We increasingly need ‘media literacy’

 

Bill Knight column for 12-10, 11 or 12, 2020

 A year ago this week, Columbia University hosted a conference on disinformation put on by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Columbia Journalism Review.

Things haven’t improved much since.

            Sure, Facebook, Twitter and other online companies started monitoring contents, and dependable organizations such as the Better Government Association and the Poynter Institute continue to fact-check. But all that seems inadequate. When we’re buffeted by edited photos, doctored videos, and propaganda designed to mimic real news companies, the truth is elusive.

For instance, many Americans won’t take precautions against the pandemic or plan to refuse the COVID-19 vaccination. Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, on Sunday said she’s alarmed that people are “parroting back” misinformation about the effectiveness of masks even as COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths surge, and a new University of Chicago survey found just half the adult population say they’ll be vaccinated against.

Why?

“Misinformation about the safety of vaccines, coupled with the public’s lack of media-literacy skills,” according to Sarah Brandt, vice president of NewsGuard, a nonpartisan group in Chicago that reviews reliability of news sites to fight misinformation and helps teach media literacy.

Media literacy has been defined as “the ability to break down media messages, assess their influence on thoughts and feelings, and mindfully create media.”

Trump calls the press the “enemy of the people,” which causes some to question news, like his unproven claims of voter fraud causes some to question the election. Granted, disturbing information can be challenging to accept. But as Southern author Flannery O’Connor wrote, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”

In Illinois, State Rep. Lisa Hernandez (D-Cicero) almost two years ago introduced a change to the state school code providing for media-literacy instruction, and though it unanimously passed the House last year, it stalled in a Senate committee. But this month Senate President Don Harmon endorsed it by signing on as a co-sponsor.

“Disinformation is never a discrete problem; it operates across our global information ecosystem,” wrote CJR’s Jon Allsop, who said there’s “various, overlapping levels of the disinformation problem: the public and private, the national and international, and, importantly, the local.”

For decades, U.S. newspapers – served by the steadfast Associated Press for state, national and world news, and once-substantial numbers of reporters for local journalism – were the trustworthy base of the nation’s shared information. But in the last 15 years, more than 1,700 daily and weekly newspapers closed, and dozens of newsrooms shut down since March. Many surviving news operations get by with skeletal remains of adequate staffs. That leaves communities without independent coverage of town councils, schools, businesses, etc., and that means less citizen involvement and more waste or even corruption, some research says.

“People don’t understand what it means not to have local news or the newspapers in general and to have comprehensive, professional, objective news,” posted Eliot Kleinberg, retiring from the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. “They’ve seen so much that isn’t that, that they’ve almost forgotten what it really looks like.”

For effective preparation to be swamped with disinformation, the country requires education. The learning is necessary for students, according to Stanford University, which reported that young Americans have trouble judging the credibility of information online – whether middle school or college.

A university professor told me, “Students have no idea about journalism or how it is different from Twitter or Twitch or whatever.”

However, the whole society needs to learn how to receive contents.

“Whether you call it media literacy, news literacy, information literacy or something else, it all boils down to the same concept,” said Brandt. “We need to be savvier online. We need to teach when and how to be skeptical, but also when to believe.”

A study from the RAND Corporation found that 41% of Americans think the news has grown less reliable. “Perceptions of changes in news reliability were linked to patterns of accessing the news,” the report concludes. “Social media and in-person communication were perceived as the most-reliable sources by the smallest number of respondents.”

Yet, offering an unfiltered firehose of material, the Internet can be a sophisticated siren luring us to ruin like Greek mythology’s sailors doomed by temptations.

Today, the World Health Organization has described the spread of disinformation an “infodemic.”

“Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

For one “vaccination” against misinformation, there’s “News Matters,” a 20-page primer on news literacy by David Porter produced in 2013 by the Illinois Press Association’s foundation. It remains available online at https://issuu.com/illinoispress/docs/aa.newsmatters.