Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

What does it mean to be media literate? It means being able to distinguish between opinion and news and being able to discern misinformation when you see it, knowing which news organizations to trust…

But my guest today argues that real media literacy, or as he sometimes prefers, being media savvy, goes deeper. It means understanding how information gets made and importantly, what likely motivates the people making any particular claim. It also means understanding how your own prior beliefs can shape your sense of what’s true and false without your even being conscious of it.

Michael Spikes is an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and director of its Teach for Chicago journalism program. He spent most of his career understanding how to teach media literacy, this very 21st century skill, and advocating for it in education programs, which raises the harder question, is how do you make an entire country, an entire population more media literate?

So we’ll talk about why teaching kids isn’t enough, why adults need media literacy training just as much, why our decentralized education system makes population level change especially difficult here in the US, and perhaps most relevant to every one of us citizens, is how do you know what to believe?!

 

Transcript

Eric Schurenberg (00:01.57)
Michael Spikes, welcome to In Reality.

Michael Spikes (00:04.746)
Thanks for having me.

Eric Schurenberg (00:06.734)
Now, Mike, you’re an assistant professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, director of Teach for Chicago Journalism Program. And before that, you covered both the pedagogic and media side. You taught in DC public schools. You’re a producer for MPR and PBS News Hours. But what’s relevant for our conversation today is that you really broke into the media literacy world and introduced the world to the concept.

At SUNY Stony Brook. At that time when you were starting that up, that the field didn’t really exist, the concept didn’t really exist. So I guess kind of just going back to to grassroots, what did you see as a teacher, a TV producer that made you recognize that there was a real need for media literacy?

Michael Spikes (01:01.332)
Well, I think, you know, most of my career has focused around youth media production and and then education around media. And I should should make a small correction that like media literacy as a concept has been around for a long time.

I think probably one of the newer innovations of it has been the different what I would call sort of subdomains of media literacy and that includes things like news literacy, which is what, you know, the s the folks at Stony Brooks sort of pioneered along with the news literacy project and then we had like digital literacy and now we have AI literacy and all of these other kinds because we sort of entered into a world I think around the time that I got involved with news literacy.

Eric Schurenberg (01:31.683)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Spikes (01:47.323)
around twenty ten. That’s when I first attended a a workshop for teachers when I was a teacher in the D C public schools to learn and to sort of adopt Stony Brooks sort of model for teaching news literacy. I went to a two week institute at the campus to sort of learn about that. And at that time, I I think this sort of digital wave was still somewhat of it somewhat in its infancy, right? Like we had we had bloggers

that were really starting to change the landscape of media. But really in terms of the sort of digital groundswell of social media, it was still very much in its infancy. We really sort of count, say, the implementation of s of smartphones amongst the populace really like it’s it’s sort of like its wave was sort of like around twenty twelve. So it was really like right in that period. So what makes this really, really important to me

Eric Schurenberg (02:16.674)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Eric Schurenberg (02:40.777)
Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (02:46.738)
is highlighted I think in a story that I usually tend to tell people of right after that workshop in twenty ten. I shouldn’t say right after, about two years after I was hired by the Center for News Literacy to join them full time as a digital content producer and also help them think about how they could take their model that was primarily a a course that was taught to undergrads to then spread it more widely to K through twelve educators.

through a project of this Digital Resource Center. So at that time when I first got hired, this was twenty twelve when I came on board with them. I got told by my boss who was then Dean Miller, he was our director, he had said, Okay, great, we’re gonna bring you on board and your first task with us is gonna be you’re gonna fly halfway across the world to Bhutan and go teach this to educators there. because at that time Bhutan was under

was getting ready to transition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one in which the the the monarch, the king, was making a choice to, you know, have give the people representation and things like that. So anyway, so we go over there in twenty twelve and it’s a you know, it it was an amazing experience. I got a chance to go over there twice to do some teaching. And while I was there in twenty twelve, this was April of twenty twelve, this was right after when

the the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, it that story has started to sort of have a bit of a groundswell here in the United States. You know, it happened in February, but it took a bit of time for it to sort of get through the traditional media channels. And people are starting to have many more conversations about it. And for me, as you know, admittedly as a African American in a country like Bhutan where it was very much a monoculture,

Eric Schurenberg (04:29.324)
Yeah, huh.

