Where the movement once worried about blogs, left-right bias, and how to decode the front page of a newspaper, it now confronts a booming content-marketing business that is cranking out native advertising, all manner of “sponsored content,” and glossy magazines and slick docu-ads produced by corporations that look and sound a lot like journalism. “Contributor networks,” in which “experts” and others self-publish for little or no money and without even a cursory edit, are sprouting like barnacles on the hulls of legacy news brands. Hoaxes and plagiarism are disturbingly common, factchecking has been turned over to the digital mob, and Facebook is considered a major news source.

News literacy’s mission—to help give people the critical-thinking skills necessary to discern what is trustworthy in this churning informational stew—is crucial. It can also, at times, feel impossible.

...[L]earning how to measure transferrable critical-thinking skills is the movement’s “Holy Grail.” Students may get better at certain critical-thinking skills in a news-literacy class, but then the question becomes: Better compared to what? Does a course on news literacy move the needle as much as, or more than, a traditional civics course, or a philosophy course on critical thinking? Nobody knows.