the world than by being a journalist, by exposing the world to itself and that in itself would elicit the change necessary to make things hopefully better.

Rodney Crouther:
That's a really elegant answer.

Dino Chiecchi:
That's why I became a journalist.

Rodney Crouther:
My background's also in journalism. I know none of us really get into it for the money because-

Dino Chiecchi:
Oh, no.

Rodney Crouther:
... yeah. The evolution of journalism you mentioned and that's part of what led you to move from newspapers to academia. That's really why we asked you here today. A lot of our younger listeners especially may not realize what the old newspaper world was like, so could you walk us through the role that newspapers used to play in American public life?

Dino Chiecchi:
Newspapers were competitive. Almost every city that I can think of had two papers in it, a morning paper, an afternoon paper, or two morning papers. And they were at each other's throats and they were highly competitive, but not at all times were they producing high quality journalism. For the sake of competition, they would sometimes be a little quick on the draw and maybe not produce the best journalism or they were thinking about the competition more than they were thinking about the reader.

Rodney Crouther:
Right. So, basically publishing things before they verified that they were true.

Dino Chiecchi:
Sometimes that was the case. We had a wonderful war in San Antonio, but I think that the demise of one paper made the other paper better. It made them more thoughtful, more productive, and do better journalism as a result of not worrying about what the competitor was doing across the street.

Rodney Crouther:
In the course of your career, could you see that changing just in the marketplace? I'm old enough to remember the era of two papers, but like most cities, if they have a paper now, they have just one. What really caused that change? Was it just one paper out competing another?

Dino Chiecchi:
That was part of it. Another big part of it was the fact that there wasn't enough ad revenue to support more than one paper in a community. Also, I think what played a great role in this was Craigslist. You remember, recall when Craigslist first started, the ads were free.

Rodney Crouther:
I remember.

Dino Chiecchi:
Well, classified advertising accounted for a fourth to a fifth of newspaper revenue. Okay. When you got a competitor on the internet offering an opportunity to sell your 10-speed bike for free, as opposed to a newspaper charging exorbitant prices for classified advertising, where are you going to go? People went to Craigslist. It was free for many years.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. It wasn't just that news was free at a website, it was that the ads were free.

Dino Chiecchi:
That's correct. At least that's my theory. But I think it's true because once newspapers start to die out, Craigslist started charging for their ads. Once you get the crack for free, it's hard to break away, and then they start to charge you for it, and that's what happened.

Rodney Crouther:
It's a business model that works with a lot of products, I guess, so yeah.

Dino Chiecchi:
It does. It worked very well for Craigslist, and I think it had a lot to do with the demise of newspapers. I also feel that the industry did not respond either in a timely basis or maybe even at all. Couldn't newspapers have done something to compete against Craigslist in a better way? I don't think they did.

Rodney Crouther:
You were still there when that evolution was happening.

Dino Chiecchi:
Oh yeah, I was.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, so you didn't see the newspapers as organizations really adapting to the changes that the internet was bringing?

Dino Chiecchi:
I did not. And a lot of us in the newsroom did not. And we were clamoring for some sort of adjustment because we knew, despite the fact that we were not in high management, that something was happening, a revolution was taking place and we needed to do something. Even people in the newsroom acknowledge that revenue is key and revenue is being stripped away from us and we weren't doing anything to respond.

Rodney Crouther:
Do you think there was like an... And I know we're speculating here.

Dino Chiecchi:
We are.

Rodney Crouther:
There was a kind of institutional mindset, I guess, at the higher levels of management that, "Newspapers are institutions of the community and they'll just always be there."

Dino Chiecchi:
I think that was the case. I think there was an assumption that people will always want their paper on their front porch. And with the evolution of the internet and things like Craigslist, people got used to the fact that, "You know what? Maybe I can do without this paper in the morning." Which circulation rates kept rising and rising and rising as well to make up for the loss in ad revenue. Well, people said, "Enough." And that's where we are now.

