The Big Threat

Against the backdrop of the devastating LA fires, with a new President in the White House and as Meta announces its retreat from fact checking, Bryce visits San Francisco where public broadcaster KQED is mounting a rearguard action to fight fake news, and meets with Stanford University’s Professor Sam Wineburg - an academic sounding the alarm on a looming global disinformation crisis. Links: Sam W...

On the eve of a Presidential inauguration, Bryce travels to Washington and New York to meet media literacy advocates and fact-checking organisations nervously assessing their futures. As the FT Correspondent Andrew Jack provides a sobering take on the new US administration and its implications for democracy, a visit to a Manhattan elementary school provides a glimmer of hope.  Links: FT for School...

Still in New York, Bryce meets with the News Literacy Project’s Darragh Worland, and compares media literacy education notes with the Poynter Institute’s Brittani Kollar. And against a backdrop of government cuts to public broadcasting and media companies buckling to political pressure, he sits down with Michelle Lipkin who’s built a nationwide community of digital literacy educators, inspired by...

Bryce visits Estonia and Finland where he discovers a shared border with Russia has made universal media literacy not just a nice to have, but existential. Interviewing the Estonian education minister, Kristina Kallas and Finnish government officials - he learns that digital literacy is now a priority at all levels of government - including the Ministries of Defence. Links: EU DisinfoLab’s Doppelg...

In Paris, Bryce discovers how the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terror attacks focused the minds of French people to the importance of media literacy - such that lessons are now mandated in all French schools. He visits a high school classroom where teens are being taught to tell online fact from fiction, meets the Agence France Presse team of fact-checkers and sits down with a former journalist turned digit...

On the last leg of his international fact-finding mission, Bryce travels to London - where an academic’s calls for media literacy to be taught at school might finally be being answered. He also visits The Guardian newspaper to learn how they’re fighting fake news - and meets with a Cambridge professor who’s an expert on the psychology of misinformation and worries COVID may have changed everything...

Having spent six weeks travelling to the US, UK, Finland, France and Estonia meeting international experts fighting the scourge of mis- and disinformation, Bryce returns to Australia to take stock of the situation at home. He sits down with the Governor-General, Sam Mostyn AC, former Labor leader Bill Shorten, the University of Canberra’s Professor Sora Park and McKinnon’s Exec Director of Democra...