Black Iowa News and BTG 1619 develop Media Masterminds & Youth Listening Session, hold workshop at Drake University

Two Black Des Moines community leaders designed a program to open a dialogue with Black middle and high schoolers about the news media in hopes of helping the teens become more savvy news consumers.

“So much false information is being spread — especially against Black people, so I feel like this is a good class to become more aware,” said participant Trinity English, 16, who attends Hoover High School.

Dana James, founder & publisher of Black Iowa News, and Marlon Ewing, executive director of BTG 1619, which offers youth education programming, spent months developing the media literacy curriculum dubbed Media Masterminds & Youth Listening Session. The curriculum focused on the portrayals of Black people in the news media, how to spot misinformation, disinformation, and artificial intelligence and how to use social media more effectively. About a dozen students and a parent attended the session, which was held at Drake University.

Many students said they receive news from social media sites like TikTok and Instagram but admit they don’t know how to find out whether the information they read is accurate.

“It’s coming from random people. I don’t know if it’s real or fake,” said participant Hyumi Yang, 17, a North High School student.

During the two-hour workshop, students compared how different media outlets portray Black people and race in articles. They also analyzed stories and learned how to vet them through research into journalists’ backgrounds, sources and website URLs, among other topics. During the workshop, students discussed their feelings about the news media and completed a questionnaire about their news consumption habits. The questionnaire asked students a variety of questions, including whether their opinion of the news media was positive, neutral or negative. One hundred percent of the respondents marked neutral.

Other key findings include:

How often do you watch or read the news?

• 71 percent of respondents stated they rarely watched or read the news

• 29 percent stated they occasionally watched or read the news.

Has following the news ever made you feel anxious or bad?

• 71 percent agree
• 15% strongly agree
• 14% disagree

Ewing, who is the founder of Ewing Financial Coaching & Equity and CEO of Conscious Cash, said it was important to help students connect today’s current events to Black history in this country.

“We created this program to be intentional in changing generational curses in the Black community,” he said.

James said students are being inundated with information that can affect their mental health, contribute to bullying and reinforce stereotypes. It’s important to help Black youth think critically about information, James said.

“At the end of the session, students said, ‘You can’t believe everything you read,’” James said. “That let us know they got it.”

James said the program’s key goals included helping Black youth become more interested in what’s happening in their communities, including voting, and uplifting the field of journalism.

The project, held last spring, was supported by a grant from the Listening Post Collective, a nonprofit organization offering resources, tools, peer-to-peer support and a shared learning space for journalists, newsroom leaders and community groups looking to revitalize local news and information ecosystems. James used the collective’s Civic Media Playbook in developing the Media Masterminds program and a news survey that is being distributed locally by Black Iowa News at community events. The project was also supported by the Drake University Business Clinic, with the help of Matthew Kaye, program manager.