Facts, Opinions, and News

Abstract

During this global pandemic we have all experienced how significant and exigent it can be to identify reliable sources of information. This exercise made broadly evident what Media and News Literacy Researchers have been emphasizing for a decade: deciding which parts of abundant unstructured, non-prioritized information, 24/7 available on our screens, are reliable is a hard challenge. When reading online news or when navigating social media, people sometimes seem to choose to “believe” in opinions or non-factual information instead of rationally adopting “facts” after verifying the content they consume. In the framework of Media, Information, and News Literacy, we are interested in how people tell a fact from an opinion or, in general, non-factual information, and how they decide to adopt it as true. As a person's ability to take an informed judgment of the reliability of any content depends, inter alia, on their training, within a comprehensive framework of media and information literacy (MIL) education, News Literacy Training can become a valuable tool: with suitable practice, readers can understand both the news production process and the checks behind the journalistic work, and the intention and meaning of the content, so that they become more capable to analyze messages and to sharpen their awareness of the specific features of the various types of “news.”