Michael Spikes (04:44.166)
I was seen as somewhat of an anomaly. I didn’t see other people of of my race. I shouldn’t say color, ’cause there’s all people of color there, but of my race there. I had even you know, had a situation where I was walking around a neighborhood and all of a sudden I turned around and saw a group of kids following me around who who really was like, Who is this person? And not in a a like a threatening way.

And when I asked about it later, they said, they probably think you’re some kind of famous basketball player or something. And I was like, I definitely don’t like a basketball player. But anyway, I got this really warm reception in the country. But then you know, everything that was happening in the United States around Trayvon Martin and conversations that I was seeing on Facebook from friends of mine

really sort of just centered around, you know, it was sort of like identity, it was sort of like, you know, the conversation around the talk. That was another sort of topic that was going around a lot, especially in in the African American community at the time of the talk being the talk that parents of African Americans felt like they had to have with their sons to say, This is how you interact with the police because, you know, there was this undercurrent of feeling like they are they already don’t like you and they already are gonna look to, you know, kill you, even though

Eric Schurenberg (05:48.044)
Right.

Michael Spikes (05:59.371)
the killing of Trayvon was not by a police officer. Anyway, while I was there, the New York Times published a story in which it did a bit of analysis of the the visuals that we were being th that were being used in the story. And the visuals, what they highlighted was that the visuals that we saw of Trayvon really highlighted him as

you know, this really young kid, they showed these pictures of him as like a middle schooler, even though he was sixteen, seventeen years old, he was much older. and then we saw images of the shooter and it was like the mugshot. And they sort of did like a media analysis of the coverage, right? And I remember posting it on my and because I was, you know, I’m in Bhutan, I’m teaching these sort of skills, and I posted that on my my Facebook page.

Eric Schurenberg (06:39.341)
Hm.

Michael Spikes (06:52.86)
And sort of like said, like I think this could be helpful for us to help, you know, contextualize the the sort of story that we’re being told here. This is not to say that in any way or shape or form is it right for a young person to be killed, right? but let’s just understand like what’s happening in the media space. And and then basically I posted it because it was twelve, it like twelve, thirteen hours ahead of the United States and I go to bed. And then I wake up.

And the amount of vitriol that I got from my quote unquote friends on Facebook who called me all kinds of names, like you must be an Uncle Tom, and you you you like being a apologist for this person and so and so and so on, just for asking the question of saying, like, let’s dig into what we’re seeing here, how this is affecting our own perceptions of what’s happening. So

Eric Schurenberg (07:29.709)
Wow.

Michael Spikes (07:49.383)
And and it just really struck me, you know, especially because I was in this country and this was the first time I had been overseas. And I get this warm reception. I’m really having this great experience. I’m having these convert these same kind of conversations with a group of people who’ve for them media is still somewhat new. You know, this is a country that didn’t even bring cable TV in until two thousand.

in the internet was very much something that only a few people had access to. It it just really struck me, of like what that response was to it and it really said to me like why this kind of education is so important. It’s really to allow people to engage with and really Yeah, I would just go back to like engaging with the full complexity.

Eric Schurenberg (08:42.84)
Yeah.

Michael Spikes (08:42.994)
of the world and how we sort of see it and how sometimes within media and I’m very careful to not say the media ’cause the media is not a thing, but media very broadly can very much shape and sometimes push us in directions that we weren’t anticipating. So yeah, that really highlights for me.

Eric Schurenberg (08:59.426)
Yeah, that’s really a really interesting example of how yeah.

Michael Spikes (09:15.038)
There is a button here for it. You want me to turn it up?

