Guest Editors’ Introduction

In January 2016 this journal published a special issue on reading, guest edited by Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue. That special issue probed such questions as why we were seeing a “re-turn to reading,” “which needs it fulfills, what significance it might have for the discipline at large,” and “how does the current turn to reading figure students—their interests, their needs, their strengths, their investments” (Salvatori and Donahue 2016: 3). Five years later this special issue, focusing on critical reading and writing in the era of fake news, extends that inquiry by asking further questions about this return to reading, specifically in terms of what this return suggests about students’ needs in our current climate.

Although published in January 2016, Salvatori and Donahue’s issue was off to press well before President Trump took office, well before uses of the term fake news spiked, well before the term was politicized by both sides, and well before President Trump used the term to eviscerate the free press. Like Salvatori and Donahue’s issue, this special issue will be published more than a year after it was developed, a year that included the 2020 presidential election. Although President Trump has since left office, the stakes have already been raised for instructors at all levels and across all disciplines who are responsible for teaching students how to make meaning—through the practices of reading and writing—of the world that surrounds them. And while we cannot predict whether the term fake news will remain in circulation, misinformation and disinformation will continue to circulate. We saw as much after Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and some media outlets continued to report for weeks that the election was still undecided. While misinformation can be problematic, it is usually not as dangerous as disinformation (which has malicious intent behind it), particularly for a democracy. We saw as much with the deadly insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, incited by Trump’s disinformation campaign surrounding the results of the 2020 election. Of course, fake news, only one form of disinformation, is not new. What is new, however, is the speed at which these stories spread because of social media and related technologies, as well as the ease with which they can be created by everyday people because of our advanced digital technology.

Despite criticisms of the very term fake news, we have chosen to use the term in the title of this special issue for the very reasons that many have turned away from it: because it encapsulates the sort of complexity that faces us—the politically charged manipulation of information that we and our students face daily. Unfortunately, our students are not faring well as they try to navigate our current information landscape wherein “internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas” (Marwick and Lewis 2017: 1). For example, in “Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning” Wineburg et al. (2016) reported on a study of 7,804 responses from students in middle school through college in twelve states conducted by the Stanford History Education Group, which sought to gauge students’ capacity for “civic online reasoning.” The researchers summarized the goals of the study as follows:

We sought to establish a reasonable bar, a level of performance we hoped was within reach of most middle school, high school, and college students. For example, we would hope that middle school students could distinguish an ad from a news story. By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners’ political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who’s behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue.

(4)

They observed that, “in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation” (4), concluding that “democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation...