Matt Jordan and Leah Dajches are in the studio at WPSU recording an episode of the News Over Noise podcast. It’s late March, and their guest is Jack Brewster, an editor at NewsGuard, a company that seeks to counter misinformation in the media. They’re reading off a list of prepared questions but communicate who will ask a timely follow-up question with a subtle nod or gesture. They’re talking about AI content farms, which are designed to publish content that satisfies the algorithms that control search engines.

These farms are pervasive but, as Brewster points out, the articles usually lack substance, are derivative of other reports, or are outright misleading. “You type ‘2024 presidential election’ into Google, and you’re being fed an article from some chatbot. Do you want that?” Brewster says. “The [ad] revenue is going to the content farm and not to the journalist who had to do the reporting. That’s a problem.”

Jordan and Dajches have been producing the podcast since its debut in 2022 as part of Penn State’s News Literacy Initiative. The show’s guests and topics reflect the numerous issues the initiative is studying and hoping to draw attention to: the horse-race nature of political coverage, the disconnect between the diversity of audiences and the homogeneity of the reporters covering them, and how media organizations are trying to reach increasingly withdrawn younger audiences through TikTok. These are nuanced issues, and Jordan, head of the film and media studies department in the Bellisario College of Communications and director of the initiative, and Dajches, a postdoctoral scholar, strive to keep the episodes politically neutral and digestible to listeners who have varied knowledge of how the media works. But each podcast episode (all of which stream at WPSU.org and are broadcast on radio stations throughout Pennsylvania) concludes with the same sentence, one that gets to the heart of the impact the initiative has hoped to have since its inception: “Stay well, and well-informed.”

The News Literacy Initiative was launched in October 2022 as a two-year pilot program, a joint effort of the College of Communications, WPSU, the College of Education, University Libraries, Student Affairs, Penn State Harrisburg, and Penn State Outreach; it is the only such endeavor of its kind from an American university to date. (The program’s initial funding came from the Office of the Provost.) Bellisario dean Marie Hardin had been thinking about ways to better educate students—and not only those who are studying to become journalists—on how to be more informed citizens. “The notion of news literacy is much more of a part of the conversation with students than it was a few years ago,” Hardin says. “There seems to be a growing awareness that there are two sides to the coin, and we can’t just be thinking about how to produce more content. We have to make that content relevant and accessible to students and to communities.”

Penn State faculty initially surveyed 900 students and discovered that most of them neither dug into news topics nor took time to find trusted sources. They discussed the baseline knowledge of news literacy that students should have by the time they graduate, and how they could impact the larger community. Jordan, who came to Penn State in 2002, led many of the initial conversations; he had been encountering many of the issues the initiative set out to study—misinformation, news avoidance, and political bias among them—in his media and democracy class. He saw how these forces were creating not only a less-informed public but one that was increasingly divided. “People have been charting people’s media consumption for years,” he says. “Our concern is that what they’re consuming tends to be bad.” As Penn State educators were planning the initiative, Jordan was beginning to see the term “news aversion” more often in media studies. With an endless flow of information coming from the internet, cable news, and social media, and much of it focused on negative or conflict-based news, which tends to dominate headlines, the emotional effect on consumers—especially those in Gen Z, who are constantly connected to social media—can be overwhelming.

The initiative surveyed 687 undergraduate students at University Park about their news literacy skills, news consumption habits, and perceptions of the journalism industry. Almost half of the students surveyed reported having “not too much confidence” that journalists act in the best interests of the public or that they objectively report the news. And just over 40% of those surveyed reported that they “sometimes” avoid consuming news on certain topics, while 60% said that they “feel worn out by the amount of news these days.”

Combatting news avoidance in college students is one challenge the News Literacy Initiative faces. Just as challenging, says Dajches, is educating older generations, who consume all sorts of news but, because of that, can feel just as worn out. “Anecdotally, my parents don’t have the news avoidance problem,” she says. “They consume so much news that when I talk to them, they just feel in such a state of anxiety and discontent with the world.”

The other danger of people feeling overwhelmed by news is that it puts them at a greater risk of being manipulated by misinformation that is disguised as news; the rise of artificial intelligence has allowed misinformation and disinformation to spread at an unprecedented rate. “Noise pollution is really about not being able to hear what the signal is, because there’s so much masking stuff,” Jordan says. “And in this kind of fire hose of falsehoods, there’s a propaganda technique that is increasingly becoming emergent among authoritarian cultures worldwide: They really don’t care what’s out there. It’s not the old Soviet model of propaganda where you figure out the story you want and just hammer it. Now, they just want so much stuff out there that nobody knows what to believe.”

NewsGuard discovered 614 unreliable news sites that were AI-generated in 2023 alone, and 141 brands that were unintentionally feeding programmatic ad dollars to those sites. It also reported 336 million views of TikTok videos that were using AI text-to-speech software to advance false claims. “I think over the next months and years we’re going to see not only these AI tools become more sophisticated, but the technology for people to build their own AI models, whether that be image generation or text generation, will be democratized,” Brewster says, “and so you’ll have more bad actors getting their hands on the sausage before it’s actually made.”

Brewster also pointed out the rise of “hundreds if not thousands” of online minicults, similar to QAnon, that can rapidly gain followers who are willing to believe even previously debunked claims, such as nanobots in vaccines, and not only distrust the media but believe it is the problem. While the majority of Americans don’t believe in conspiracy theories, their opinions of the media are mixed, particularly when it comes to local versus national coverage. A survey by Pew Research from January 2024 revealed that 71% of respondents believed local media report news accurately, while 63% believed the media is transparent about reporting and 61% felt that media kept a watchful eye on local political leaders. A 2022 Pew survey, though, shows very different attitudes about news organizations in general; fewer than half of adults nationwide said news organizations in general do a very or somewhat good job of covering the most important stories, reporting news accurately, and serving as a watchdog over elected leaders.

