11 Media Literacy

Types of Media Literacy

There are a few different ways to think about your own media use. For example, when you are engaging with media, you are either just kind of paying attention to it, but not deeply thinking about it, or you’re paying attention to it and thinking about it in a way that you’re actually evaluating it as well. For increased media literacy, it is best that you are conscious of the media you’re engaged in. So perhaps, every so often, check on yourself to see what you are doing with your media use. Ask yourself for each media you use, Is it just something that I watch passively so that it goes in one ear and out the other? Or am I actually evaluating it? Also consider your emotional use of media. On the low end of media literacy, the emotions are controlling you. On the high end, you are using media to control your emotions. For example, a really trashy TV show is going to grab your attention because it makes you feel angry. People are drawn to that kind of high drama, emotion sometimes without thinking. However, if you’re high on the emotional aspect of media literacy, you might choose more uplifting media when you’re feeling down. Good self awareness goes a long way to advance media literacy. Also, consider your moral use of media, which is where you develop opinions about the ethical nature of the media messages. So on the lowest end of the spectrum, you’re just basing your media use off your intuition. For exampe, “I feel like this is wrong, or I feel like this is right”. You can’t really explain why.  Toward the middle part of this spectrum, you can kind of start to identify with characters who have similar values to you. If you’re watching a TV show and one character is more or less similar to you, you’re going to identify with them more. With the most advanced moral media literacy, you’re looking at the overall narrative, separating some characters from their actions. For example, maybe someone did something bad, but they’re not a bad person; they were just misinformed. In this way of thinking, you’re able to see things from all perspectives. Finally, there’s our aesthetic appreciation regarding media literacy. This is your enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of the media content that you’re engaging with. If it’s low, again, you’re simply categorizing it as this is good, or this is bad, not really able to explain why. If you’re in the middle, you can distinguish those two aspects. You can say thing like, “I like that movie, because acting is really great, even though the directing was not a very good”. But at the highest level, you’re looking for insight into your own culture, or artistry, or even the visual manipulation. You’re aware of that kind of media manipulation.

Levels of Media Literacy

People can watch the exact same show, for very different reasons, depending on where they are with their media literacy. Let’s take reality shows, for example. Someone who is low on media literacy might watch the reality show and think it’s real. They’re not really good at explaining why they like certain characters; they just have a feeling that they like someone or dislike someone. However, people with that mid level of media literacy might be watching the same reality show, but for a different reason. They might watch it because they identify with one or two of the characters. They enjoy this parasocial relationship, feeling a closeness to the characters as if those people are like their co-workers or friends in some way. Or, maybe they’re watching to learn something, and they’re doing it intentionally. For example, maybe they’re watching a reality show to learn about how to dress well, or how to train a dog. Then you have your people who are at the high level of media literacy. Likely, they’re engaging in the show, but then they’re talking about the show with their friends in real life to make connections. They discuss things like what’s similar and different than real life, or maybe they’re talking about the quality of the editing, and they’re really evaluating it.

Interpersonal techniques for media literacy.

First of all, you’re going to catch your friends making poor choices with media all the time. You don’t need to correct them every single time. But it is nice if you do step up and correct them when they have some kind of severe misperceptions. But let them know that you have their best interests in mind; you’re not just trying to be right in an argument, and you actually care about them. You can also be an advocate for balance. Again, you don’t want to criticize someone because they don’t know every single thing that’s happening in the news. However, you might want to suggest that your friend just read the newspaper while they’re eating breakfast, for example. Or, if you’re around children, help them understand the actual reason why some programs are bad for them. Don’t just say this TV is off limits because it makes them want to watch it even more. Instead, try to ask them questions. What do you think is not good about this program?

In terms of media literacy, public education in America is nowhere near where we need it to be. Some of the methods for teaching media literacy are actually even backfiring. So, America is pretty far behind other countries in terms of media literacy education. We spend more time and more money on media, but less time and less money learning how it works or how it manipulates citizens.

