Untold Stories - a media literacy response to mis & dis information

Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has media literacy duties including a responsibility to commission activities that support women and girls, help people spot and avoid misinformation, and understand how platforms use our personal data. This ITT sets out our requirements to help people spot and avoid mis and disinformation through understanding how stories become news. This will build their media literacy knowledge, skills and behaviour and their engagement with news.

Media literacy has a role to play in supporting people to possess the critical thinking skills to better spot mis and disinformation and identify news and information they can trust. literacy, sometimes known as news literacy, teaches audiences how to judge the reliability and credibility of news and information, and distinguish professionally produced news from other forms of content. Our research showing that 44% of people agreed with the statement "the more a story is edited, the less it is likely to be true" suggests that enhancing understanding of how stories become news could better equip people to make more informed judgements about mis and disinformation.

At the same time, local media has a vital role to play in the social fabric of the UK. Local media, and particularly the local public interest news it produces, can help to deliver important benefits to society by supporting local democracy and holding councils and other local institutions to account. Local media is also an important way for many communities to stay informed about local information and events, which in turn can help to promote social cohesion and community engagement. It can give a voice to people from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs, reflect an entire community back to itself and promote greater mutual understanding. It also has the potential to stimulate local economies by promoting local businesses and events that bring people into an area. As a result, effective local media provision has previously been described as an important element of the glue that can help build and bind communities together. Research also points to the commitment of local journalists to create a sense of community and to defend it, suggesting that engagement with local media could be part of the solution to countering wider hatred, disinformation and polarisation.

We require an organisation or organisations who can deliver a programme that improves adults' media literacy skills, specifically that they are better able to identify mis and disinformation and that they have a better understanding of how news is produced, ideally through having produced their own local news reports. It is likely that your organisation has already developed a media/news literacy programme, although it may require some adaptation to meet the requirements of this tender.