What's Ahead for News Literacy

An all-out assault for media illiteracy must commence in New Jersey, and Steve Chiger may be the man to help lead the charge.

Chiger, English and journalism teacher at North Star Academy Charter School of Newark, is the president of the Garden State Scholastic Press Association, which aids New Jersey’s high school newspaper advisers. Journalism teachers work on the front lines of media education. Chiger figures this is as likely a place as any for the effort to grow.

Chiger and I agree that the push for media literacy in our schools will probably not come from the state. “I’ve never gotten the sense as a teacher that it’s a priority,” he said.

New Jersey has a comprehensive media literacy standard in its Language Arts/Literacy curriculum. Rutgers’ own Dr. Robert Kubey led the effort to include Standard 3.5: “All students will access, view, evaluate, and respond to print, nonprint, and electronic texts and resources.”

The standard includes three sections: Constructing Meaning from Media; Visual and Verbal Messages; and Living with Media. By the time we finish with our high school students, they should understand that messages are a representation of social reality, and that they vary by historic time periods and parts of the world. Students should also be able to identify and evaluate how a media product expresses the values of the culture that produced it. They should be able to analyze messages for stereotyping; they should be able to compare and contrast three or more media sources.

Under Living with Media, they should be able to use media texts to explore human relationships, new ideas and aspects of culture, for example racial prejudice, dating, marriage, family and social institutions. They should be able to figure out what political, historical, economic and social influences are affecting the media; lastly, students should be able to recognize that those who create media messages use different forms, techniques and technologies to convey their messages.

These standards cover many of the same angles that Howard Schneider is addressing with his “News Literacy” course at Stony Brook. But the state gives teachers very little in the way of actual tools for getting the job done.

In fact, under each of the sections of Standard 3.5, the state offers the same three suggested activities: a project in which students search the web for information about attaining their goals, then write an essay; a Web search for key figures in the Transcendental Literary Movement in the United States; and a Web search for material related to Milton’s “Paradise Lost” or Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” The students then write “a report on current opinion of the work.”

These three suggestions are not exactly what Schneider would recommend when students study “news literacy.” The activities are connected to media literacy in that the students must judge their source material. But we need something much more specific, much more comprehensive. Right now, it’s up to teachers to search for materials. It’s like character education. “Is anyone making you do it? No. And a lot of teachers are not media literate themselves,” Chiger said.

The way Chiger sees it, poetry is media literacy under the current standards. Another concern: the standards don’t mention whether media literacy is about fiction or nonfiction or both, he said.

So how will media literacy – training kids to be able to judge what's good media and what's bad – become a priority? “I think it will come grassroots,” he said. “Some schools will figure it out and it will spread.”

Journalism class is the best fit for the movement to take root. The first challenge is to get schools to recognize the importance of a journalism curriculum, as his school did. He is now building his school's first journalism program. The second, Chiger said, is for journalism teachers to rethink what they’re doing. Many journalism classes concern themselves mainly with production of the newspaper. They should also consider teaching news literacy, he said.

The material is a natural fit – the study of the First Amendment; press freedom, or the lack of it, around the world; journalistic hoaxes and how they occur; deconstruction of news stories to study investigative techniques; credibility of sources; analysis of Wikipedia and whether it’s a good journalistic source; comparing the same story as it’s reported by different media outlets.

Chiger does all of this in his journalism classes, although the class meets only three times a week. He needs more time. And we could all use more resources. That’s where Chiger and the Garden State Scholastic Press Association would like to make a difference. The group has already produced lesson plans on a variety of topics for its members, which are offered at its spring adviser’s conferences. “Longterm, I would love it if we got into the business of producing curriculum support or curriculum materials,” he said.

For now, we'll all keep building programs in our own classrooms, helping students to think like journalists, because that's what they need to do now. Instead of a chosen few gatekeepers collecting our information and feeding it to us, we now must go out and get it ourselves. Every student is a budding journalist, and there's "no way they could be good reporters without media literacy,” Chiger said.

We can also take advantage of excellent curriculum materials that I happened upon at these sites: the Media Education Lab at Temple University; the Center for Media Literacy; and the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University, which offers a gateway to scores of other sites.

‘Rebooting the News’

Howard Schneider was the editor of Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, for decades before he retired from journalism, planning to pursue all of those pleasurable endeavors that he’d forsaken to be a news hound. But his hiatus was a short one.