However, you can stay aware of government regulations on media issues such as advertising, privacy, etc. Then once you’re really informed on those issues, be sure to also vote on those issues for people who have the same beliefs as you do.

Media Literacy in Practice

Dana Boyd. The author shares with her audience that the way that we’ve been thinking about media literacy may actually be counterproductive for a number of reasons. The first thing that she mentions is, when we teach media literacy, we usually go off the assumption that if people just have access to information, they’ll make good decisions. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality because people tend very often to make decisions based, not on what they know, but on what they feel. That can skew their idea of what reality is like. Let me give you an example. Let’s say that I am trying to persuade you to do something to help with the bee population, especially I like honey bees, but the bee population in Ohio, and a lot of other places is declining. This can have some really negative environmental effects. So maybe I want to share with you some factual information about how important these are to their survival. But what if you got stung by a bee yesterday; that is going to be very top of mind for you. So if I forget to include that kind of information, and I’m trying to tell you, bees are good, bees are great, we need them. But you’re thinking I just had a really negative experience getting stung yesterday. So, you might make your decisions based on your recent experience and not the overall fact that getting stung by bees is not very common. In fact, bees are very good for our environment. Yet people can know that and accept that and still have a really hard time making decisions based on the overall big picture instead of their own personal experiences. So that’s one of the reasons why media literacy can be problematic, because we keep forgetting to take that into account. Especially academics tend to be so focused on the big picture and academics, you know, it’s what we do for a living, that we tend to forget that not everyone has the luxury of doing research for a living. And so they they aren’t exposed to that way of thinking all the time. The next thing is that she mentioned is that a lot of the times, we get caught up looking to see what is happening in the world, that we fail to address Why is happening in the world. And a lot of that happens when we study illiteracy, we see all these, you know, bad things are happening. And then we just try to shove information in people hoping that that’s going to solve the problem. If we don’t get at the root of why people are making bad decisions, or why people are having a hard time understanding what’s real, what’s not real, what are their own personal responsibilities and biases, then we’re not going to get anywhere, at understanding. For example, we have a very real problem with prejudice in this country and a lot of other countries as well. And it’s very hard to look at the why. Because it’s complicated. There’s a lot of factors involved. And we just naturally as humans, we’d like to categorize people and things, you know, this person is good or bad, and not kind of look at the nuances. But this can be very problematic, because if we don’t look at the y, which can be a really hard look, sometimes we’re not going to be able to accomplish our actual goals. The third thing that she brought up is that there’s a real problem with people becoming sort of overwhelmed by how much disinformation there is that they start to think that they can’t trust anything. You know, maybe they find out that one newspaper article had to be redacted or that they had some kind of correction that they made. And then they think Well, no, I can’t trust anything. And that can be extremely problematic, because it’s really not the case. There are certain newspapers like the New York Times washington post in our very own Columbus Dispatch, that have very, very high ratings amongst media literacy professionals. And just because an article needs to have a correction does not mean that you should discount journalism in general journalism actually, can be an is if you look at it from a social science point of view, very reliable. The final thing that she mentioned Is the, again is a problem with academics who study media literacy is that education has changed a lot since the Great Recession. It was already in trouble in the universities in America and around the world financially. And that problem actually was she wrote her speech way before the Coronavirus. But now it’s even worse, where class sizes are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Your individual professors are teaching more and more classes, they have more and more researchers possibilities more and more responsibilities towards service that when students have you know, an honest to goodness question, professors very often don’t have time to address that. And so in that way, education is becoming these kind of canned cookie cutter, things where there’s less and less personal interaction, that is very real, that is very problematic. Nobody likes it. And so her recommendation is that we make some pretty large changes in how education takes place. So that we have more time just to answer questions, where people are asking something like, Well, why is this the way it is, or you know, I need clarification on that.

Scout mindset

Ad Deconstruction

If you’re looking for a book explictly about media literacy, I recommend James Potter’s book, which is simply called “Media Literacy”. The book list different strategies to improve your media literacy, which obviously has a strong connection to your ability to be an active, informed and responsible citizen. So one of the first things you can do is start by improving your own media literacy in that way, you are not just improving yourself, but you can also learn how to help other people to improve their media literacy skills.  The following are some general tips on how to do that, summarized from Potter’s book.

Strengthen your personal locus. This is a combination of awareness of your goals and the actual drive and energy that you have to search out and gain experiences to attain those goals. So the first thing you have to do is to figure out what your goals are. Then you need to try to ensure that your goals are really your own goals. So your media consumption goals should be based on what you really want, and not what you think your parents want what your teacher wants. If the goals are actually truly your own, that makes you much more likely to stick to them. So you have to do a little bit of personal reflection here to figure out what your goals for media consumption are. Then consider what kind of energy it is going to take to reach those goals. So for me personally, I think it’s very important that I stay informed about history as well as current topics. That is a goal that is my ow, and it is quite important to me. But it does take a lot of energy. If I were to learn everything that I wanted to learn, I wouldn’t be able to get as much done in my daily life that I need to accomplish as far as work obligations, family obligations, things like that, I’d have to spend my whole life on it if I was to actually reach my goals. So sometimes I have to like change my goals make them more realistic. For example, I try to read one book about the history of communication per semester. More than one is not reasonable for me, but one is.

Also it is really easy to get caught up in current events and spent your whole life just keeping up to date on the news. Some new stations and outlets are very good at making you feel like you have to stay glued to the screen. So what I decided is that I think it’s very important that I stay informed, but it has to be realistic. So I read the newspaper in the morning while I’m eating breakfast, and I have a big breakfast. So that’s a nice chunk of time for me. But I have my breakfast and my coffee, I read the New York Times and The Washington Post and the Columbus Dispatch. I do not read the paper outside of breakfast time. That keeps me informed every single day without it taking over my life.

That’s kind of how it goes with media literacy. Usually what we do is we have these small goals. And we’re just adding the small amount of commitment, like reading the newspaper during breakfast, but it’s got to last long term over a lifetime.

Next, develop an accurate awareness of your exposure patterns. For example, what kind of media am I paying attention to? How often am I doing it? How do I feel about the media that I’m exposing myself to? Does the exposure match up with those goals that I had set for myself?

Next, acquire some base information, knowledge that you need to have to be good with media literacy. Try to make connections between concepts that we’ve talked about in this book in some of your other social science classes, and your own real life. See if there’s any gaps in that information, I’m sure there will be and then see if you can fill those gaps by learning more about it.

Next, examine your mental code. Mental codes are basically what is driving your habits to be the way they are. For example: Why do I play that video game six hours a day? Is it fulfilling a need that I have? Is the media itself pressuring me to engage in it more often with click bait and other cognitive strategies? Are my current beliefs making me happy? Again, consider what’s realistic. There’s no reason for you to think that to be a  responsible and informed citizen you never get to play video games or watch trashy reality shows. You can; that’s perfectly normal. Just make sure that you’re engaging in them with some background knowledge about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You can regulate it and make sure it’s still matching up with your goals.

Examine your opinions, and ask “Are my opinions supported by facts and logic? Do I respond to my opinions in a reasonable way?” For example, I know a lot of people in my field, intelligent, well educated field, or people who watch shows that they know are terrible, but they continue to watch it anyway because they get sucked up in the storyline.

Next, we always want to keep this reality fantasy continuum in mind. If you’re enjoying a work of fiction, by all means, enjoy it. But try to use it as a tool for creativity, or is some kind of stress reducing outlet. Don’t use it as a model for how do you live your own life because it’s just not how the world actually works.

If you become more skilled at designing messages yourself, that is good for media literacy because it helps you be good at promoting yourself, for example, on social media. However, it also helps you catch when other people are trying to manipulate you. Here are a few things you can do to improve your messaging on social media. First, don’t take privacy for granted. Second, think about whether there’s a chance that your message is ambiguous. If your message is ambiguous, how do you think other people would interpret it, if they saw it? I see this happening on social media a lot. For example, people intend to explain something using sarcasm. But then, because it’s online, it can be very difficult to understand that that’s sarcastic. This ends up giving completely the opposite impression than what they intended. Then, because they don’t have real privacy online, ever, it can get them into a lot of trouble. Finally, take personal responsibility for your posts. Looking to blame other people is a natural part of human condition. But it is not productive.

