Back in 2017, Danah Boyd did an excellent takedown of “media literacy” efforts and how they appear to have backfired.
As I detailed in my book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, too many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research. As a result, the message that many had taken home was to turn to Google and use whatever came up first. They heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not.
Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education. When educators encourage students to focus on sourcing quality information, they encourage them to critically ask who is publishing the content. Is the venue a respected outlet? What biases might the author have? The underlying assumption in all of this is that there’s universal agreement that major news outlets like the New York Times, scientific journal publications, and experts with advanced degrees are all highly trustworthy.
Think about how this might play out in communities where the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an untrustworthy source of information…or in those where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious people…or where degrees are viewed as a weapon of the elite to justify oppression of working people. Needless to say, not everyone agrees on what makes a trusted source.
Students are also encouraged to reflect on economic and political incentives that might bias reporting. Follow the money, they are told. Now watch what happens when they are given a list of names of major power players in the East Coast news media whose names are all clearly Jewish. Welcome to an opening for anti-Semitic ideology.
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Keep in mind that anti-vaxxers aren’t arguing that vaccinations definitively cause autism. They are arguing that we don’t know. They are arguing that experts are forcing children to be vaccinated against their will, which sounds like oppression. What they want is choice?—?the choice to not vaccinate. And they want information about the risks of vaccination, which they feel are not being given to them. In essence, they are doing what we taught them to do: questioning information sources and raising doubts about the incentives of those who are pushing a single message. Doubt has become tool.
My son is a teenager in high school, and I was always taken aback at how much the “media literacy” message he brought home with him from school was exactly what Boyd describes: the important thing to establish the truth was to look at the source and motivations of people making claims.
I suppose the one advantage of this approach is that it is fairly easy to teach in educational settings. The assignments my son did often consisted of simply finding an article, and then analyzing its source and motivations. That practically writes itself.
We had a lot of discussions about the problems with this approach. I was surprised how often teachers would discourage him from reading the Wikipedia entry on a subject, and I would immediately encourage him to do so, though with an explanation of the benefits and limits of Wikipedia in general. (I don’t ever remember being discouraged by teachers from reading encyclopedia entries when I was a child, though they share the same benefits and limitations of Wikipedia).
And then we had follow-up conversations about logical fallacies, about what sorts of red flags to look for in statistical claims, and how to compare and evaluate competing claims about controversial topics. These things are not easy and can’t be condensed to a simple lesson plan. But they are crucial for producing adults who think critically about the world around them.