Welcome to our (New) weekly media literacy quiz. This quiz will test your knowledge of the past week’s events with a focus on facts, misinformation, bias, and general media literacy. Please share and compare your results.
Media Literacy = the ability to critically analyze stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy or credibility.
Media Literacy Quiz for the Week of Jan 13
Test your knowledge with 7 questions about current events, media bias, fact checks, and misinformation.
Rules: No Googling!
Your news literacy quiz is brilliant. However the people who really need to develop news literacy won’t.
I’m concerned about that, too, Paige. However I go back and forth between pessimism and hope. With websites such as this one, and the teaching of media literacy and critical thinking in schools — which is happening, though probably nowhere near the scale I’d like to see — I think educating people (including those who most need it) is just going to be a slow process.
Not to sound unrealistically optimistic, I take encouragement from the massive lawsuits against Fox News for knowingly defaming Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic… the roughly one thousand people who’ve been charged for their involvement in the January 6th violations on The Capitol, and the roughly 200 so far sentenced to incarceration (both according to USA Today)… the huge damages to Alex Jones for his insanely irresponsible disinformation about Sandy Hook… DirecTV and AT&T cutting their funding of OAN (though they never should’ve funded it in the first place)… and more. These actions may succeed where healthy news consumer skepticism — and corporate responsibility & integrity over greed — fail. They don’t directly affect news literacy, but they do at least impose penalties for those who knowingly dispense fear mongering and blatant falsehoods, and for those who credulously consume it, which should serve to discourage both.
But no question, there’s still lots of work to be done. If you had presented the more optimistic viewpoint, I might have countered with my more cynical one, the side you brought up. The point of both is for us all to stay reasonably informed, wary, and involved, and to promote reason, but also to not slip into apathy and despair.