There is a media literacy crisis that is only being exacerbated by the volume of information that people are served on a daily basis. The News Literacy Project surveyed more than 1,100 American teenagers in 2024 and asked them three basic questions designed to test whether they could tell news, advertising, opinion and entertainment apart. Fewer than 20% got all three right. Adults aren’t doing much better: a 2024 University of Illinois study published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review found that 45.7% of respondents guessed when asked to sort a dozen statements into fact or opinion.
Media literacy used to mean knowing how to spot fake news or obvious propaganda. Now it means running a set of checks on nearly everything you read, because it has become a lot harder to discern what you are reading. Opinion pieces, also known as op-eds (meaning opposite the editorial page), can run next to breaking news with no visual distinction beyond a small label most readers scroll past. Letters to the editor may get mistaken for staff reporting. Sponsored content is built to read exactly like the article next to it. And now AI-generated material is showing up in the same feeds, polished enough to pass for the real thing at a glance. This means people cannot easily tell factual reporting from opinion or commentary, which matters because people believe what they read; believing an opinion to be fact is misleading and can even be dangerous.
Here are five questions that can help you read more critically, so you can be a more informed media consumer.
Am I reacting to a headline, or to the reporting itself?
Many headlines are built to be shared, and can be screenshotted, reposted, and reacted to by people who never even read—or even opened—the full story. These days, headlines are often written to get a click, rather than serve as a summary of the article, and are in most cases written by editors, rather than reporters, who don’t know the story as well. Unfortunately, headlines are sometimes the only part of a story people read.
Over half of U.S. adults say they get news from social media, which often only includes headlines with a call to action to read the full story at a link in the profile’s bio. Another study found that people thought headlines often give away enough of the “story” that users feel they already know what happened, and didn’t need to click through to read more. Harrowingly, another research analysis found that 75% of news links shared on Facebook were done so without the posters clicking (or reading) the link first.
That gap between what a headline implies and the information the reporting actually provides is often exactly where a story does the most damage. These headlines can spread rapidly, and in the cases where the news is incorrect, even if a correction is issued, the correction may only reach a fraction of the original audience. It has always been important to read through a full story to understand what is going on, but this is even more imperative today.
Is this reporting or opinion?
Check whether the piece is labeled, and who wrote it. Straight news comes from a staff reporter and goes through a rigorous editing and fact-checking process. An op-ed is written by someone outside the newsroom, such as an expert, an advocate, or a public figure. The outlet isn’t endorsing the argument by running it; most major papers cap them around 700 to 800 words and require the writer to disclose any financial or organizational stake in the topic. A letter to the editor is reader-submitted, is around 200-300 words, and is usually written in direct response to a recent story. A clearly labeled opinion piece signals transparency. The outlets worth worrying about are those which blur that line rather than marking it, and the label is easy to lose entirely when skimming an article or only seeing a headline on social media.
Who’s paying for this?
Sponsored content is legal, and federal guidelines require it to be disclosed clearly, usually in small text near the headline: “sponsored,” “paid partner content,” or “in partnership with.” It’s a genre built specifically to mimic the surrounding editorial content in tone, format and length, which is exactly why the disclosure matters. The disclosure only does its job if a reader notices it, and most people are scanning too quickly to catch four words of gray text above a headline that otherwise looks like everything else on the page.
Is a person accountable for this, or is it computer generated?
Starting in November 2022, CNET quietly published dozens of personal finance explainer articles, on topics like compound interest and closing a bank account, under the byline “CNET Money Staff.” Nothing on the page said the articles were AI-generated; readers had to hover over the byline itself to find a small note explaining the content was produced “using automation technology.” Futurism broke the story in January 2023, and once readers started checking the AI’s work, CNET’s own editors found errors in more than half of the 77 articles reviewed, some serious enough to require substantial correction, including one piece that gave readers inaccurate advice about how compound interest actually works. CNET paused the program, then changed the byline to something less human-sounding and made the AI disclosure harder to miss.
That’s why it’s worth checking whether a byline actually maps to a person. A real reporter can be reached, is likely to have a body of work you can trace outside the outlet that employs them, and answers for what they publish under their own name. Content without a real, verifiable person behind it can still carry every surface marker of a byline such as a name, a title, sometimes even a staff page, without any of that actually standing behind it.
Is this a reputable news outlet?
Finding reliable news sources often comes down to a quick search: has this outlet issued public corrections when it gets something wrong, or been caught fabricating sources or quotes before? A masthead with named editors, a visible corrections policy and years of searchable archives all signal an outlet with a track record worth protecting. A site without any of that, no named staff, no correction history, no way to verify who’s actually running it, is asking you to go on faith.
A strong correction record answers one question: does this outlet own its mistakes? It doesn’t answer a second, separate one: is its overall coverage balanced? An outlet can correct every factual error and still choose, consistently, which stories to cover and how to frame them. Knowing where an outlet leans, and reading with that in mind, is its own skill, distinct from verifying whether something was fabricated, but just as necessary.
With the advent of tools like social media, AI, and blog hosting websites, anyone can share news. But, the majority of the people who report in this way are not held to the same standards as journalists in a newsroom: editorial oversight, sourcing requirements, and public accountability when something turns out to be wrong.
None of the five checks takes long once they are a habit. Check to see if a piece is labeled opinion or news, if someone is paying for it, if a real person stands behind it, if the outlet has a track record worth trusting, and if you have actually read past the headline before considering the information factual or sharable.
It doesn’t require special expertise, just a habit of pausing and thinking before deciding what to believe rather than after. Exercising media literacy matters because the volume of information people take in every day keeps growing, while the scrutiny most of it receives does not. A reader who can tell a labeled opinion from unlabeled speculation, or a sourced claim from a fabricated one, is making informed decisions rather than absorbing whatever shows up in front of them. That’s really the whole exercise: learning how to tell if news is real and reputable before you decide to trust it or share it. Sharing unverified information is as bad as purposefully writing misinformation yourself.
