Stephanie Craft, Professor, Journalism
Monday, February 18, 2019
5:15 – 6:30 p.m. (including light dinner)
212 Honors House (unless otherwise notified)

In a 2017 paper in the journal Communication and the Public, U. of I. journalism professor Stephanie Craft and colleagues wrote that conspiracy theories “flourish in the wide-open media of the digital age, spurring concerns about the role of misinformation in influencing public opinion and election outcomes.” The study looked into what the authors termed “news media literacy” and its role in the spread of conspiracy theories – and also the impact of general literacy on partisanship. It determined that greater knowledge about the news media led to a lower likelihood of conspiracy theory endorsement, even for theories that aligned with their political ideology.  From “fake” news to outgrowths such as QAnon, come learn more about how news media literacy impacts society and you.

Stephanie Craft’s research, focusing on news literacy, press practices and journalism ethics, has appeared in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Communication Law & Policy, Mass Communication & Society, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, andJournalism & Mass Communication Educator. With Charles Davis, she is author of the textbook Principles of American Journalism, published by Routledge. Before earning her PhD, Craft worked as a newspaper journalist in California, Washington and Arkansas. Currently, with the support of a McCormick Foundation grant, she and her research team are developing a measure of news media literacy that can be used to explore relationships among news media use, literacy, skepticism, civic engagement and other variables, and as a tool for curriculum development and evaluation.