Fact Checking

Fact checking sites systematically publish assessments of claims made by public officials and institutions. They are an intentional, explicit attempt to identify whether a claim is true or false. This is different than general corrections to misinformation because these fact checking sites don’t just say if something is true or this is false, but they usually provide some kind of context. They give you some background on the topic before they tell you if a statement was true or false. These sites should be nonpartisan, nonprofit, transparent, and they should be doing their own independent research. If these fact checking sites are borrowing research from each other, then they’re no longer being independent because we would see cyclical logic. For example, if you have Person A and Person B, and Person A says, “I know this is true, because Person B says it’s true”. And then Person B says, “I know it’s true, because Person A says it’s true”, then you have the cyclical effect, where they’re depending on each other, and no one’s actually doing good quality research. That does not happen with a true fact checking site.

The purpose of fact checking is, of course, to influence people’s beliefs because citizens are making big decisions on important policies regularly. Fact checking should help them have the background knowledge that they need to do that. But that’s not the only purpose of fact checking. The other purpose is to hold political entities accountable. If a politician knows that their feet are going to be held to the metaphorical fire, that they’re going to be caught if they say something that’s not true, and that they will be publically called out for it, in theory, then they’re going to be less likely to say things that are not true.

This is where we see a really big push for misinformation. Historically, if you wanted to attack a democractic institution, one of the first things that you should do is to attack people’s general sense of reality because then it’s more difficult to hold politicians or other government employees accountable. When citizens feel that it’s not possible to know what’s true, they might give up and not eve try. Then we no longer have that accountability we need for a functioning democracy.

Why fact checking sites developed

First, misperceptions are common because a lot of people don’t understand the important issues of the day. Various topics that we need to have policies for, such as immigration, health care reform, and infastructure are complicated topics for citizens to understand in detail. Second, a lot of this misperception has a strong, negative impact on democracy. To compound that problem, not only are misperceptions common and have a strong negative impact on democracy, but they’re very difficult to correct when people have misinformation. In fact, sometimes if you tell someone that they were wrong, and you give them the correct information, that can backfire. They may actually end up doubling down on their false beliefs.

There’s an article about this that I think is really interesting (cite). It provides an example of this issue where people are corrected, and they double down. Going back to the early 2000s, John McCain was running for president and Sarah Palin was running as the vice president in a campaign against Predisent Obama. At that time, Obama was looking to accomplish some pretty major health care overhaul. One of the things that happened during the campaign is that Sarah Palin was amongst a group of people who incorrectly told the general public that Obama’s health care reform included “death panels”. She and other people were saying that Obama’s health care bill called for a panel of healthcare experts who would judge whether or not someone was deserving of health care, which was definitely not in the bill. One need only to read the bill to know that there was was not anything about death panels in there. Yet, the general public is unlikely to read a 1000 page healthcare bill word for word because people have other obigations such as jobs family. So it became very difficult for the general public to know who was telling the truth and who wasn’t. Obama and the Democrats were saying there were no death panels. But a lot of the general public were hearing that there were.  So, fact checking was important surrounding this issue, and we started to see the development of these independent fact checking sites for issues just like that. Quality newspapers also do their own fact checking with investigative journalism.

Current Status

Fact checking is more common now than ever. However, the bad news is, this does not always mean that there’s a decrease in misperceptions. There are contradictory findings in the research in which some research studies find that fact checking is very successful at correcting misinformation while other studies find the opposite, that fact checking causes more misunderstandings than nothing at all. Other studies found no difference in understanding an issue whether fact checking was used or not.

