Thank you Professor Rosenberg, and let me welcome students, educators, administrators, journalists, and news professionals to the first High School News Literacy Summit at Baruch College. We are extremely pleased to have you here.
What began as a modest idea some time ago has taken on a life of its own and has become a major national event. We are honored to have among our speakers a number of influential thinkers in journalism and news literacy.
I would like to thank the McCormick Foundation for sponsoring and supporting this summit and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for its support of last night’s workshop for educators. I also want to thank Ruth Ann and Bill Harnisch and the Harnisch Foundation for the seed money they provided to help support our Department of Journalism’s collaborative projects.
Finally, I would also like to thank Professor Rosenberg and Baruch College’s Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions for organizing this event in collaboration with the Pulitzer Center, Stony Brook’s Center for News Literacy, the News Literacy Project, and a number of other collaborators.
We have many important partners, presenters, and participants here with us today, but none more important that the students from 10 New York City High Schools. You students will be participating in up to 17 different workshops today. Your task today is important and complicated, and I admire you for taking on the challenge.
The news, and how we get it, is much more complicated than it was when I was in high school. When I was your age, the news was a lot simpler. We either read it in the newspaper or heard it from one of a handful of TV networks or radio stations. Reporters, newscasters, and anchors, like Walter Cronkite, were prominent and revered. Maybe it was a more innocent and naïve time, but we assumed that they spoke the unvarnished truth.
It’s not so easy for you. Today it seems everyone has an agenda and a means of communicating. The news is marked by spin, gossip, and snark. It comes to us in blogs and tweets, status updates and text messages. We watch it on YouTube and listen to it via podcasts. And of course, since my student days we have seen the creation of the 24/7 cable news cycle with hours and hours of broadcasting time that has to be filled with something, whether factual or otherwise.
Yet we often don’t know anything about the qualifications of the author or what Stephen Colbert calls the “truthiness” of the information being conveyed. And too often, what is portrayed as fact is, in reality, opinion—and frequently ideologically-driven opinion at that. But as the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously pointed out, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.” So, today, you have to work harder to be news literate. You have to sort fact from fiction. You have to develop critical thinking—and that’s why you’re here today.
As educators, we have a responsibility to help this generation of students, and the general public, to become more critical news consumers. At the same time, we realize that many of young people and students today are also news publishers… of blogs, tweets, status updates, email blasts. So it’s important that we help you become more responsible contributors as well, and to improve the quality of the information you provide.
Well, it sounds like you have taken on a lot of responsibility just by logging on! In fact, you have. But with that responsibility also comes an opportunity to make a contribution to your community and your fellow students.
You have a full and busy day ahead of you. I am glad that you all have joined us today at Baruch College for this very important event. I look forward to learning about the results of your summit. Thank you.
