Should middle school kids be watching CNN in school?

It’s a discussion a board member at Norwin School District wants to consider.

CNN 10 isn’t the same round-the-clock programming that runs on your cable stations. It is a 10-minute program offering students bite-sized chunks of stories for kid consumption. Four stories at about two minutes apiece run daily. Recent offerings have included the Russia-Ukraine border dispute, North Korean missile tests and explanations about what causes inflation.

The brief reports have transcripts available online. Designed for tween consumption, they are short and to the point, without the blurring of lines that can happen when 24 hours of air time ends up being filled partially with opinion that is hard to tell from fact — a failing of all cable news channels.

But that makes it all the more important for kids to be exposed to news. All kinds of news. They need to be able to learn how to consume news — not just knowledgeably but also critically.

More and more, people get their news not directly from the TV or the newspaper but from links shared on social media. When doing research, we would call the eyewitness that tells us something a primary source. The news story I might write would be a secondary source.

When it is picked up by another agency and “aggregated” into another story, that’s tertiary. By the time you get to the Facebook group that shares the link to a link to a link, the story is a tangled knot of what happened, what’s been misconstrued and what’s been cherry-picked to support a position.

It is hard for adults to learn the difference between good sources and bad ones, but adults are more likely to also watch or read trusted sources. About 89% of kids say they get all of their news online, from a mix of social media and direct sites.

The next generations have to know how to find information that is real. How to trust or when not to trust what they find. They need to learn to fact-check, question, dispute and research. Really research, that is. Not just look for the first site that tells them what they want to hear.

And if you think this is me calling out your party or taking a shot at the other guy, it’s not. It’s a bias found on all sides. Seeing it as a partisan attack is part of the problem.

CNN 10 doesn’t appear to be biased, but even if it were, it is still important for people to learn to consume news with open eyes and open minds. News is the one thing that will never be short on the shelves because of supply chain problems.

We all need to learn how to be smart shoppers. Even in middle school.

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