NLP AR FY21 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 3
Dear Friends of NLP,
Current events continue to underscore that news
literacy education is essential for the future of a
healthy democracy.
For too many, trust in institutions, including
the media, has ruptured. They no longer find
facts convincing; feelings hold sway, and
conspiratorial thinking has moved into the
mainstream. The voting rights of all our citizens
and the sanctity of our election system face
ongoing threats. We’ve seen renewed evidence
of the role of Facebook and other social media
platforms in exacerbating political polarization
and extremism. We are enduring a stress test of
our democracy that has continued throughout
the pandemic, the 2020 presidential election and
the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
We recognized in early 2020 that misinformation
poses such an existential threat to our
democracy that we needed to extend our
reach beyond students to all generations. We
developed new resources for the general public
and launched a comprehensive campaign to
combat election misinformation during the 2020
election, including a series of public service
announcements in English and Spanish. We also
hosted the inaugural season of our podcast, Is
that a fact?, which explored the question, “How
can American democracy survive and thrive in
our toxic information environment?”
At the same time, we made great progress on
the education front. During the 2020-21 school
year, we reached more students and educators
than at any other point in NLP’s history, with over
108,000 students active on Checkology® and
more than 13,000 educators across the country
using our resources. We enhanced our support
of educators by creating additional professional
learning opportunities and opening our virtual
NewsLitCamp® events to participants nationwide.
We also launched NewsLit Nation, our 48,000-plus
member network for educators, and our News
Literacy Ambassador Program, which supports
grassroots community organizing efforts for news
literacy education.
You helped make all this progress possible.
We hope that as you read this annual report, you’ll
take pride in these accomplishments.
But we still have much work to do.
The country is deeply divided along partisan lines
and separated into media echo chambers. News
literacy education is one key to bridging this
divide. We all need the skills to know what news
and information to trust, share and act on. Our
democracy depends on our collective engagement
in the pursuit of a fact-based future.
Thank you for joining us in our fight for a future
founded on facts.
Sincerely yours,
Greg McCaffery, Board Chair
Alan C. Miller, Founder and CEO
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