SUMMARY
- Media Literacy Now is a nonprofit that advocates for media & digital literacy lessons in K12 schools to train American children to avoid “disinformation.”
- It’s arguably the most influential such nonprofit in the U.S., with paid advocacy leaders in 23 states including Arizona, Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, Montana, North Carolina, and Utah.
- MLN material was endorsed by the federal government’s “information literacy taskforce” under the Biden Administration. It was also recommended by the CDC Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Centers for Disease Control.
- The nonprofit was directly funded by the State Department to promote media literacy overseas.
- Media Literacy Now endorsed and was quoted by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the introduction of her Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act, a failed bid to give the Department of Education a $20 million slush fund to promote media literacy training in schools around the U.S.
- Media Literacy Now’s board includes the founder and CEO of Ad Fontes media, known for its “media bias” chart which flagged Fox News and the New York Post as hyper-partisan and unreliable.
- MLN’s New Jersey chapter head penned an op-ed after January 6th labeling it a “Trump-inspired insurrection” fueled by “disinformation campaign regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.”
- An MLN state researcher in Pennsylvania connected the fight for media literacy to the fight for critical race theory in schools, proposing an “intersection between critical race theory and news literacy.”
Media Literacy Now is a grassroots nonprofit advocating for K–12 media and digital literacy education. It operates one of the most expansive coordinated advocacy infrastructures of any “anti-disinformation” civil society organization in the United States.
MLN maintains advocacy leaders in 23 states, spanning politically diverse regions including Arizona, Indiana, Texas, Tennessee, Montana, North Carolina, and Utah. This makes MLN arguably the most influential media-literacy lobbying outfit in the country, with a presence in nearly half the nation’s state legislatures.
The group drafts model legislation, provides policy templates to lawmakers, and actively campaigns for mandates that embed open-ended “media literacy” requirements into state education standards—requirements that, in practice, often track with federal narratives about “misinformation” and “extremism.”
MLN celebrates the legislative victories of the media literacy movement. The wins cited on its “impact” page include a cross-section of the country — not just blue states like Rhode Island and Illinois, but also red and purple states like Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Utah.
The Biden Administration’s Interagency Media Literacy Push
The sudden burst of media literacy legislation across the states did not happen organically. It arrived with the blessing, and in at least one case, the direct financial support of US federal agencies.
The Biden Administration’s Information Literacy Taskforce, a federal interagency initiative, explicitly recommended MLN’s material as part of nationwide “resilience” programming.
The Information Literacy Taskforce was a cross-government effort to promote “information literacy” across the nation, involving the following agencies and bureaus:
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
- Institute of Museum and Library Services
- Library of Congress
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- National Institutes of Health
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- National Telecommunications and Information Administration
- Social Security Administration
- U.S. Department of Education
- U.S. Department of State
- U.S. Department of Treasury
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
The CDC Foundation, a nonprofit partner legally designed to act on behalf of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, likewise cited MLN’s media-literacy resources in publications released as part of its $1.5 million taxpayer funded initiative to promote media literacy.
Most notably, MLN received direct State Department funding in the form of a $30,000 grant to promote media-literacy work in Germany, placing the organization squarely within U.S. foreign-policy messaging operations.
This combination of funding from the US foreign policy state, to an ostensibly domestic education nonprofit, is a pattern FFO has seen before in the disinformation where lines are blurred between civic education and state-aligned information control.
MLN’s influence has extended to federal legislative initiatives. When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced her Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy Act in 2022, she leaned heavily on MLN’s authority. The organization, which officially endorsed the legislation, was quoted in the bill’s introductory materials.
The materials also justified the push for media literacy in terms of the discredited Russiagate panic:
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference found that between 2013 and 2018, Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) operated influence campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter campaigns that reached 126 million users in the United States. Those accounts spread divisive content meant to pit Americans against each other and transmitted misleading information designed to disenfranchise minority groups. The IRA’s strategy linked multiple social media accounts that had a significant number of followers and maintained personas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
Klobuchar’s legislation has so far failed, but its objective is clear: allocate $20 million to the Department of Education to seed media-literacy programs nationwide. This amounted to a political slush fund for ideologically aligned curriculum design, with MLN positioned to benefit from the federal push.