Schneider is now the dean of the brand new Stony Brook University School of Journalism and he has created a new form of study that I believe is the most valuable form of media literacy. It’s called “news literacy.”

Schneider himself coined the name of this new genre, which he described at a conference two weeks ago. It is “the ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports,” he said.

Schneider was a featured speaker at “Rebooting the News: Reconsidering an Agenda for American Civic Education.” The conference on Oct. 23-25 in Philadelphia was sponsored by Temple University’s Media Education Lab. It was billed as “a strategic convening for journalists, teachers, educational administrators, public-policy researchers and engaged citizens.” The question to be answered at the conference was this: “How can we best help young people engage with news media in ways that help them understand and contribute to contemporary society?”

I believe Schneider has found the answer, which he is in the process of perfecting at Stony Brook, he told the conference. I was able to attend through the generous posting of his session on the Internet.

This journalist is passionate about his new vocation. He came to it in a roundabout way while teaching his first course at Stony Brook. There, he said, he discovered that his students, who by the way, were not journalism majors, fell into three groups. A third of them tended to believe everything they saw and read. A third didn’t believe anything, didn’t trust the press, believing it was motivated by profits and greed.

The final third of the class was simply baffled and confused. They would ask if Michael Moore is a journalist; if Bill O’Reilly is a reporter; if they could rely on YouTube for their news, he said.

He immediately began planning a course that would help them sort it all out.
“The mission of training the journalists of the future is crucial and we’ll do it,” he told the group, but, “the mission has to be not only training journalists, but news consumers too. That mission, to me is as important, if not more important, than training journalists.”

News is the currency of citizenship, he said. The ultimate goal, then, is to give students tools and analytical training to tell “what information is reliable enough for you to make a conclusion, to make a judgment…” In other words, can they use the information to make a decision or would that be a mistake? “I cannot imagine any citizen of the Information Age not being equipped with this skill,” he said.

Schneider said his experience gives him the skill to know good journalism, although he can’t pretend to know what will happen to the industry as its new financial model gets ironed out.

“No matter what the business model … we’re going to need an audience, an audience that can distinguish between quality journalism, journalism that really makes a difference, that they can trust, and journalism that’s junk,” he said.

Schneider starts the course by teaching students to recognize what neighborhood they’re in while consuming their media. If they find “verification, independence and accountability” by the author, they are in the journalism neighborhood, he explained.

The course points up both good and bad journalism. Students learn to distinguish news from opinion and solid opinion writing from junk. They learn the opinion neighborhood landmarks, he said.

They also learn the definition of journalistic truth – that truth is provisional, that it changes over time. This means the news consumer can never stop digging for the follow-up story. “You must follow the story over time. You must stay with the story over time,” he said.

Schneider’s course should be required of all students, probably starting in the early elementary grades. Our goal as journalism teachers should be to develop elementary and high school-level courses that do what Schneider has laid out so well on the college level.
It seems media literacy is growing up, splitting into genres. To me, it’s a great development.

Election holds a wealth of media ed lessons

This week flew by as students at my school held meet-and-greets near their lockers and rallies in the halls, raised money for TV commercials and registered to vote. It was just like a real campaign, complete with student candidates who stood in for McCain, Obama, Nader and the Libertarian Bob Barr.

In the end, Republican John McCain won the election in a squeaker, taking 98 votes to Democrat Obama’s 96 votes. The students learned a lot about the ins and outs of a political campaign and we teachers had a blast leading them through it all.

We had designed our program on my own experience in covering campaigns as a news reporter. We had ballots, registration cards, campaign finance reports, Common Cause and 527 groups. Our candidates, all volunteers from the senior class, ended their three-week campaigns with a debate before the entire student body. They were nothing short of fabulous.

Now that it’s over, I thought about how we’d designed the effort from scratch. Maybe we didn’t have to do that. I went out on the web to see if I could find some materials that could help other teachers to avoid re-inventing the wheel. I found plenty of election materials designed with media literacy in mind. Some other items turned up as well that could also aid us in our media lit efforts.

Before getting into the election it might be useful to see where your students stand on the media literacy continuum. Are they savvy news consumers? Ask them to take the media literacy quiz at PBS Teachers Web site.

Next, engage them in a lesson entitled Critical Media Literacy: Commercial Advertising. It asks students to watch TV and to write down every commercial they watch: what product is describes, the length of each commercial and the number of advertising minutes in a three-hour watching period.

They may now be ready to jump into politics, where the lesson materials are terrific.

