News Club Interview: Bryce Corbett

So, who is Bryce Corbett?

Bryce Corbett is my colleague, my friend and a journalist with an expansive career, having worked for many of our major media outlets. More recently, though, he is the Director of Squiz Kids, where he launched our daily news podcast for busy families in 2020.

That podcast is now listened to by thousands of families around the breakfast table, on the drive to school, and by even more kids and teachers in primary school classrooms across Australia.

The enthusiasm shown by those classrooms led us to create a digital literacy program called Newshounds - many of you will no doubt have heard us talk about it.

Bryce has just returned from a trip around the world, thanks to being awarded a Churchill Fellowship, where he learned more about the issues of misinformation and disinformation and how other countries are tackling them.

You can listen to the conversation here, tune in on YouTube - and hit subscribe while you’re at it - or scroll down for an edited transcript.

Interview Highlights

Highlight 1: On why other countries consider media literacy an issue of ‘national importance’

Bryce Corbett: When I was in Estonia, I was meeting with people from the defence ministry. This is a country that, in its history, has been passed backwards and forwards between being an independent country and being invaded by Russia. They don't take their independence for granted, and they're reminded daily of how easily it can be taken away from them.

So, they consider ensuring they have a digitally literate population a matter of national importance, and the teaching of media literacy to the entire population falls under the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Communications. They explained to me that this is not just a nice-to-have; this is existential. They talked about it as information warfare and how they need to prepare their populations to be constantly on alert for information warfare.

Highlight 2: On the link between Belle Gibson and media literacy

Kate Watson: You said she is “the con artist and the snake oil salesman of our time, enabled by social media.” Are there just hundreds of thousands of Belle Gibsons now?

Bryce Corbett: Absolutely, everywhere. In the context of Newshounds, we have a module on influencers. It's about teaching kids that the teenager with hundreds of thousands of followers who tells you to put lemon juice on your face because it’s good for clearing up pimples doesn’t know what she’s talking about… She’s not a medical professional. Anybody can say whatever they want online, and there is nobody policing it, and there is nobody regulating it. It’s a complete free-for-all.

Highlight 3: On the role of journalism in calling out fact from fiction

Bryce Corbett: Apple loved the story of this girl who had brain cancer and was curing it by drinking green juices. So, Apple had her app as the default app that comes when you buy an Apple Watch. And then there was Penguin Random House, the massive international publishing house, that gave her a book deal. And — it boggles the mind when you think about it — neither of them, at any point, stopped to ask, "Well, hang on a minute, is this cancer story true? Do you have any evidence to back it up?" Because she didn’t.

When push came to shove, she had zero actual medical records to suggest that anything she’d been saying about the brain cancer was true.

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