Rodney Crouther:
Newspapers still exist in some form. They're online. They still exist in circulation, in physical form, in paper form. But if that's not the primary way people are getting their news today, how has the business of getting news reported changed?

Dino Chiecchi:
It has evolved in many ways. Now, I do think newspapers are viable. I hope they'll be viable for a very long time. What they have done is they've adjusted what they're doing. They recognize that the internet is where people are going to get a lot of their news. Consequently, reporters are having to be trained in many different ways.
I brought a camera with me because visuals play such a huge role in what newspapers now have to do. If a story is accompanied by a photo gallery, who doesn't click on the photo gallery? Now, mind you, the photos got to be high quality, there can't be an excessive number of photos, but people want to see visuals. They want to see videos, a minute, 29 seconds long, no more than that, they want to see that. They want to see those photo galleries. They want to read a good, tightly written stories with subheads that'll keep their attention. Otherwise, they're going to go somewhere else.
And more than anything else, it's highly competitive. Be out with a story first. But as I like to tell my students, "Don't be just first, but be right, first." And I'll give you an example.

Rodney Crouther:
Please.

Dino Chiecchi:
When Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash, initially, one of the network news stations said that Kobe Bryant died with all his daughters, all four of them. Remember that?

Rodney Crouther:
I do.

Dino Chiecchi:
That was wrong. That was way wrong. They didn't verify their sources. In the heat of battle to be first, they were wrong.

Rodney Crouther:
So, new technology, but still making the same mistake?

Dino Chiecchi:
That's right. So, we still have to be accurate. "We got to be accurate and then be first, not merely be first." At least that's my motto, and that's what I teach my students. I'd rather be second, but be correct, then be first and be wrong.

Rodney Crouther:
Become a trusted source.

Dino Chiecchi:
You bet. We want to maintain as trusted because very quickly people lose that trust and go somewhere else.

Rodney Crouther:
You're hopeful that newspapers are finally catching up to...

Dino Chiecchi:
Absolutely. Not even hopeful, I'm even confident. Some newspapers never even put down their paywalls, like The Wall Street Journal, they were never free. And yet, they're still competitive, doing well and from what I understand, making money and breaking stories.

Rodney Crouther:
I guess, that's encouraging. Could you tell me a little bit about your students, coming into the class, what's their perspective on news? Because they don't think of news I think the way earlier generations did that had fewer channels and fewer opportunities to get news. They've got a lot more resources, right?

Dino Chiecchi:
You're absolutely right. They're inundated with sources of news. TikTok is one example. X, formerly known as-

Rodney Crouther:
Twitter.

Dino Chiecchi:
... Twitter, but forgive me. I call it X all the time and I forgot what they used to be called. They're inundated with sources for news, but they need to understand that those sources for news, many times, don't have an editor or a solid reporter to verify what it is.
Every day I begin my classes by asking them, "What's on your minds?" In effect, I'm asking, "What's in the news today." Okay? And some student will say that they read something or heard something on TikTok or somewhere else and I'll say, "Did you bother to verify it with a credible news source?" And typically the answer is, "No." So, we spent a few minutes in class trying to verify what they heard or read. If we can verify it, fantastic. But typically the answer is, "It's unverifiable." Consequently, it's not real. You need to be very careful as to what you're doing, so we talk about that a lot in my classes, "Make sure that you are verifying your information and that it is solid. Just because you saw it on TikTok doesn't mean it's for real."

Rodney Crouther:
Do you see that sinking in once you go through that exercise a few times?

Dino Chiecchi:
It does in my classes. I don't know about afterward, but it does in my classes. Yes, we talk about that a great deal in my classes.

Rodney Crouther:
Because that isn't... I mean, it can feel like extra work when you're scrolling and just absorbing story after story.

Dino Chiecchi:
Absolutely.

Rodney Crouther:
To come out of that, to then go to a secondary or a third site to try to verify what you heard.