At pbs.org, the Independent Lens provides educational materials, lesson plans and worksheets for teachers and students. Among the best offerings is “Please Vote For Me” – what a wonderful little video this is. In 10 minutes, the creator takes us through the campaigns of three 8-year-olds in China who want to be elected as the classroom monitor. This is the first democratic election that anyone can remember in the school and the three tiny candidates don’t disappoint. One of them is a budding dictator, another learns through her tears to be tough on the campaign trail. In the end, students viewers get a great lesson on the ins and outs of political races.

At Cable in the Classroom, teachers, parents and students receive instruction on how to be media-smart, which the site’s authors say is “a 21st Century skill because it provides a framework and method to think critically about the media you consume and create.”

This site offers a nifty learning experience called “eLECTIONS: Your Adventure in Politics.” It’s a three-dimensional multimedia game made in partnership with CNN Student News, C-SPAN and the History channel. You choose a political party and five positions on key issues. You then spin for your turn and move along a board that looks somewhat like “The Game of Life.” It’s pretty cool. You’re rewarded for good choices, penalized for straying from your positions on the issues.

My next discovery was “Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civil Engagement,” developed by Media Education Lab at Temple University, where Dr. Renee Hobbs resides. Rutgers’ own media literacy scholar Dr. Robert Kubey, in our interview last week, described Hobbs as one of the two best curriculum designers in the country.

The Media Education Lab designed “Access, Analyze, Act” for pbs.org. These excellent lessons start with students setting up their own political blogs. They later take a quiz that helps them to determine their “political personality. They are either skeptics, explorers, activists or spectators. My own students took the quiz and really enjoyed comparing notes and deciding whether they agreed with the results. The lessons are in three different sections, eventually taking students through an examination of their own Congress members’ campaigns and positions. These lessons really are well written. Teachers will love them.

A great way to round out the work on elections is to use “A Free and Open Press: Evaluating the Media.” To start, you’ll need a connection in the news media who could give you an hour's worth of wire service stories (or you could take them from the Web yourself). Students play editor by choosing and ordering the stories. Which ones will they choose to report, and how will they make those decisions?

In these ways, students begin to think critically about the media messages we consume each day, whether through political campaigns or through product placement in their favorite TV shows. There's never been a better time to be a teacher, I'm convinced.

Why Americans are not media literate

I think I'll augment my use of the label “media literacy” to describe the field of media education. I thought about it after talking with Robert Kubey, Rutgers professor and director of The Center for Media Studies. Kubey is the editor of “Media Literacy in the Information Age: Current Perspectives.” The field now seems to be so much more than those two words suggest.

Kubey’s book is a collection of the best writing on what he calls “an extremely broad and unfocused area” of academia. He used to teach a course on the subject at Rutgers but no longer does. The best way to study it, he recommends, is by immersing yourself in the literature and in attending conferences where the best minds in the field are gathering.

Kubey explained that the phrase “media literacy” has lost its sparkle in the field. “It doesn’t really have good cache – it sounds babyish,” he said. Instead, scholars around the world are using terms like media analysis, media and politics and media symbolism.

He also points out that the United States has some catching up to do in media education.

“Australians are the best,” he said. “I’ve published how far behind the Americans are. They ‘re teaching kids semiotics (in Australia). It’s based on symbolic images. There are meanings attached to things like glasses and you go out from there.”

In his collection of essays, Kubey includes “Media and Arts Education: A Global View from Australia.” It’s written by Peter Greenaway, a world-renowned media education scholar who endorses the teaching of popular culture. He and others refer to American pop culture as the “Coca Cola Culture.”

The rest of the world is way ahead of Americans in media education because the rest of the world has been forced to grapple with the saturation of the “Coca Cola Culture” in their own countries. They have begun looking at ways to equip their students with tools to identify popular culture texts and their influences. We Americans, meanwhile, have very little exposure to outside cultural texts, so we’re not concerned about their effects. And we're not critical of our own cultural texts.

“Australians have been subjected to enormous amounts of information about America, whereas Americans’ exposure to Australian culture is in comparison miniscule,” Greenaway writes. He quotes another scholar, Patricia Mellemcomp, who says, “The most profitable export, the biggest industry, of the U.S. is representation.”

Kubey points to two approaches in media education. One is the protectionist approach, in which we seek to keep kids away from what we perceive as harmful media. The other is the cultural studies approach, where we teach them how to interpret meanings and effects of media texts.