Michael Spikes (09:22.675)
Okay, how’s that?

Michael Spikes (09:28.169)
Okay, how about that?

Eric Schurenberg (09:29.794)
Yeah, I c I can hear you fine, yeah. And does that help, Tom?

Michael Spikes (09:32.639)
Okay.

Eric Schurenberg (09:37.868)
Okay.

Eric Schurenberg (09:42.392)
Do Tom, do you where would you like us to pick up?

Eric Schurenberg (09:49.313)
Okay, all right.

Okay. All right, good. All right. Well, Mike, that was that’s a really telling example of how sort of at a very subtle level people can be manipulated by choices that journalists make. So r you recognize that. Clearly your friends did not, or at least they agreed with that kind of perspective that the the news the newsroom had forced on kind of the debate.

So let’s let me let’s talk about first of all, kind of getting down to the basics. What do you mean when you say news literate? What does it someone have what skills does someone need to be able to kind of pronounce themselves or to be pr to actually feel like they are news literate?

Michael Spikes (10:38.686)
Yeah, so in trying to think about about this, one of the things that I usually try to do is I try to go to like what is actually the definitions of what it is we’re talking about and then how does that inform my own personal definition based around, you know, what I’ve read and and sort of work with. So we think about the the definition of literate, it really means that someone is knowledgeable in a field, like they’re well read, and largely that they’re fluent in the way that they can work with it and then also how they

might talk about it. So, if we use that as a marker, saying that somebody is media literate, really what that might do is it might just say like the only people who really are media literate are those who work regularly in the field. And those are people like you or myself or or colleagues of mine who are always thinking about these sort of topics and they very much shape probably the way that we talk about things that we see in the world. I know lots of times when I talk to friends of mine

I’ll say just be aware that because of my background, I’m always gonna like come back to the the sort of like argument that just blame it all on social media. Right. That’s what I probably come back to. But so with that being said, what I might call media literacy in terms of like an education and an interventional tool, I may say that instead of a person being media literate, I might call them more so like media savvy or media competent. And by that

Eric Schurenberg (12:02.583)
Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (12:05.29)
What I mean is that this is a person that can be really thoughtful, a thoughtful, intentional consumer and producer of media. Because they understand and they draw on a set of knowledge about how media systems work. They sort of understand that. And they also understand how media affects them as individuals and how any media that they create can affect the people who consume that media. So

to me a good example of that can be like young journalism enthusiasts, like young people that I work with a lot of times. The first thing that I always say to them is, and the first lesson I sort of go to is understand that there are different genres of media and those genres are driven by the intentions, the motives of those that are creating it. It drives their methods for how they do their work.

And it also drives the work that they do and the work they choose to do and the messages they put out. So if you can think about that, I would call that group more so media savvy or media competent, more so that I might say media literate. Because media literacy, I think, as a full conception and full sort of like field encompasses such a large constellation of both pieces of knowledge.

Eric Schurenberg (13:19.594)
I see. Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (13:32.806)
and skills that I think it can be difficult for me to at least at this point for me to point at just the average consumer and call them media literate.

Eric Schurenberg (13:44.395)
Okay. So let’s let’s talk about media savvy then, because that is really a a 21st century skill. You just have to be able to navigate an information environment that has become so much more complex and so much voluminous with social media and other kinds of digital media as well. So, you know, I I I I I’m aware as you are of

couple of shorthands for being a media savvy person and that you can apply when you encounter some claim that’s being delivered as news or analysis or opinion. I guess, you know, I I kind of I and I’m aware that many of them have come out of the work you did at SUNY Stony Brook at the Center for News Literacy. And l let’s talk about one of them if you don’t mind. There’s a

via standards with the acronym stands for verification, independence, and accountability, as a test for whether information is reliable. Walk us through that if you don’t mind.

