When “News Literate Journalism” Suddenly Arrived

There is a new, much‑shared article in News Research Journal titled “Creating a news literate journalism: A metacognitive model for journalism practice.” It presents a framework where journalists are taught to think about how they think, to interrogate their own processes, and to become “news literate” about their own work, not just about the misinformation their audiences face.

The author talks about metacognition, self‑reflection, and curricular models that ask journalism students to reflect on how they gather, verify, and frame information, as if this is a timely revelation the profession has been waiting for.

The Problem With Reinventing the Wheel

News literacy and metacognitive journalism are not new ideas that magically appeared in 2025. For years, journalism scholarship and foundations have been circling the same themes: media literacy, self‑conscious reasoning among journalists, and “learning‑oriented” news practice. There are entire frameworks, grants, and institutes dedicated to teaching people how to verify information, recognize bias, and reflect on how news is produced.

Yet every few years, a new paper shows up that renames the same terrain, acts as if it has discovered an uncharted continent, and treats everything outside academic journals and institutional white papers as if it never existed.

What I Wrote Long Before This “Model”

My work has been in this space for decades, and it did not need the label “metacognitive model” to exist. Books such as Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News (2005) explicitly teach readers how to verify information, evaluate sources and eyewitnesses, and logically deconstruct how lies are laundered into “news.” That book functions as a step‑by‑step manual in news literacy and verification, long before “news literacy” became a funding buzzword.

Later books like When Journalism Was a Thing, A New Approach to Journalism, and Loaded Language and the Dilemma of Journalism push the conversation further by dissecting propaganda, ideological framing, and the emotional and narrative tricks that journalists and outlets use to distort reality. Those works are not just about “media consumers”; they interrogate the profession’s internal culture, cognitive shortcuts, and scripted narratives, which is exactly what “news literate journalism” now claims as innovation.

Journalism as Cognitive and Emotional Practice

The current article nods to metacognition: journalists should be aware of how they know what they know, and how they decide what counts as news. That acknowledgement is useful, but partial.

In my work, journalism is treated as a layered cognitive and emotional practice:

• Verification as a mental discipline: Checking, challenging, and classifying information are presented as systematic habits rather than optional extras.
• Awareness of propaganda and narrative templates: Journalists are shown how they are nudged by anecdotes, demonization, and selective omission into producing propaganda with a straight face.
• Institutional and cultural literacy: The internal culture of newsrooms, from ideological filtering in j‑schools to sensationalism as default, is treated as an object of analysis, not a neutral background.

This is metacognition in practice: not just “thinking about thinking,” but systematically interrogating the profession’s own rituals, ideological defaults, and emotional blind spots.

Why This Matters (Beyond Personal Annoyance)

On one level, this is just irritating: watching researchers treat lived practice, field investigation, and books as if they never existed until they were recoded into an academic paper. On another level, it is a form of intellectual erasure that lets journalism avoid a full reckoning with its history of errors, fabrications, and propaganda, because the people who documented those problems in real time are kept at arm’s length from the canon. 

When institutions periodically “discover” news literacy and metacognitive journalism, they also conveniently reset the timeline. That reset pushes out earlier, more radical, or more uncomfortable critiques that were written without grant committees and institutional filters. It allows the profession to act as if it is bravely innovating, instead of finally catching up to arguments that have been in print, on shelves, and in practice for decades.

If journalism is serious about being “news literate” about itself, it needs more than another model and another acronym. It needs to acknowledge the people who were mapping this terrain long before it became an academic trend, and that includes the books and frameworks that asked hard questions when it was neither fashionable nor institutionally safe to do so.