'Media literacy' advocates in the US push to create savvier consumers of news and information

Roosevelt High School government teacher Aldo Parral uses the News Literacy Project's materials to teach his students how to read the news and sniff out what's not true. — Los Angeles Times/TNS

The Instagram headline was pithy and alarming: “Head of Pfizer Research: Covid Vaccine is Female Sterilisation.” And the report, from a murky source, could have had real-world consequences, coming in 2020, just as the US rolled out the first vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

That made the story a perfect tool for an educator trying to teach high school students how to separate fact from fiction — a survival skill in a culture drowning in a tsunami of information.