(bright music) - PBS Utah has a new Book Club In a Box about media and misinformation in partnership with Amplify Utah, which helps facilitate the connection between student work and traditional media outlets to encourage more diversity voices.

And here to tell us about what's in this box is Amplify Utah's Marcie Young Cancio.

Hi, Marcie.

Sorry that was such a long intro, but.

So this is a great and very very timely Book club in a Box, given all the misinformation out there and how students can negotiate that.

Tell me what novel and what film you're using for this.

- Sure, yeah.

It's a really big time for misinformation, especially going into an election year.

We are really primed to need to know how to check for that.

The book that we're reading for the Book Club in the Box is George Orwell's "1984", which has been called chillingly prophetic as we kind of go into this new world of digital and social media, or are fully in this world of digital and social media.

And then the film is "While We Watched", which is a documentary following Indian journalist Ravish Kumar as he fights information around nationalism and kind of on the political spectrum there.

- Yeah, so it's a great pairing.

- It's an incredible pairing.

- And it is the 75th anniversary of Orwell's book, which is amazing.

- Isn't that wild?

- Yeah, yeah it is.

And you teach media and misinformation, right?

I mean you're, you're on the U campus, you're gonna be teaching a course that's really important, so talk about why this is particularly relevant, and especially for students.

- Sure.

So Amplify Utah is largely a passion project that's created to help students within their journalism career and journey, but my full-time gig is clinical assistant professor of journalism at the U, and a big part of being a good journalist is being able to know how to read the messages in media.

If you're not media literate, then you can't truly be able to create solid good journalism that keeps people informed.

I firmly believe that everybody should probably take a media literacy class, and the younger we start it, the better, so we can pay attention to things that just don't feel right as we hear them on any channel.

Facebook, Instagram, TikToks, e-mail.

- Yeah, wherever you go.

So it's an important thing you're doing, and thank you so much for doing it.

- Thanks.

- Thank you.

And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming Book Club in a Box with PBS Utah and the Amplify Utah, Media & Misinformation, go to pbsutah.org/bookclub.

I'm Mary Dickson.

Thanks for watching Contact.

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