Michael Spikes (14:53.898)
Yeah, so VI, that acronym was meant to stand for verification, independence, and accountability. Now we generally would use that, we would introduce that in early lesson that was part of the Stony Brooks sort of model of teaching news literacy, in which we tried to introduce students to the idea of information neighborhoods. You also heard me in the last answer talk about them as genres. So we sort of would break out

Eric Schurenberg (15:12.417)
Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (15:23.862)
out different kinds of media into these we would call them neighborhoods you could also think of them as genres and they would include things like journalism, entertainment, advertising, promotion, and what we called at that time, and I think we still call it raw raw information. And each of those was sort of broken out by who were the practitioners of that, what were the goals and intentions of those practitioners, and then how do they get their information out? Like what channels do they sort of flow through?

Eric Schurenberg (15:40.429)
Hm.

Michael Spikes (15:53.785)
Okay.

So it was a way to really understand how and and really sort of I yeah, I guess we can call it maybe start to call it an evaluation tool, for looking at different and I’m gonna be really careful in saying this, different outlets of media. And and and I would be clear in saying, and this is something I see a lot of people well, I shouldn’t say a lot, but I see a num I’ve seen a number of actually

Eric Schurenberg (16:15.395)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Spikes (16:24.716)
Educators who have used the model sort of misinterpreted. And they’ve misinterpreted VIA and they’ve they’ve said, well, it ref it refers to a source. And I would say, Well, in our context of news literacy, we define a source as a person or a document or something that provides information to a journalist in the story that they’re doing. So we would say, like, if you’re doing a story about

A company, you talk to the CEO of that company, that CEO is a source. If you’re talking about the place where you got that information from, or the place where the journalist was working, say they were working for like Forbes magazine or something like that, we would call Forbes an outlet. So what we would do is we would use VIA to evaluate an outlet, and we would say, is that outlet using information that’s verified, meaning that it’s checked by multiple sources?

It provides the evidence to us that tells us how the journalist knows what they know. Is that outlet independent? So does the outlet take steps to let us know how they have distanced themselves, say, from the organization or whomever it is that they’re talking to? Are they real? Do they and that that independence is relative, right? They can have different kinds of connections to them and so on. And then are they accountable? Do they

make clear who wrote this story, where it’s coming from, and are they transparent about the methods and do you as a consumer have the ability to speak back to that that outlet and say, I think you may have made a mistake, and then if the outlet sees that they made the mistake, do they take steps to tell you and again be transparent about what they did to correct those mistakes instead of just sort of sweeping them under the rug and then just like pulling it.

Right. So that’s what we use that for.

Eric Schurenberg (18:24.596)
Okay. All right. Good. So that is, I mean, those are definitely the pillars of responsible journalism and news conveyance, verification, but using verified sources, being independent and not beholden to any particular hidden agenda, and then being accountable and being transparent. It’s a lot to check when you’re just coming across a headline in your on your phone. I i is there one

fast kind of low effort, kind of universally applicable check or process you would want people to go through before they give credence to any particular story, let alone share it.

Michael Spikes (19:12.038)
Yeah,

I’ve been thinking about this in a couple of different ways because one, yes, it acknowledges that the skills that are part of what we call media literacy broadly take effort, right? And I think really what we want to do is we wanna empower people with the skills and knowledge needed so that the effort that that we’re you know digging into now, the effort that it takes to say check a news story or

Eric Schurenberg (19:27.886)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Spikes (19:44.525)
check a claim out, right? That that effort becomes so habitual that it doesn’t it doesn’t feel like effort anymore. It’s just like how a marathoner, right, the first time they get out there to do their training is really, really hard. I know for me I’m not a runner. So if I told myself I was gonna run a marathon the first time I went out there I probably was be about to die. Right.

but if I do that over time, right, my muscles change, my my breathing changes, all of those things adapt. So then it doesn’t feel effortful for me to run, you know, ten K, five K, whatever, right? So I use that same sort of analogy on the media literacy side. So I’m sure for people like yourself or myself, you know, you watch the news and the first thing that pops up in your mind is like you hear a claim and you go, Where did that come from? What’s the evidence? How do they know that?