Dino Chiecchi:
It is more work, but it's necessary work. We need to have an educated population, they have to vote, they have to make good decisions about the people they vote for and how they're voting and if they're trusting sources that are unverified, that have no editors, that's not a good thing for society.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. Gatekeeping in journalism isn't really about protecting one side or the other, it's about protecting the integrity of the process.

Dino Chiecchi:
You're absolutely right. It's about protecting the integrity of the process and being verifiable. There's no such thing as alternative facts. Despite the fact what we heard years ago, there's only one set of facts and we need to verify them, make sure they're right, and make our decisions as a result of that.

Rodney Crouther:
I know one thing that's changed, in newspapers, it was pretty clear because it was printed at the top of the sections, like this is, "news," this is, "opinion." Do you think we've lost that, as news has become electronic, that we don't have those clearly defined lanes of information?

Dino Chiecchi:
I think legitimate news sources are doing better at that and doing well. They're labeling what is analysis. They're labeling what is opinion and they're doing that and they're mimicking to some degree on their homepage what the cover of a newspaper would look like. They're doing that or they're doing a better job of it. And I'm very happy to see that because sometimes the lines got a bit mixed and it's important that the lines be separated, very clear as to what is opinion, what is fact, what is news, what is sports and so on. I think they're doing better at that and I'm very pleased.

Rodney Crouther:
That's encouraging. That's really encouraging. How is Texas State creating opportunities for aspiring journalism students to carry on this work?

Dino Chiecchi:
I'll give you a couple of examples. We have good relationships with the news products in the area. I'll give you one example that I'm doing in my classes as it is working very well. We have a solid relationship with Austin American-Statesman. Several years ago, for the first anniversary and the second anniversary of Uvalde, I took a group of students to Uvalde to talk to parents who lost loved ones in the mass shooting where 19 students were killed and two teachers also perished. Okay?
The students not only interviewed these people and did real work out in the field, not just within the confines of the classroom, but out in the real field, out in the field, covering real news with real people. They then wrote their stories. We had photo galleries, we had good stories, we had good video. We presented this information to the Austin American-Statesman as well as Texas Public Radio and the stories ran on their platforms.
The Austin American-Statesman, for example, has a section every Sunday called Sunday Plus. For the first anniversary, the entire Sunday Plus section was our students' work.

Rodney Crouther:
Oh, that's great.

Dino Chiecchi:
Yes, it was.

Rodney Crouther:
I mean, it's a great experience for them. It's great content for the Austin American-Statesman, but that's something your students can have in a portfolio on a resume.

Dino Chiecchi:
That's exactly right. And this year we did something very similar. We went to the Texas Hill Country on two different weekends and we reported from the Hill Country stories that haven't been reported by anybody else. Those stories will be made available to the Statesmen as well as to Texas Public Radio for them to review and to run as well. So, we're going out into the classroom, the things that we're learning in the class are being applied out in the field and they're being made available to legacy media for them to run both in the newspaper and on the radio, but also we're producing other items, multimedia, that they can run as part of packages.

Rodney Crouther:
And I want to make sure our listeners get something very important, I think, in the nuance of what you just said. Your students' work is being made available to these legacy media, to Texas Public Radio and the American-Statesman.

Dino Chiecchi:
That's absolutely right.

Rodney Crouther:
It's not part of the deal that whatever they write is going to get published.

Dino Chiecchi:
Nope. Nothing's automatic. However, the very first story that was produced by our group of students already ran in the Austin American-Statesman. It was a story about the fact that so many festivals and art festivals as well as music festivals have been canceled in the Hill Country as a result of the floods and the death and destruction that was caused by the Guadalupe River. That story already ran in the American-Statesman, ran a couple of weeks ago, already.

Rodney Crouther:
Great. So, if you have a Statesman subscription, you can go on and read that right now.

Dino Chiecchi:
That's absolutely right. And we had a shared byline by two students. They were told that they wanted the story to run before what would have been the data of this music festival, and our students did that. They interviewed nine different sources in the span of one week. Doing something unheard of, the story was written, it was edited by me, and it ran almost verbatim in the Austin American-Statesman. That's what we're doing in our classes.