“If you’re worried they’re being bamboozled by political ads, that’s not protectionist,” Kubey said. “You’re trying to teach them how to ask the critical questions – what’s left out, what isn’t said, what’s the motivation … all of that is critical in a message, in advertising …”

Kubey’s book offers some concrete starting points for the teaching of media and popular culture. Two other Austrialians, Robyn Quin and Barrie McMahon, offer a framework in their essay, "Living with the Tiger: Media Curriculum Issues for the Future." The purpose of media literacy education is to give kids an informed and critical understanding of the media, its techniques and impact," they write.

Some important discoveries that I took from their work:
• I must keep in mind that their media are a source of pleasure for kids. The last thing we want to do is denegrate their media choices.
• Data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is certainly not wisdom, Quin and McMahon write. These are all distinct points on a continuum. The information explosion showers us with data, but we're getting very little wisdom. Kids need tools to move along the continuum.
• Kids are not passive recipients of media texts. They, as audience members, are active in the construction of the message's meaning. In other words, we all bring our own knowledge, prejudices and resistance to the construction of a message. Part of the teacher's job is to make students aware that their attitudes and positions help to construct the meaning of a message, and that we could all derive different meaning from the same message.

The most important discovery for me is the realization that I must change my teaching style. I must guide my students. They must make these discoveries on their own, with my help. With further research, I'll be ready to begin writing my lesson plans.

Teaching media literacy with politics

Teachers of media literacy have a great tool in the presidential campaign if they want to engage kids in the study of media symbols. The cases of “Joe the Plumber” and ‘60s radical William Ayers seem tailor-made to help kids smarten up about their media.

First, Joe the Plumber. His five minutes of fame commenced with last Wednesday’s presidential debate. Republican John McCain used Joe to hammer Democrat opponent Barack Obama. McCain asserted Joe would be harmed by Obama’s tax plan, since the plumber told Obama in a campaign video clip that he’d be making $250,000 a year in his business. Obama’s plan would force a tax hike on Joe, McCain said, and even Obama admitted the same in the clip.

The New York Times did some fact checking on Joe.
Seems he’s not quite a plumber (claims to be an apprentice, but no record at the union hall). His formal name is not Joe, but Samuel J. Wurzelbacher. He owes back taxes. One more thing: the business he wants to buy may be worth $250,000, but his income would not be nearly that high. Instead of a tax hike, he’s likely, at least in the first years of business ownership, to get a tax break under Obama’s plan.

Take another McCain attack ad, the one that accuses Obama of palling around with 1960's violent radical William Ayers, formerly of the Weather Underground. FactCheck.org did an investigation of the McCain commercial laying out the Ayers-Obama connection and called the ad “largely untrue.”

In case you think I’m picking on the Republicans, FactCheck.org will set you straight in their book, “unSpun.” Peddlers of disinformation sit on both sides of the political aisle and their cases are spelled out in this great book, described by its authors as a handbook on how to recognize and avoid deception, not just in politics but in commercial advertising and life in general.

Like the cases of Joe the Plumber and William Ayers, “UnSpun” is a great resource for teachers who are just starting their exploration of media literacy. In it, the authors, Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, give us a list of “tricks” that advertisers and politicians use to deceive us. You can recognize these tricks in many of the ads and campaign messages that bombard us each day. The authors have attached clever names to the tricks that make them easier for kids to wrap their brains around. For instance, there’s the “Name It and Claim It” trick. Here, the deceiver renames the product to conceal some aspect of it that would otherwise turn us off.

I recently read the “unSpun” book with my high school sophomores. After learning the list of tricks to look for in their media use, they broke into groups to produce an ad (poster) for an imaginary product that uses one of the tricks. The only requirement was that the product be in a bottle.

Two students, Mike and Alex, were assigned the “Name It and Claim It” trick. They decided to rework maple syrup, this time calling their product Maple Nectar. They saw the word ‘syrup’ as a negative. It’s sticky, you can’t avoid getting it on your hands. But the word ‘nectar’ brought visions of gods bestowing a magical drink upon us all.

Lesson plans are easy to conjure with the “unSpun” book. If you try the poster project, you won’t be disappointed. In fact, "unSpun" helps us to fit media literacy into what researchers say it should now be. Since television and mass media have become so ingrained in our culture we should no longer view media education as providing "protection" against unwanted messages, according to Elizabeth Thoman in "Skills & Strategies for Media Education" at the Center for Media Literature. The goal should be "to help people become competent, critical and literate in all forms so that they control the interpretation of what they see and hear, rather than letting the interpretation control them."