What are they going to show you, right? All those questions pop up in your mind. And it happens so seamlessly that it doesn’t feel like effort. You see a claim on your phone. Again, like, yes, I think the smartphone in particular is one of the problems here because it does make it sort of difficult to jump between different websites or different apps to be able to check. Because one of the things we would tell people is like, make sure you you are consuming news from a wide variety of sources. But that can be difficult.

However, if you have the skills and have sort of taken on a mindset, or sometimes we call it an epistemology, which really refers to it’s like a way of thinking, being, doing, moving through the world. It’s almost like you take it on as an identity. I would actually argue that like the media literate or that media savvy, it’s actually, I would actually count it as part of my identity. I tell although I tell my students, like I don’t identify as a journalist, I identify

identify as a media producer because of the work that I’ve done in the past. But again, like I there’s this particular way that I move through the world that those skills that we want people to take up come automatically. So with that being said, I think it’s just really, really important, probably the first thing for people to do is to always keep those questions in mind. When you see a claim, where did it come from? How does this person know it? I think those are the first two questions that they should be thinking about and always sort of engage with

Eric Schurenberg (21:52.204)
Yeah.

Michael Spikes (22:08.52)
And do so toward not just trying to find a discrete answer to things. It is really to sort of like become comfortable with this sort of muddy, what I would almost call like this muddy middle, right? To go like, yes, it could be right in this particular context, this person’s point of view might override another, but in other situations another point of view might override what I might think about this thing. And it can be really, really difficult to do that.

Because the platforms from which we get so much of our information these days do not encourage us to do those sort of things, right? So yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (22:45.792)
Yeah. I I think that’s that’s a really important point and also a really hard human skill, just to be open minded. Your example of the Trayvon Martin murder is I mean, there it the photographs that the the media were publishing, they weren’t false. Those were the people involved, but clearly they were sending a particular message with a particular tendency. And you have to be alert to that. A kind of

Michael Spikes (23:06.783)
Right.

Eric Schurenberg (23:15.736)
healthy skepticism or why were those choices made and not other choices. I I I I note that a lot of the effort in making people news literate is aimed at at kids, it’s at students in K through twelve. And the reasons are are pretty obvious is that that’s where when you you just want to get that kind of mindset that you just described inculcated in people when they’re when they’re young. But

It’s also true that because of the fact that social media and this kind of digital news environment happened when they were still in in the adulthood for many people who are now alive and who are voting, it would be kind of wise to be able to bring this training to adults. Are there programs out there that help adults become more skilled in this way?

Michael Spikes (24:15.176)
Yeah, there’s there’s been lots of different sort of interventions that have popped up. one of the things I actually admit that pulled me from the world of being a practitioner to the world of like scholarship was that of the sort of explosion of interventions that popped up after the twenty sixteen election. Because all I did was I just found myself, you know, sort of pointing at them and saying, Well, that’s not gonna work because of this and that’s not gonna work because of that But then it made me sort of go like, Well, how do I know that what I’m using will work?

Eric Schurenberg (24:34.902)
Hmm, mm-hmm.

Michael Spikes (24:45.08)
so it really made me sort of dig deeper into that. But going back to the question at hand, I think there’s many different sort of interventional tools that are out there for adults to sort of learn these skills because just like you, yes, I definitely feel like just as much as we want to teach young people these skills, we also need to teach adults these skills. So there it it sort of ranges based on effort level, I guess I would say, going back to that analogy that we used in the last.

Eric Schurenberg (25:14.53)
Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (25:15.01)
Last answer. and they can range from full online courses like those from like Coursera and edX. I in particular with Stony Brook developed a course on media literacy there. You know, this was one of those MOOCs that were big. That was probably like fourteen. Well, no. Well a while ago. and then there are also sort of bite sized interventions. There’s sort of like short videos that may pop up on YouTube. I remember there being

Eric Schurenberg (25:36.024)
Yeah.

