What CNN Got Right About the Presidential Race | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it

Last Sunday morning on Reliable Sources, CNN’s Brian Stelter asked his considerable audience to be on guard for one of this election cycle’s most ugly features: fake news sites. He accurately them called “a plague” across the internet. He proposed a new rule for social-media users: “Triple check before you share,” and he offered some useful tips on how to do that.

I’m not a fan of CNN’s generally atrocious political coverage in the past 18 months, to put it mildly. But I am a big fan of Stelter’s work; he’s currently the beacon of light at the news channel. His don’t-fall-for-fake-news advice, part of a series of commentaries he’s been delivering, is a key reason why.

In pieces like the one that ran on Sunday, Stelter has done what the traditional media have largely failed to do: Leading the way in bringing media-literacy skills to the wider public. Given the size of his audience, on TV and online, it is probably no exaggeration to call him, as I did the other day, “America’s most influential teacher of media literacy in the digital age.”...