Media literacy campaign tackles the challenge of determining what’s true online

Andrea Rivera remembers when a friend told her that the state of California was planning to become its own country. 

“I was like, ‘We have to fact-check this,’” Rivera said, “It was obviously something he found on TikTok.” 

She quickly searched through state government web sites, finding clarification for the post her friend had seen. 

“It was actually about how this man in Fresno was trying to get signatures,” she said. It was a first step to creating a ballot initiative – but one that, even if it passed, would be a symbolic vote, not actually change the state or federal government. 

Rivera, a student at San Joaquin Delta College and Sacramento State, is a student journalist (she also freelances, including for Stocktonia). She was used to checking for authoritative sources to clarify things she heard. She knew the same wasn’t true for her friend.

“I was like, OK, you’re 24 and you haven’t learned how to fact-check something. Let’s learn how to fact-check this.’” 

She also knew her friend was far from the only person in Stockton confronting the challenge. 

Experts agree the declining number of traditional news sources, plus the rise of social algorithms and artificial intelligence, have radically changed the ways people decide what information to see – or believe. 

San Joaquin Delta College is tackling the issue with a media literacy campaign called Media Decoded. The two-year pilot program, funded by a grant from the California Teachers Association Institute for Teaching, will dispatch so-called media literacy ambassadors to K-12 classrooms and events starting in spring.  

Those same issues will be at the heart of a public forum Feb. 13 at San Joaquin Delta College. The event brings together journalists honored by the Pulitzer Prizes for a conversation about news, politics and the future of journalism in the community. 

“We’re seeing more students that are simply getting information as opposed to contextualized information,” said Tara Cuslidge-Staiano, a journalism and mass communications professor at San Joaquin Delta College. “And I think that’s why we’re having the bigger conversation this year. That’s what brought this up.”

A need in Stockton

According to Cuslidge-Staiano, a contributing challenge in Stockton is a previous lack of reporting within the city. 

“I was once a reporter and an editor in Stockton … I’ve watched the Stockton news scene dwindle more and more each year,” Cuslidge-Staiano said. “Because there’s not really newspapers anymore, the news media organizations have started to make big choices about the things they can cover and the things they can’t cover, and you start to lose some of those stories along the way.” 

This, combined with an increase in social media usage, has led Stocktonians to rely on each other for updates on local news instead of actual news organizations. 

“There have been conversations over the past five years about how we have a lot of misinformation in Stockton and in San Joaquin County, specifically,” Cuslidge-Staiano said. “We are a society that is looking to social media to answer our information needs.” 

Laura Harris, an associate professor of history education at Arizona State University, says the issue is similar nationwide. 

“With the growth of different types of communication and the rise of the internet and now AI, there is certainly a need now more than ever for more media literacy education,” Harris said. 

“There is much more of a need now to think about, for example, how search engine algorithms determine the type of historical perspectives or information on current events that people are exposed to.” 

Harris, who is a part of a grant-funded program that focuses on media literacy and civic education training for teachers, said early school training on media literacy can combat misinformation. 

“If teachers are more knowledgeable about how they interact with different forms of media on a daily basis, they can help their students learn these skills,” Harris said. 

The media literacy campaign 

So far, the Delta College program has participated in on-campus events including the Fierce Fall Fest, where students’ families visit campus. The students handed out flyers and pledge cards. People who sign the pledge cards and return them make a promise to practice media literacy going forward – it’s a way to hold students accountable. 

“We had a booth there and we had a lot of our stuff out for people to look at and read,” Rivera said. “We got to explain it to some kids of all ages, as well as their parents.”

According to Rivera, media literacy can be broken down into four steps: examine, question, interpret and explain. 

“You have to ask yourself, ‘Is there something missing? What questions do I still have?’” Rivera said. “If there’s questions that I still have after reading this article or the headline, there’s more to the story, so I need to do some more research.” 

Soon, Media Decoded plans to share literacy tools with classrooms around San Joaquin County. Cuslidge-Staiano and her students spent the fall semester working to develop both long and short versions of a media literacy guide that can be adjusted for every grade level, as well as for adults. By next month, they plan to contact teachers.

They’re also making online versions of the literacy tools to be accessible to others inside and outside classrooms. 

“Not every teacher is going to be willing to give 30 minutes to an hour of time,” Cuslidge-Staiano said. “All of those resources are going to be available for download on our website.” 

The goal of the program is to create a curriculum that can provide context for media literacy for any age group. 

The goal was to put media literacy “in a language that you’re going to understand,” Rivera said. “How am I going to explain to an elementary schooler what media literacy is?” 

Cuslidge-Staiano said curiosity is an essential part. 

“You need to ask questions in order to understand your community better and actually see how the news impacts you,” Cuslidge-Staiano said. “At the end of the day, we really want people to get over that hurdle.”