Rodney Crouther:
That is really training for what they're going to do when they're in an actual newsroom.

Dino Chiecchi:
Real life daily journalism. That's what we're doing here.

Rodney Crouther:
That's great to hear.

Dino Chiecchi:
Thank you.

Rodney Crouther:
And really inspiring.

Dino Chiecchi:
Thank you.

Rodney Crouther:
Is there anything else you'd like to say about the future of journalism and the evolution of newspapers?

Dino Chiecchi:
I am bullish. I am. I feel that journalism is going to be with us for a very long time. The formats in, it'll continue to adjust, to modify, to evolve but at the end of the day, we are preparing our students to be able to be prepared for that evolution and we're doing it now. And if there's a new evolution, a new trend or whatever, we'll be prepared to handle that as well. I am confident.
Our professionals, that are teaching these students, many of them come from newsrooms from around the country or Central Texas at the very least. We're preparing our students to be ready for what the marketplace is asking for and what the readers and subscribers are demanding.

Rodney Crouther:
And I think historically, it might be good to note that the internet isn't the first new technology that's come along and changed how newspapers work. I mean, newspapers existed before radio and television.

Dino Chiecchi:
When television came out, they said it'd kill radio. Well, it didn't. When the internet came about, they said it'd kill newspapers and TV. Well, it hasn't. We're going to keep evolving. Yeah, things are going to change. Maybe newsrooms will be smaller in size, but our goal is to get our students to the point where they're getting hired because they're well-prepared, and I think we're doing that.

Rodney Crouther:
Nice, so this is still a viable field and it's an opportunity for a new generation to put their stamp on it.

Dino Chiecchi:
I am totally bullish about it. Absolutely, I'm confident we're going to be fine.

Eddie Sanchez:
Cool, Rodney. Well, that was a really interesting conversation that you had with Professor Chiecchi. I was really surprised to hear the fact that he had stated about Kobe, how it had originally came out that he had passed away with his four daughters. I didn't get to see that myself, but I mean, definitely I know because of how fast people want their media, their stories, how quickly they consume it, that bad information can get out very, very easily.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. I mean, he made the point that media is still a business and media outlets are competitive and getting it out fast is part of the game.

Eddie Sanchez:
Now, I'm interested. Did you get a chance to talk to anybody about how to find accurate information or how to find good sources, so that way we're not getting tricked by bad headlines?

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, absolutely. Because of course Texas State has a professor who specializes in media literacy and it's Dr. Gwynne Ash, who was kind enough to join us in the studio here.

Gwynne Ash:
Hi, I'm Gwynne Ellen Ash, and I'm a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Reading Education Program.

Rodney Crouther:
How long have you been teaching at Texas State?

Gwynne Ash:
This is the beginning of my 22nd year. I came in 2024.

Rodney Crouther:
Oh, definitely a dedicated Bobcat. Great. And what's your particular area of study? I

Gwynne Ash:
I am a reading professor, so I teach about all different areas of reading, including things that people would think of as traditional reading, like oral reading fluency and vocabulary comprehension. And then I also do work with children's and young adult literature and critical media literacy.

Rodney Crouther:
Great. And that is the subject we ask you here to discuss today, media literacy, so what drew you to that particular area of research or teaching?

Gwynne Ash:
Well, it's funny. I came to it fairly organically. I had always been someone who enjoyed doing textual analysis, identifying the power of writing for doing things. And when I taught public school, when I taught middle school, we always did a big unit on propaganda techniques because that's part of the state standards. Now, we usually did it compared to advertising and, certainly at my age, it was print advertising for the most part, although also video.
But in my doctoral program, right at the turn of the century, I wrote an academic piece that was about this little animated TV show that was popular with some of the middle school kids that I worked with and it was called South Park. And in the piece, I was arguing that everyone was talking about South Park being about kids. And I said that I didn't think South Park was about kids, and I actually had to go look this up. I said, "South Park is not about children. It's about media, media uses and media abuses and adults, not children's, lack of understanding of the way media functions in their lives."

