It's Time to Change the Way We Think About "the Media"

There it was again, my worst nightmare: the all-too-common phrase “the media won’t show you this.” It struck my social media feed in a tweet referencing a video of Black Lives Matter protesters in Colorado marching for justice, undeterred by a torrential downpour. It racked up 159,000 likes. The video was filmed by a reporter for Denver’s local 9News, a member of “the media.” The inability of the Twitter user to identify the source of his video is indicative of a chronic absence of education about how we interact with “the media” in our daily lives. 

That knowledge, referred to as media literacy, is both a beneficial tool for contextualizing our interactions with “the media” and a vital compass in the age of misinformation. Anyone with access to the internet can create and share content widely, and we must learn to think critically about strategies for analyzing and verifying that content just as widely in order to keep up. We need to identify the manner in which our biases can influence what content we engage with and share, and ask questions about the authors’ motivations behind their content. This education must be a requirement for high school graduation in the United States. It should be included as a portion of the typical general education courses in which high school students enroll, similar to U.S. government and economics. There are organizations, such as the News Literacy Project (NLP), that have already designed curriculums (even entire virtual classrooms in the case of NLP’s Checkology platform) to this end. 

If you are experiencing any doubts as to the importance of having a map for navigating fact and fiction, take a look at how quickly the viral “Plandemic” video, featuring false claims about COVID-19 from a discredited scientist, reached over 8 million people.

An extensive body of research, including one study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests people are more likely to share content online that confirms what they already believe. This behavior forms “filter bubbles”, in which social media users constantly engage with content that is consistent only with their own ideals regardless of quality. It is under these conditions that COVID-19 conspiracies can fester to the point of causing real harm. Using media literacy education to build a framework for identifying disinformation can prevent dubious content from spreading in the first place.

Additionally, media literacy prevents the erosion of public trust in foundational democratic institutions, such as the free press. The perpetual onslaught of information in the digital age can create uncertainty about which sources to trust. The Media Insight Project found in 2018 that 44 percent of American adults had an overall decrease in trust of the news since the year before. A more thorough and nuanced understanding of journalism, an important component of media literacy education, may help Americans identify ethical and credible news outlets for use in constructing a trustworthy, diversified and fact-based news ecosystem. Engaging with those sources would demonstrate the ways journalists, especially those on the local level, are indeed “showing you this.”

All of this is not to say that journalists are above reproach. News outlets can absolutely make mistakes that harm public trust, like how televison news networks have been called out for featuring mug shots of African Americans when reporting on an alleged crime, creating a presumption of guilt rather than innocence. If you have read this far, however, I hope you can recognize how media literate citizens would be better equipped to recognize and address such issues.

Forgoing a media literacy education requirement in the United States is to leave Americans in the dark as we are catapulted into the post-truth era, in which public opinion seems shaped more by the furor of fear than by fact.