When these kinds of contradictions happen in the research, people who are not familiar with the scientific method may jump to the conclusion that the scientific method is flawed and no answers can be certain. But that is not generally the case. Generally, when we find these contradictions, what it means is that there’s some kind of a boundary effect, where sometimes, under certain circumstances, and for certain people, fact checking works, and under different circumstances with different people fact checking, does not work. This might be related to the circumstances, or it might be related to the message factors, the actual fact checking sites, or it could have to do with the individual people involved.

There are a couple of reasons why fact checking might not work. Some of these are cognitive; they involve the way that people think. Others involve individual differences between people, such as their personalities and backgrounds. The third involves time.

Regarding cognition, people just simply like to be right. So sometimes fact checking fails because people are very resistant simply to being told that they were wrong. Another issue is that when your misinformation is corrected, this can cause cognitive dissonance. For example, if I said, “I support Plan A”, and then I hear some information that Plan A is bad, I may feel torn between whether I continue supporting it or not because I feel both in favor of it and am starting to feel some negatives as well.  I feel two different ways. I might resolve that dissonance by just covincing myself that this new information is not correct, even though it might be. People also have a desire to make sense of the world, which can be threatened when we’re told that we’re wrong. If you have a schema such as “Democrats support death panels”, it makes it very easy for you to make snap judgments that are unaccurate.

Regarding individual differences, people who have some media literacy skills can actually be more resistant to factual corrections. The reason is that people who understand a little bit about the social sciences know enough to be able to criticize studies that they disagree with, but they don’t know enough to see how they are wrong.

Another individual difference might be people’s political parties or ideologies. We do find that both parties have some kind of biases in the way they thinking. But multiple studies show that Republicans tend to have more negative views of the media and are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories at this moment in time (cite). This has not always been the case; Republicans have not traditionally been incorrect in the mass media more often than then Democrats. In the last four years though, popular conservative media speaks out against fact checking on a pretty regular basis. Studies show that Republicans are more prone to being closed minded, less likely to seek out counter attitudinal information or information that is disconfirming their beliefs. Also, the political elites are less likely to embrace fact checking than Democrats. However, there’s not something inherent about Republicans and Democrats that’s causing this difference. It’s more likely that there’s something about the political climate, currently, that’s that’s causing this. That is where the social sciences become really important because we need to look into why these kind of results are happening. We know what’s happening, but we don’t necessarily know or understand all the reasons why. And if we can figure out the reasons why, then we can help rebuild these problems.

Regarding time. It’s actually very good for democracy to have two relatively equal strong political parties. So we don’t want to see one political party failing in their accuracy, we want to solve this problem and strengthen the Republican party in that way. There’s also a temporal influence where we see that fact checking is more likely to fail if it’s in the middle of an election season because people’s emotions are amped up in it. The unfortunate thing about that is that during election season, that’s when we need fact checking to work the most. But that’s actually when it works the least.

https://news.osu.edu/fact-checking-works-across-the-globe-to-correct-misinformation/?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=umar_faculty-staff-newsletter_fy22_oncampus+today+20210914&sfmc_id=42970261

Fact Checking Site Characteristics

A lot of the fact checking sites have graphical illustrations intended to help people understand the fact checking. However, it actually tends to backfire sometimes, perhaps because they oversimplify more complex problems. These kinds of graphical illustrations (e.g. the number of “Pinocchios” to illustrate how true or untrue a statement is) actually harm the ultimate goal of keeping the public informed.

Long messages are also problematic because people don’t want to read a very long message, nor do they want to read a message that’s very complex linguistically.

Journalists and fact checking

A peer reviewed article that I want to share with you is called “How journalists and social media users perceive online fact checking and verification services” The main point is to answer the question: Do journalists like fact checking (cite). This was done in the European Union, and they just interviewed 32 journalists, which is not a large sample, but we can still get some interesting information from it. They found that journalists in general have very positive attitudes towards fact checking sites, but none of them were willing to rely on any fact checking sites exclusively. They really like to rely on their own research. This is not surprising given that these are investigative journalists. So they’re quite capable of doing their own fact checking. 