Michael Spikes (25:44.873)
sort of project in which researchers were looking at the effectiveness of just short bite-sized videos that might pop up before you see a YouTube video that might just say to you, like, be aware that the information you see here might not be true. Not just saying of this particular video, but just broadly. So, and seeing what the effectiveness of that was. so that can be another sort of interventional tool.

Eric Schurenberg (26:02.797)
Hm.

Michael Spikes (26:14.836)
and but largely if I can say this, and again take it with it take it with understanding I work in a journalism school and I’m a journalism professor, but I’ve always sort of looked at journalism and I mean journalism that comes from I’m gonna say institutions which we call sort of mainstream journalism, should all should be seen as sort of like a form of education for adults after they leave the classroom.

Eric Schurenberg (26:41.614)
Hm.

Michael Spikes (26:41.684)
Because journalism helps people to sort of understand the world around them. And what I would encourage people to do is to look for journalism that not just alerts them to what’s happening, not just says, this thing happened here, this thing happens there, but really tries to provide them with insight and context to help them better understand this thing, this a thing that they just alerted them to. So

If the news you are consuming, if the journalism you are consuming is not doing that, I would really tell them to try to look for another source that tries to dig more into it and again provides insight. So I think that can also be an interventional tool that I think that news literacy in particular tries to do as it tries to position journalism as not just a platform for learning skills. You look at what the practices that journalists do to do their jobs.

That can help you adopt those same practices, but also to look at news content as a platform for practicing those skills because you specifically will say, Is this story giving me insight or is it just trying to just alert me to something that may just get my heart beating faster?

Eric Schurenberg (27:54.111)
well I think that’s a that’s a really key point. and so what I’m hearing you say is that the things that you the habits you want to build up, the things you wanna make part of your news consumption habits are reading from or or viewing from multiple sources so that you get different points of view, and that you wanna demand from the journalists that they provide context.

for the information they’re giving you. And and you know, s a lot of people say all I want are the facts. The facts without context may be not that helpful. But the other thing you mentioned too is you don’t want if if all you’re getting from the news you’re consuming is angry or outraged or that’s a good sign that the that outlet is manipulating you.

that they’re not trying to give you insight. They’re trying to get you to do something or believe something that is a particular of particular importance to them, but not necessarily to you. I I you know, this is one of the things that’s so hard about teaching this this set of skills is that it’s a lot of work and it’s time consuming and it doesn’t come naturally to people who are used to kind of

moving through the world in a kind of a habitual way, like all of us are. Kind of it we’re not really doing a lot of deliberation about whether to, you know, flick the turn signal before we make a left turn. But but there are other reasons, I think, too. It the the term media literacy, news literacy seems to some people, I think, as partisan, that it is that it’s a left coded term.

Is is one of the problems with teaching this skill that people either think that it’s not for them or that they don’t or they think they already know it and they don’t need to learn it.

Michael Spikes (30:00.82)
Yeah, I I usually kinda say it as a joke, but you know, I I I definitely mirror that where new news literacy or media literacy is something when you go to talk to people about it, they say, my gosh, this is so important and they say it’s so important for everyone, but really I think what they mean is that it’s really important for them to learn, not me, right? So it can be really difficult to sort of take on that sort of intellectual humility.

Eric Schurenberg (30:23.212)
Yes, right. Yes, right.

Michael Spikes (30:30.398)
And sort of say like, here are the things that I know, here are the things that I don’t know. I also say to people a lot of times that being a person who has a terminal degree, you know, my students call me Dr. Spikes, you know, all these kind of things. I say, you know, one of the things I really learned by doing all of this was not that, you know, going through that process made me just a much smarter person. It just it just put in front of me like how much I do not know. And to be comfortable with that.

