In the early days of my still-young teaching career, I found myself repeatedly frustrated by the work that appeared in my high school students’ annotated bibliography entries. Completing this assignment in the second half of a multi-week argumentative research unit, some would write, “It passes the CRAAP test,” or “It’s a news article, not an opinion piece, so it’s credible.” These simple measuring sticks of credibility — a quick run-through of an easily memorizable acronym, a quick glance at an article’s home on a website — became waves of a magic wand. Presto! The former journalist in me, meanwhile, was gritting his teeth: Why do they think it’s so simple?, I would keep asking myself.

The answer, of course, is that they often have been taught to view source evaluation and analysis as that simple. Unfortunately, the evolution of the ways in which we have equipped secondary students to consider informational sources, particularly news articles, has been outrun — no “photo finish” here — by the evolution of the news business itself. CRAAP is, well, crap and the news/opinion binary ignores the complexity and subjectivity necessarily embedded in the journalistic process. This stands in stark contrast to an outmoded and idealistic view of journalism that values objectivity above all else.

Objectivity, of course, has been “decided almost exclusively by white reporters and their mostly white bosses,” former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery wrote in a New York Times opinion piece in 2020. Lowery wrote these words as the broader profession was undergoing a long-overdue reckoning, along with many other institutions, as Black Lives Matter protests were sweeping the nation following the murder of George Floyd (and countless other Black Americans). They also came a few weeks after I accepted my first teaching job — and they shook the cobwebs off my own perspective of journalism.

Fast-forward three years later and I’m in a position to teach pre-service English educators about how to incorporate journalism and new media into the classroom. One of my primary goals in the course is to help these future English teachers have a similarly galvanizing moment about their understanding of journalism, and the best way I’ve found to achieve that is through having them talk to journalists themselves. Each semester, I’ve brought in reporters, editors, and others who have their hands in the day-to-day business of delivering the news to the public. Each semester, I hear similar reactions: Students are gobsmacked at the number of decisions that go into the process of reporting, writing, and editing. Students are inspired by the ways in which news organizations pursue what Lowery in his Times piece calls “moral clarity” by actively rejecting “both sides-ism.” And students are disheartened by the frank discussions we have about the lack of diversity in newsrooms and the uphill battle that remains for local publications and the industry at large.

I put these journalists in front of my pre-service educators because I believe these conversations will benefit our secondary students in the long run. I’m convinced that the efforts to help students reframe their approach to evaluating informational sources should begin with offering the same guidance to their future teachers. I hope, ultimately, that their greater understanding of the complexity and subjectivity inherent in conveying information makes its way into a new wave of instruction on how to factor that into the work students do in a developmentally appropriate way. 

At the end of the semester, I ask the pre-service teachers to film a TikTok-style video summarizing how their perspective on media literacy has shifted and the resultant stance they plan to take in the classroom. You can check out a sample of these videos below this short list of recommended resources for “reframing” discussions about journalism:

• “A reckoning over objectivity, led by black journalists” (New York Times)

• “Ohio’s whitest home newspaper” (Columbia Journalism Review)

• “How diverse are U.S. newsrooms?” (ASNE)

• Pew Research Center surveys on the media industry

July 31, 2023