Partisan Rhetoric
While MLN brands itself as nonpartisan, its top leaders display a clear ideological skew.
The organization’s national board includes the founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media, the company behind the widely publicized “media bias chart.” That chart has been criticized for operationalizing political bias under the guise of neutrality—ranking mainstream left-leaning outlets as “reliable” while flagging Fox News and the New York Post as hyper-partisan and unreliable. Analysis from the Media Research Center revealed Ad Fontes flags 64 percent of left-leaning news sources as reliable, compared with 32 percent of conservative sources.
When MLN spokespeople address national political controversies, their framing often mirrors partisan or federal “disinformation” narratives.
Following the events of January 6th, the head of MLN’s New Jersey chapter, Olga Polites, authored an op-ed calling it a “Trump-inspired insurrection” driven by a “disinformation campaign regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election.”
The op-ed further blamed the riot on disinformation spread by “Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin,” and accused The Daily Caller, a mainstream conservative news source of “traffic[king] in lies and conspiracy theories.” Polites only identified one conservative publication she considered credible: the establishment journal National Review.
A Pennsylvania-based MLN state researcher, R. Alan Berry, explicitly linked media-literacy advocacy with the fight to protect critical race theory (CRT) in school curricula. Berry contributed a chapter to an academic book from Routledge published in 2022, titled Critical Race Media Literacy: Themes and Strategies for Media Education.
Fake news has become a hot topic in both the literature and the classroom. What scholars and educators have failed to acknowledge to date, however, is the extent to which fake news is a part of the contemporary news landscape already. One especially relevant and egregious case is how race has been consistently misrepresented in the news media with the news conveying stereotypical representations and narratives for decades, if not centuries. However, with the recent focus on misinformation and fake news, most contemporary news literacy programs do not cover issues of race in the mainstream news media. Instead, they teach textual analysis and evaluation skills to detect fake news and situate fake news outside the realm of mainstream media, failing to connect news media and race. This chapter proposes the creation of a media education program that will create an intersection between critical race theory, news literacy, and fake news. We will first provide a working conceptualization of fake news that acknowledges the issues surrounding racial representation. Then, we will introduce some pedagogical strategies educators can implement to use fake news to teach about race and media.
MLN’s ties to race-radicals on the progressive left don’t end there. It also has ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center, known for routinely denouncing mainstream conservatives as racists and purveyors of hate speech. MLN’s founder gave comments to the magazine of Learning for Justice, SPLC’s education initiative, in October 2021.
SPLC, which quoted the founder favorably, filed the story under the tag “dismantling white supremacy.”
As FFO has previously highlighted, the SPLC’s Learning for Justice initiative itself provides a media literacy curriculum for use in K12 schools — one officially recommended by California’s department of education.
A Federal Campaign Spreading at the State Level
Media Literacy Now sits at a critical junction:
- Endorsed by federal agencies under the previous admin.
- Funded with State Department money to promote media literacy abroad.
- Embedded in state legislatures nationwide
- Promoting curricula that adopt the narratives of federal “disinformation” frameworks.
Through these levers, MLN has become a de facto government-adjacent speech-adjudication partner—but targeted not at adults, platforms, or foreign populations, but at American children inside the K-12 system. Though the present administration has reversed course on online censorship, the previous administration’s efforts on media literacy live on through organizations like MLN, as well as the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and the News Literacy Project (NLP), covered in FFO’s previous report.
Media literacy is not inherently problematic. But when “media literacy” is operationalized as a tool for political gatekeeping, backed by federal agencies, and implemented through nonprofit networks with explicit ideological alignments, the risk becomes clear: The classroom becomes an extension of the government’s preferred information narratives.
As the new bureaucratic language of “resilience,” “digital citizenship,” and “literacy” continues to spread, understanding MLN’s role is essential. Its influence reveals how easily “education” can serve as the soft power front end of a much larger information-governance architecture—one that increasingly targets not just speech, but the worldview of the next generation.
