A Media Literacy Tool to Assess News Credibility

As part of her lesson on fake news at Fairview High School in Fairview, Pennsylvania, social studies teacher Nikki Nies relies on a punny, well-used acronym: CRAP, which stands for currency, relevance, authority, and purpose. With so much information out there (including teens’ main source of news, social media), she wants students to know how to evaluate what they’re seeing and assess the credibility of their news. “So we’re identifying the crap, by using the acronym CRAP,” Nies tells them.

Currency refers to the publication date of the article—to help her students see why this matters, Nies fesses up to her generation’s penchant for sharing outdated articles on Facebook. Relevance means students should check to see if there are other articles about the same topic in the news. Are other sources talking about this? Authority refers to the author and the publication. “This is one of the biggest tips I can give you,” she tells her students. “Google who the author is. Are they credible? Or is Joe Schmo nowhere on the internet?” Purpose refers to the intent of the article—is it to inform? Entertain? Or is it out to persuade or sell something?

One requirement for her current events and media literacy class is that students must bring a recent article each day. Nies teaches them to use the CRAP acronym to dissect its reliability. To go deeper, she has students answer questions about their daily article using her “How Reliable Is Your Article?” worksheet, which guides them through the components of the CRAP acronym. She also introduces them to resources like AllSides and the Ad Fontes Media Bias Matrix, which shows them where their sources fall on the political spectrum.

Why is this important? “I think we have a very polarized United States,” says Nies. “And I think it’s very easy to find articles or news sources that will support your theories on certain things. So that news is out there. But it’s understanding the reliability of that source, before we are quick to say that as a fact.”

To see more of Nies’s comprehensive lesson on sniffing out misinformation and assessing credibility of news sources, watch the video Giving Students the Skills to Spot Fake News.