The second peer reviewed article is called “Partisan selective sharing: The bias diffusion effect checking messages on social media” (cite). This study was published in 2017. So it’s very easy to have that date in mind when we’re thinking about the context of this research. But one of the flaws of the peer reviewed process is that it can sometimes take a very long time for a research study to be published. This is a good thing, because it means that it’s very rigorous. The downside is that rigor takes time. In this case, there was a huge five year delay between when they collected the data and when they publish the data, so the real context to keep in mind is 2012. They found that people tend to share fact-checking messages on social media only if it supports their own candidate or if it says something bad about the other party’s candidates. However, on average, they found that Democrats were more open to fact checking. The takeaway point here is fact checking is good, but it doesn’t solve all of our problems. One of the issues that we see here is this partisan divide. We do find both Democrats and Republicans as well as independents are more likely to share a fact checking message if it confirms how they already feel. Also, everybody, regardless of political affiliation, is less likely to share that message if it says the opposite of how they feel. However, on average, that’s less of a problem with Democrats. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem. It is still a problem just to a lesser extent.

Conclusions on Fact Checking

Ultimately, some factoring check is better than none. But keep in mind, some types of fact checking are better than others. Overall, the effects are not terribly strong for fact checking often because there are some individual differences in peoples thinking, personalities, and circumstances. On average, Democrats and liberals are equally receptive to information that supports or contradicts their ideology. But Republicans or conservatives are more eager to accept corrections if it’s in line with their attitudes. This effect is probably driven by the media and political elites. Best practices encourage fact checking to be clear, either say something’s true or false, not putting it on kind of a spectrum of true defaults. The more people know about the media in general, the better. So the more they know about fact checking in general or science in general, the more supportive they usually are of it. But knowledge alone is not enough to keep the public informed. That’s where we need these kind of meta analyses to examine the whys. Finally, the best thing we can do is have people watch multiple sources of news. Instead of just watching one news channel or reading one newspaper, the best thing is to just cast a very wide net because you’re going to run into misinformation. That’s not as problematic as long as you’re getting the right kind of information as well.

Correcting Misinformation

To start examinging how to correct misinformation in the media to maximize citizenship behaviors, let’s look at a meta analysis. Meta-analysis takes the results from not one, not two, but as many as possible peer reviewed articles and looks at them all together in one big picture. That way you’re not just getting the results from one study, but it’s a summary of many studies, all in one pretty paper. Meta-analyses are great because the way that they combine all this information at once makes them convenient. But it’s also quite convenient for answering more advanced scientific questions. For example, with one study, you might see, under these various specific circumstances, Thing A causes Thing B. But with a meta analysis, we can look at more than just those specific circumstances. So for example, there are some techniques that are successful, but one study might not give you the whole picture. (cite)

Historically, misinformation is not a new thing. For example, in the time of World War II, a quarter of our population believed some kind of wartime rumors that just weren’t true. For 25% of the population to believe something that’s not true is pretty bad. Let’s jump up to 2014 where a study found that half of Americans had at least one conspiracy theory, an easily proven false conspiracy theory, that they did believe in. So we certainly need to find a way to dispel misinformation, but there are different ways we can do that. A meta analysis can help us figure out if people believe in something that’s not true, what is going to be the best way to debias them or to help them understand that the previous information was wrong.

One method is to give them the real information in a myth versus fact format. In this case, they see something a poster or a video that shares a commonly believed myth and the contradictory factual information. There are some good points to doing it this way. You’re making the audience directly compare the fact and myth. The trouble that we run into though is that people are not always very rational creatures and sometimes they accidentally remember the myth instead of the fact, especially after a large delay.

The second thing we ask ourselves is about coherence because sometimes just giving people the facts isn’t enough. Sometimes we have to provide an alternative explanation that help them make sense of myths.

References

Frenkel, S. (May 19, 2021). Mob violence against Palestinians in Israel is fueled by groups on WhatsApp. The New York Times.

McGinley, L. (June 28, 2021). Juul agrees to pay North Carolina $40 million to settle vaping accusations. The Washington Post.