Right. I’ve been comfortable with being like, yes, I’m highly knowledgeable on this very specific topic, right? And yes, it could, you know, extend to other areas and allow me to talk about those are other areas, but I would never call myself a expert in those other areas. And I think that’s where yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (31:21.442)
That is that is such a great example of intellectual humility and active, actively open-mindedness, that the research shows that those two qualities, to the extent that you can actually measure them, are highly correlated with people who are hard to manipulate. People if you actually approach the world with the kind of intellectual humility that you just exemplified or

Michael Spikes (31:39.508)
Right, right.

Eric Schurenberg (31:49.12)
or actively seeking other points of view, you’re, you’re not gonna be, it’s gonna be very hard for someone to make you their pansy, their fool.

Michael Spikes (31:57.623)
Right, exactly.

Eric Schurenberg (32:00.799)
in a a lot of people in the field point to Finland, the you know, the European country as being an exemplar of media literacy training. And and to be sure, they start teaching kids there how to spot manipulation, you know, as early as kindergarten. And Finland is a very different place. It’s a lot smaller than US, a lot more homogenous. It also has a really

kind of high motivation to make people knowledgeable in this field because they’re right next door to the the world’s most sophisticated exporter of misinformation, which is Russia. But is there something that we can learn from Finland here in the US to make our news literacy levels higher?

Michael Spikes (32:53.014)
when thinking about this question, so I I encounter it a lot because my so my doctoral training was in the learning sciences. So we think a lot about and we do a lot of comparisons between different educational systems. So I think the the main sort of takeaway that I would have from looking at the Nordic countries and Finland and things like that is that just like you mentioned in your question, that context matters.

Eric Schurenberg (33:05.314)
huh.

Michael Spikes (33:23.188)
Right? Because there are those sort of other factors that are part of Nordic countries sort of makeup, their countries themselves. Like you say, they’re much smaller, it’s a much more homogeneous sort of country, right? It’s probably a little bit easier to move sort of like ideas through through them because of that. those things are sometimes what we might call common.

founding variables within if I talk about it in a research sort of context are those variables that are not always included when we look at those sort of like things like just raw say test scores right that come out of a place like Finland. So that’s really, really important. So with that being said, one other thing that I think is really important to think about from these sort of countries is that they have a very much top down sort of education system. So their Minister of Education

Eric Schurenberg (33:55.436)
huh. Yep.

Michael Spikes (34:22.814)
can say, I want student I want all students in our country to learn X and this is what they need to do. And then that proliferates throughout the system probably pretty homogeneously, right? On the other hand, here in the United States, we have a system that’s very much different than that. And it’s very and it’s a what we call a

Eric Schurenberg (34:29.101)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (34:34.924)
Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (34:46.068)
gosh, I should know the name of this. I’m just thinking about local control. So what what we have in the US is a local control system. And what that means is at the state level, the state can write standards to say if a student moves through schools

Eric Schurenberg (34:50.967)
yeah.

Michael Spikes (35:03.24)
In different parts of our state, there should be particular things that the teacher will know that the students should know at a particular point in time. What they, however, cannot dictate to districts is how to get the student there. So they cannot recommend curriculum, they cannot tell schools what well, they can say, here’s what the student should know, but they cannot say, here is how you should teach it, right? So with that being the case,

Eric Schurenberg (35:31.778)
Hmm, hmm.

Michael Spikes (35:33.127)
case because I learned this, you know, this is a very hard lesson for me as well, because I came to Illinois in 2014 to be part of a effort to inculcate media literacy into civics education. And we really thought this was our great opportunity to do so at a state level and to see how that worked. And when I was inside of that system, what I saw was that the work that I was doing would have to be done by individual

school district because every individual school district makes their own choices about how to teach their students what they are teaching them. So that that also came into play when we got our media literacy requirement put into law here in Illinois in twenty twenty one.

That was you know, we said that’s a great step forward. However, the state board could not say, Here’s where you teach it, here’s how you teach it, here’s when it needs to be taught. So some recent research that I just brought out with some colleagues of mine and I, we looked at what did that policy look like five years down the road? How has it proliferated through our system? And what we found is that educational policy from the top down, it works

Eric Schurenberg (36:43.874)
Yeah.