The analogy that Jordan often uses compares news media consumption to food consumption: Teaching students how to identify both the vegetables (responsible, civic-minded journalism) and the junk food (content designed to create anxiety, fear, and divisiveness for clicks and profit) was a primary goal, but he also sought to extend those lessons to the larger community. “How do you get people to have a better news diet?” he says. “How do you get them to understand that they can manage their [impact] so that they won’t avoid the news if they avoid the stuff that is unhealthy?”

Unhealthy journalism isn’t limited to deliberately misleading information or propaganda; it can often be as simple as the media reporting on things that excite people instead of the things that will inform them. As the United States approaches the presidential election, Jordan is promoting the Citizens Agenda model of reporting, which eschews what has become traditional political coverage—who is polling well at the moment, what promises are the candidates making—and focuses on issues that are important to the voters, which are typically more localized but undercovered, if covered at all. The News Literacy Initiative is working with the McCourtney Institute for Democracy this fall on a project that will use surveys and focus groups to determine which issues are important to the Penn State community, then share those findings with the Student News Consortium—a collection of student media entities that share information and resources—and other local news organizations in the hope that those issues inspire the topics of coverage. “The more people get engaged in the issues that are important for local community, the more they get engaged in democracy,” Jordan says.

It’s a balmy afternoon in March, and Jordan and News Literacy student ambassador Jenna Meleedy are speaking to a small group of first-year seminar students in Borland Building. They ask the students where they typically get their news and which topics they generally avoid. One student says he doesn’t use social media to find news, and then a few minutes later admits that he gets much of it from TikTok. Jordan replies with a statistic that roughly 20% of what appears on TikTok is poorly sourced information. Another student discreetly scrolls through Instagram on his phone as Jordan and Meleedy talk. “We want you to take an active role in the news you consume,” Meleedy says. “There is quality journalism on social media. You just have to be mindful of the garbage out there.”

Highlighting and quantifying common problems with media consumption is a point of emphasis for the initiative, but so is offering potential solutions, both via the podcast and in outreach programs for consumers. Jordan suggests that the seminar students consider nonprofit news organizations, including ProPublica, NPR, PBS, and the Solutions Journalism Network. Meleedy later describes how she gives herself a 9 p.m. “news curfew” and limits her daily news consumption to a 30-minute listen of a podcast on NPR while she gets ready for classes each morning. “It’s at least better than using the ‘news finds me’ mentality of just hoping that whatever I need to know about the world is just presented to me,” she says. Jordan recommends a similar “less is more” strategy not only for students, but for everyone. “Talk to your neighbor. Go volunteer at the local library,” he says. “You don’t have to watch news all day to be informed about your world.”

Brewster—who is independently developing an app called Newsreel designed to help younger audiences reengage with the news—and his colleagues at NewsGuard use multiple AI tools designed to identify false narratives and online sources of misinformation, but there are also basic strategies that they say anyone can use to improve the quality of their news feed: Evaluate the accounts you follow on social media and whether you really want to be following them. Google news stories to see what has previously been written about the topic. And practice good journalistic habits, including reading with a healthy skepticism and verifying dubious information. “The internet has allowed anyone to have the capability to be their own journalist,” Brewster says. “That means thinking of yourself as someone who has curiosity and wants to report the facts. I think that’s a really basic idea, but it’s something we forget. We have the power to repost things that are factually accurate. We have the power to comment on things that are wrong.”

It bothers Jordan that so much of today’s media coverage, particularly in the political sphere, is about feuds, and that the worst behaviors are reported on more than the best behaviors. There are reasons for that, with profit usually at the top of the list. That’s something he believes people should keep in mind. “The easiest takeaway in terms of the outreach message is: In a world where our attention is being monetized and sold, be mindful about what’s luring you in so that advertisers can get access to you,” Jordan says. “If it’s rage-based news, stop. And it doesn’t matter how old you are or what your political persuasion is.”

Jordan set out looking to examine how certain narratives are perpetuated in the media and how they affect the ways media is consumed and generated in the first place. “I didn’t want it to just be about fact-checking,” Jordan says. “I think factual, verified information is very important. But I think framing matters more than facts. I think the story matters more than facts. Facts, you can check them, but it doesn’t really impact the misinformation. You can tell people the truth. But if they’ve already heard the frame, it’s there, right? You can’t tell them to forget the elephant they just saw.”

When the pilot period expires in October, the News Literacy Initiative will be funded solely by the College of Communications, which is seeking funding from external sources to ensure the initiative remains strong and sustainable. Dajches recently moved on to take a faculty position at New Mexico State University, and the postdoctoral scholar role will not be filled. Jordan will continue the podcast for at least one more year, and he hopes the initiative will be able to participate in more outreach this year, including the student ambassador program (see sidebar, p. 55) expanding its news literacy workshops from on campus to local high schools. In October, for the second year in a row, the initiative will host a media literacy conference for students and educators in partnership with the National Association for Media Literacy Education, which will include live broadcasts of media literacy seminars.

Creating a more news-literate society, says Jordan, is about both the supply of news—getting members of the media to be more mindful of responsible journalism and the challenges they face in reaching audiences with it—and the demand, which is getting those audiences to actively seek out reporting that will inform them and discard that which doesn’t. The News Literacy Initiative is continuing to come up with ways to educate students who will wind up in both groups about topics that will affect their everyday information habits, as well as the world around them. “My dream is that every student graduates from Penn State with a level of news literacy that will allow them to move out after graduation with the tools they need to engage in their communities in a really healthy, productive, beneficial way,” Hardin says. “We’re a long way from that. We’re just at the very beginning of this.”