Seeking to help students become more discerning consumers of news, Stony Brook University is to announce today a $1.7 million grant from a journalism foundation to create what college officials believe is the nation's first university-wide course in "news literacy."

The goal, said Howard Schneider, dean of Stony Brook's new journalism school and the former Newsday editor, is to "help people sort through this avalanche of information. ... This is a critical skill for citizens of the 21st century because of the unprecedented amount of information." ...

... Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a Stony Brook alumnus, said that with so much media proliferation, it's "hard to tell which ones are reliable."

And in light of what Clark called "radical political polarization ... that leads to people only believing messages they want to hear," Schneider said. "One of the hardest things we have to do is get people on all sides of the political spectrum to be open to information that doesn't conform to previously held beliefs and biases."
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