Rodney Crouther:
What is media literacy? How do we define that?

Gwynne Ash:
In a lot of ways, it changes over time, right? Because what the media that we have are different over time. But the National Association for Media Literacy Education calls media literacy, "A study that builds on traditional literacy and offers new forms of reading and writing. Media literacy empowers people to be critical thinkers and makers, effective communicators, and active citizens."

Rodney Crouther:
Like you said, and you alluded to it earlier that our definition of media changes. When we were in middle school, it was all print media and a little bit of TV and radio but yeah.

Gwynne Ash:
Yeah, maybe radio, television, film, and those old programs. Now, they include all electronic or digital means of visual creation, audio creation, still some print-based, although that may be digital, but the processes and the ways that we think about the messages in media stay the same even as our media is different.

Rodney Crouther:
The term media covers a much wider range of communications than it used to.

Gwynne Ash:
Yes. The gatekeepers are gone, so communication is much wider and we look at how those texts in the past might have been one or two messages and now there might be a thousand messages on the same idea that people have to evaluate and consider when selecting how they want to interpret the information.

Rodney Crouther:
And even the at-home gatekeepers, like your parents, pretty much could control what was you saw on TV because there might only be one TV or two in the home.

Gwynne Ash:
And you were the one who had to stand up and change the channel.

Rodney Crouther:
Exactly. And now, today's generation have literally thousands of channels at their fingertips.

Gwynne Ash:
Mm-hmm. Even guardrails are not very effective for many of the things that parents might use for-

Rodney Crouther:
Oh, right. The apps and things that are supposed to control what kids are allowed to see.

Gwynne Ash:
Kids are usually pretty good at getting around those guardrails very quickly.

Rodney Crouther:
Well, yeah, today's kids are better at technology than their parents.

Gwynne Ash:
Sure. Some technology, which is interesting to me, but I think it's because some of the difficulties that we may have faced as young people, like the fact that a file from a Macintosh couldn't be read on a Wintel machine, they don't know how to save files as different formats because it's never something that they've had to do, but they do know how to create a video out of nothing.

Rodney Crouther:
What are the trends today regarding media literacy and the different ways that people digest news? How has that changed over the... It's changed really rapidly over just a couple of years.

Gwynne Ash:
Yeah. I mean, I think, kind of what you alluded to before with the multiple makers. We have one issue, which is that we've really had a splintering of the media. Where, when I was a child, there were three network TV channels and PBS. There may have been a few newspapers. Most were local or regional, and you might be able to go and buy a big newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times at a bookstore. But we had niche reporting that was very homogeneous.
But now, with cable television, streaming news, digital radio, the internet, and then social media, what people see, hear and read is much more heterogeneousness. We have entire siloed news areas where topics might be reported in one area and not reported in another area and depending on where you get your diet of news and information, you might have a completely different sense of events than other people might.

Rodney Crouther:
I was going to ask how that's changed because yes, when there were only three stations, everybody basically got the same news. Regardless of what your preferred channel or newspaper was, the general information was pretty much the same. And now, between what you can self-select and what algorithms select for you and push toward you, it's possible to live in a completely separate reality from someone sitting right next to you.

Gwynne Ash:
Yes. And we see that both with what we'd call misinformation, which might be incorrect information, versus disinformation, which is specifically incorrect information, that what people encounter varies very much based on their diet. And I think that the rise of AI, and certainly at the university level and going into public schools as well, has changed our understanding of evaluating texts for reliability and trustworthiness in very different ways.
I remember sitting in a speech communication class in the 1990s and the professor telling me that soon, because it wasn't at that time, and we weren't even using email regularly, but soon people would be able to create photographs and videos that didn't really happen, and it would be difficult to identify that they did not really happen. And he discussed primarily the sociopolitical issues that may arise with that. And I always think about him, and then I think about a family friend, Dr. Ron Zellner, who was in educational technology, and he told me about the same time that we would start getting TV through our phone lines.
And I thought at the time, it was crazy, how could they send television through our phone lines? We had just gotten cable a few years before, and they were both right.