Michael Spikes (36:51.436)
well to push awareness. So people are aware that this thing is around. However, that policy did not say again, it did not talk about how it was going to be enforced. It didn’t talk about how it was going to be measured, nor did it say how teachers will be held to account. And because of that, teachers had a lot of they were just very confused about how to do it. They asked like, so we got to do this media literacy unit. What’s the unit?

Is that a week? Is that a day? Is that a quarter? Is that so it wasn’t in there, right? So I think that’s one of the big challenges we have here in the United States with implementation of media literacy. It is you have to go individual district by individual district in order to implement it in a way that will allow it to be, I think, assessed probably at the same level, and also to know how well it was being done in the classroom.

Eric Schurenberg (37:25.112)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (37:50.009)
Wow, so that is a real challenge. Congratulations, though, for getting that adopted in Illinois, even though it’s its implementation has been pretty fragmented. So let’s so let’s just end with kind of one piece of advice, one recommendation. If somebody listening to this episode does nothing else, you know, that you would like them to develop the habits of

Michael Spikes (38:00.055)
Yeah.

Eric Schurenberg (38:18.144)
intellectual humility and news literacy and so forth, that that’s a, you know, that’s a continuous learning process. But what’s the one thing you would want them to do, or the one thing you would want them to change next time they encounter a claim online?

Michael Spikes (38:32.726)
I’m going to draw from even as much as I am not a huge fan of the acronyms, even though we talked about VIA and there’s other ones that were part of Stony Brooks’ work, and what those things should do, I think, should lead you towards that habitual sort of work, not just I need to always pull from this acronym. With that being said, I’m gonna draw from the SIF acronym, which starts with STOP.

Eric Schurenberg (38:59.504)
S for stop. Uh-huh.

Michael Spikes (39:00.52)
Yep, stop. So I think and I would say that’s the main one. If you come upon a claim and you respond to it, like you respond, like you you either become upset or you become you become angry, also know that that’s a that’s a marker of what that might be doing, the first thing to do is just stop.

Eric Schurenberg (39:16.152)
Yes. Mm-hmm.

Michael Spikes (39:20.116)
Right, don’t do anything. Right? Don’t don’t go to share. Don’t go, you know, any of that. And then from there, I guess this is my second one, it is come back to those questions we talked about before. What what does this person know? Who is this coming from? And how do they know it? And I would say that’s the biggest one because I think in in certain cases, and I talk with my students about this a lot in our journalism classes, we are trying to exist in a world where there are people who can just make things

Eric Schurenberg (39:36.159)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Spikes (39:50.04)
things up and just speak with some sort of they they seem like they have authority but they don’t back it up with anything and I think that is the biggest challenge for journalism broadly. It is that we have such a large part of our population that just takes things just at this face value and never asks this question of like, how do you know that? Or show me the evidence, right?

Eric Schurenberg (40:20.141)
Yeah.

Michael Spikes (40:20.16)
And I think that’s a real danger. So I really think that with stop, your next step has to be, like, how does this person know this? What is the evidence that helps to support it? there are different levels and hierarchies of evidence and blah blah blah and so on that you can go into and you can find out more about, but I think those are what’s most important for people to take away.

Eric Schurenberg (40:41.336)
Well, that is that is great. And that the SIFT methodology is something that you can probably do in a minute or less. Most important, as you said, is stop. And then the second one, which you also elaborated on, is the I in SIFT is for investigate the source. Then find other coverage, as you note, you know, if it’s really news, it’s been covered elsewhere and you might get a different point of view. And then finally, T in SIFT is for

Trace it back to the original source so you can actually see, you know, if it you should be able to ex see where it came from. Michael Spikes, thank you so much for spending the time with us and for the work you do on raising our level of news literacy. It’s no one would deny that it really is important.

Michael Spikes (41:32.695)
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Eric.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Sep 30 2026

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