Teaching Media Literacy

The vast, new tools at our disposal are requiring greater levels discernment in the use of media and in some cases, giving rise to new areas of study and instruction at the university level. The Chronicle of Higher Education published an interview this week with a professor who shared a list of unreliable news sites with her mass communication classes at Merrimack College, only to have the classroom discussion overtaken by events when a top search about the Presidential election signalled the arrival of the impact fake news. She then made her list public:

What spurred you to create the list?

Part of the immediate impetus was to give it to my students as a resource. If you find yourself on these websites, and many others, you should make sure that you know what these websites are, and understand that all media has a different frame and has different standards for newsworthiness. So it was basically to encourage them to always read multiple sources of information.

I made it public after I saw that 70news.wordpress.com was the No. 1 Google news site that popped up when people Googled the popular election results. As that was happening, some of my communication and media friends were like, "Hey, we want to share this list on Facebook or with our students," so I was like, Oh, OK, so people are interested in this. But I honestly didn’t anticipate getting more than a few shares.

It’s basically a lesson in media literacy for my students that exploded to be something much beyond that.

The list has become popular very quickly. What has the reaction been like?

I’ve received hundreds and hundreds of emails over the last two days, and overwhelmingly, they’re very positive — especially among academics, among journalists, among librarians, and everyday people who are just frustrated and don’t know how to wade through all the information that’s thrown at them on a daily basis.

This is not a controversy that will recede on its own - 'clickbait' works for a reason, after all, and adds a troubling dimension to the concept of breaking the news. But at this vulnerable stage, the responsibility is greater than ever to think critically, to know how to question sources and assumptions. What good is having so much information at one's fingertips if we cannot tell what's real from what's fake? There are no shortcuts to being well-informed, and that bar is only going up as the bar for what passes for news goes down. Issues like these are the very fulcrum on which a free society rests, and the university has a crucial role to play.

Image: Mark Rothko, No. 3/No. 13, 1949, oil on canvas, 216.5 x 164.8 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)