Rodney Crouther:
Frighteningly right. How do you teach elementary or middle school students to sort a trustworthy news source or information source from disinformation or misinformation?

Gwynne Ash:
Well, and we've really shifted probably in the last couple of years in some of the recommendations that we have for how we have students look at messages or texts in that way. I use as a framework, from a lot of my literacy instruction, Freebody and Luke's Four Reader Roles or sometimes called the Four Resources Model, which talks about what readers have to do to make sense of text. And this is true for all kinds of texts, so we have code breakers that figure out how the text works and for young kids, that would even be learning how to read the words. And we have meaning makers that are focusing on literal and inferential comprehension of text.
But then we have two other roles that a lot of people may not think about related to reading. Text users who figure out what text purposes are and how we might select different texts or genres or communication approaches depending on what we're trying to communicate. And then text analysts who go beyond comprehension of a text to think about the author's purpose, the author's point of view, thinking about bias that might be present and whether they accept or reject the author's message, so I like to couch reading in that to get kids thinking about that to start with.
And then one of the really powerful tools is a concept of lateral reading, and that is that, when we used to teach kids about webpages in the early days of the internet, we'd have them look at visual elements of the webpage. For example, what is the URL suffix? If it's gov, it's going to be more trustworthy or if it's org or if it's com. Well, now, first of all, there's a lot more URLs and there isn't really the gatekeeping that's happening there either on what URL people are using, so it's not as reliable to look at.
We also would ask them to look at things like advertising and how advertising is prevalent or not prevalent in the ad or are things misspelled, things like that, more surface level.

Rodney Crouther:
I was saying on social media, you're not even seeing a URL, it's just content coming at you.

Gwynne Ash:
Right. And lateral reading, instead of looking at the source, actually immediately has you looking outside the source for information that can help you understand the text better. Let's say, I have an example here, that I had a Martha Stewart blog post that came through on one of my social media feeds, and it happened to reference a research study that I had read. The Martha Stewart blog post said along the lines of, "If you eat earlier in the day, you'll live longer." And I thought, "Oh, that's that study I read last week." So, in lateral reading, I would pull up the blog post and then I would pull up other sources that gave me information about the claims of the post and about the author and where their point of view perspective may be coming from.
So, I pulled up the original research article that had been published in Nature and looked at this piece. As we'll talk about later with data literacy, it was a common conflation that happens in social media and in some less-reliable journalistic sources where people confuse correlation with causality. So, the study, which looked at the eating habits of elderly British people, found that people who had more health difficulties ate later in the day, had later lunch, later breakfast, later dinner, and had a smaller eating period, but it was a correlational study. And even the authors themselves posed it as a way of monitoring people's health. So, we might look at people People who are eating late breakfast and think, "They may have some health concerns that we want to look into."
But the reporting, in the blog post, shifted the other direction. "Oh, you need to eat earlier and you'll live longer." Which is a data literacy problem, a misunderstanding. So, by doing lateral reading where I'm reading the article, at the same time I'm reading the reporting on the article, or I'm reading someone's opinion about the accuracy or validity of Martha Stewart blog posts. And with lateral reading then we're able to have background knowledge we might not have had to evaluate the claims being made, so I think it is very powerful for students. It ties into a lot of what we understand about synthesizing information across texts, being able to understand differing reporting of the same information. And it also encourages students to read more, right? They're reading multiple texts in evaluating it.
Middle grades is the biggest period of time where their math curriculum looks at probability and statistics. Most students don't look at probability and statistics after middle school unless they study it in high school. And yet we find it is an understanding that is widely difficult for children and adults to understand both statistics as reported, data displays, and being able to interpret those and to be able to interpret them critically, to look at how people use scale, for example, to make arguments with the same data.

Rodney Crouther:
Right. I think I've heard that in other discussions in this field that people tend to assume too much just because a statistic is presented. That the basic human tendency is to extrapolate a level of trustworthiness that may not correlate to what that information actually is.

Gwynne Ash:
Yes. We have a real difficulty in the United States, adults, not even talking about kids here, with differentiating fact and opinion. The Pew Research Center did a study in 2018, and they found that adults overall only did slightly better than 50/50 in identifying statements that were evidence-based statements, which they defined as fact, being something that could be proven or disproven, versus opinion statements, which obviously reflect someone's opinion and could not be proven or disproven, so we did terrible as adults in differentiating those things. And I think part of that also has to do with that news environment that we're talking about. That, starting in 1980, when we began moving to a different media ecosystem, there was a real conflation of news reporting and opinion or punditry reporting, and it seems people are having difficulty differentiating them.

Rodney Crouther:
And I want to be clear, this is something that's across the board it's not a-

Gwynne Ash:
Oh, absolutely. And there's actually a really interesting finding that they asked for self-identification of participants by political alignment. And they found that both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to identify statements that aligned with their perspectives as evidence-based, even if they were not. And it was that real difficulty of recognizing that because you agree with something, it doesn't make it evidence.
Also, that just because something is evidence-based, it doesn't mean it's correct. There was a real presumption, going back to what you were talking about, that if it was a factual statement, that made it correct, versus, as a factual statement, it was something that could be fact-checked and you could look to see if it was accurate or inaccurate.

Rodney Crouther:
Okay. It sounds like all of us need to become a little bit better at research.

Gwynne Ash:
Sure. I mean, and it is very true. I mean, I joke with people all the time that I'm the most annoying person on social media because I'm always the person pointing out like, "What's the resource for that? What evidence do you have to support that? That's not true, you need to take that down." Which I imagine is quite annoying, but it is a tendency of all of us.
I was interviewing a middle school kid once asking about why they were choosing to share the information they were sharing on social media. And I asked them about how they decided that something could be used as evidence. I was interested to see what their fact-checking plans were. And what the young man told me was, he's like, "Well, I don't really worry about that. I worry about whether it supports my argument." And I said, "So, you would share something that you knew not to be true or that you might not know to be true and you would share that anyway?" And he said, "Yeah." And it really made me think about our epistemologies of truth as well.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and what we count as knowledge. And there's been quite a lot of writing and critical media literacy about the different ways that people perceive evidence. And I'll admit, I'm an old Star Trek, Vulcan-centric kind of person. I'm very tied to being logical and being evidence-based, so when I encounter someone who looks at information differently, I need to recognize that it is a worldview. It is a way that they are looking at things. And it helped me understand some things better too, because I didn't understand why when people were presented with evidence that contradicted their opinion, they didn't change it, but it was because their idea of what evidence was, as well as what fact and opinion were, that differed from mine.

Rodney Crouther:
Wow, that's a lot. That does sound like this is going to take work from all of us, that we all need to take a step back and develop a new way of looking at any information that comes to us.

Gwynne Ash:
Yeah.

Rodney Crouther:
How optimistic are you that we can kind of stem this tide of people running off like half cocked on bad information being our standard rather than the exception?

Gwynne Ash:
Critical media literacy, which goes the step beyond media literacy to look at how messages are produced and who is producing them and how that ties to the messages that come through, I think is necessary for that. And even having that critical mindset of, "What is this message telling me? Why is this message being communicated to me? And do I accept or reject this message?" Which is ultimately the step that a critical reader is able to evaluate all that information and then use it to make their own decision at that step.
So, I think if we think of it as empowering to be able to identify the perspective of an author, the purpose of a message, how power structures differ in the way we receive messages. For example, if your sister tells you, "You need to clean your room." That's one message. If your mother tells you, "You need to clean your room." It's a different message.

Rodney Crouther:
Oh, absolutely.

Gwynne Ash:
So, when we think about authors' power, that becomes significant. And production is, I think, in the age of large language models and AI, very significant. Again, adults have been found to have great difficulty identifying text that is created by large language models or visuals that have been created by AI. Young people are a little better, although they might have a little hubris in that area, also.
Many of the media, that we want people to be critical when they consume, is pleasurable, right? We like to listen to music, we like to watch TV shows, we like to watch movies, we like to read short and long form journalism, whether digital or print. And sometimes people are a little protective of their pleasure, right? They don't want to analyze the things that are enjoyable, but the pleasure can be the entree. Like, "Let's talk about some of the music you like listening to. Have you ever read the lyrics and thought about what they mean?"
I did a karaoke study with kids probably in the late '90s, where we were working on oral reading fluency with song lyrics, and part of the intervention was talking about what the songs meant. And the kids were really resistant to that at first. They didn't like the idea of songs meaning something or songs being a school thing. That was a part of it, right?

Rodney Crouther:
You were making their fun thing work, yeah.

Gwynne Ash:
In some ways, it was taking their pleasure away. Right, but it can engage them in more interest because, well, they want to have those songs, they want to think about those songs, they want to be doing things that are interesting. Kids reading about video games, kids playing Minecraft, those are all openings that we can use to have them become more critical. And I think that there is hope for young people in that way.
Older people, I think we need more of an understanding of what we don't know. We talk about kids being digital natives, right? The internet has always existed for them. Well, I'm a "digital immigrant" is the term used because I lived at a time when there were computers at the university, but nobody could use a computer. And then you could go and use a computer that belonged to someone else. And then, while I was in high school, there was a computer math class where we learned trigonometry on an Apple 2E, but it was never that presence. I didn't have an email address until after my master's program. I didn't use email or the internet in any academic sense until my doctoral program. My niece is 11 and has had an email since she was five for school, so all of that has made the world different for them and has, I believe, really raised the stakes in being critical.
As kids enter a new world, they will have to learn about things that we can't even conceive of yet, the way that I couldn't conceive of television coming through a phone line. And the other important thing we do in media literacy is let kids take the lead sometimes, because they know more about some things than we do, six, seven, let's say. And they know less things about things they don't even know they don't understand yet that we can help them with, so if we work collaboratively, they can give us their strengths and we can help share our strengths and work together to better understanding the messages we encounter.

Rodney Crouther:
I think that's a good note to end on, that it's not an us versus them, it's that we need to take our old-school knowledge and kind of combine it with their digital-native experience and maybe both of us will have a little bit better understanding of the torrent of information coming through our phones.

Gwynne Ash:
I mean, in that way, I'm very jealous of them. I used to read the encyclopedia at my grandparents. I loved it. And to have all of that information at their fingertips as a kid, anytime you have a question, to be able to possibly find an answer, that's great, but they need to be able to filter through all of those possible answers to find the best answer, and that's what we can help them with.

Eddie Sanchez:
Well, Rodney, it was really hopeful, I guess, listening to Chiecchi and Professor Ash talk about how the media landscape is still evolving, how journalism, even though it might be changing, there's still a lot of hopefulness and a lot of people are really invested in making sure that there's a lot more accuracy and that journalists are more on point with the information they're providing us.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. I mean, it was good perspective that they pointed out, yeah, the technology's changing, but the professionals in media and in journalism are starting to use those same tools that worry a lot of people to put safeguards back in and make it easier for us to find good source of information. They did put some of the onus on us to be careful about how we consume and what we consume, but-

Eddie Sanchez:
Yeah, I think I need to be a little bit more careful with jumping on headlines.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah. But they weren't all doom and gloom. They're just like, "No, we can figure this out and media's changed before and it'll change again." So, I came out of it feeling actually a little bit more optimistic about getting good information in the digital age.

Eddie Sanchez:
That's a good thing. That's definitely a good thing. Well, it was great conversations that you had with them, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with them.

Rodney Crouther:
Yeah, thanks. And thank y'all for listening to Enlighten Me, we'll be back next month.
This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State Podcast Network represent the views of the host and guests, not of Texas State University.