Is all this media exposure harming our kids?

A glowing television set is an irresistible force in any room. We simply cannot ignore it. We know this and we live with it.

Case in point: I visited the local bar a few weeks ago to celebrate a friend's birthday. We talked and laughed about recent exploits among our group of close friends. And every once in a while, I found myself drawn to one of the five little screens that hung above us. There was a TV set everywhere I turned.

When my eyes went to the TV, I seemed to enter a trance, even if for only five seconds. The chat was lost for a few moments. Then I pulled myself back to the party. This continued as long as I sat within view of a TV.

"Television Addiction is No Mere Metaphor," according to a 2002 study of the same name by Rutgers University Professor Robert Kubey and colleague Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We already know from EEG studies that our brains are less stimulated during TV viewing than they are when we read a book, the authors note.

But those feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue after we pull away from the set. And the sense of relaxation we experienced as we watched? It ends quickly after the set is turned off. The authors made their findings by following test subjects, using their "Experience Sampling Method." The subjects were beeped at random intervals, prompting them to write down their TV habits and the feelings they were experiencing.

The study found that after TV, the viewer's mood is about the same or worse than before. Symptoms during and after heavy TV viewing are about the same as if the viewer were addicted to drugs, the study found.

But how do these findings apply to computers and the Internet?
Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi say the same principles often apply, and it's all about what they call our "orienting response." An infant near a TV will crane its head to see a glowing TV, they point out. It's the primitive fight-or-flight mechanism at work, a.k.a., the orienting response. The baby becomes quiet and alert to what could be danger. And this is what’s happening to us adults and kids with every video we watch and every computer game we play. Our orienting response is being hit again and again.

The authors point to work of Annie Lang at Indiana University. She found that the typical music video activates the orienting response continuously. And if you put too many scene changes and jumps within a scene in any visual media, you overwork the orienting response. Then we fail to retain any of what we saw, she found.

Other studies provide both good and bad news on the effects of Internet use. The good news: the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA found in a 2004 study that the typical Internet user is “an avid reader of books” and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user. It also found that TV viewing is down by as much as five hours a week by Internet users, compared to those who don’t use the Internet.

The disturbing news: in their survey of Internet users in 14 countries, they found that most Internet users generally trust the information they find online. More than half of Internet users surveyed said "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and credible. The South Koreans are the most trusting and the Swedes are the biggest skeptics, the study found.

But are we really learning less with all of this reading and viewing, than we were before the Internet? Maryanne Wolfe, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,” has an ominous view, as outlined in “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” by Nicholas Carr in the July/August issue of Atlantic Monthly.

When we read online, Wolfe says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information” because it’s coming at us so quickly and there’s so much information to absorb. And our ability to interpret text and make “rich mental connections” isn’t used when we merely decode, she says.

Or does all of this trouble lie in the misuse of our "orienting response"? When kids play video games for too long, for instance, they report feeling tired, dizzy and nauseous. Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi point to a 1997 incident in Japan, where 700 children were rushed to the hospital after they began suffering epileptic seizures brought on by a Pokemon video game on TV. If we could train our minds to shut off our fight-or flight response, maybe we'd rise above mere decoding. For now, we must arm our students with the tools to judge the information that they are absorbing. It's a start.

View from the front lines of media literacy

Journalism teacher Noreen Connolly recalls the day she got her “wake-up call,” as she put it, to begin teaching media literacy.
One of her students, a member of her high school newspaper staff at St. Benedict Prep in Newark, approached her with what he thought was a great story.
“It was all about 9/11 conspiracy theories. It was bazaar, what I thought was phony logic,” she remembered. “The building fell this way, therefore there had to have been a bomb inside the building. He didn’t even name his sources.
“We looked at various websites. One was a bazaar looking site in Denmark. I asked, how can you judge this as a legitimate source? He couldn’t answer,” she said.
Connolly started in earnest to build media literacy into her already crowded curriculum. Her basic credo?
“The news doesn’t just appear. Someone finds it and writes it and decides if it goes on the page,” she said. That lesson is built into everything she does.
Of course, her biggest challenge, and mine, is to get students to be inquisitive about world events and politics. We can’t help them to be critical about their media when they’re not interested in them the first place.
“Basically, they want to look at sports, games, sneakers, fashion or girls,” Connolly said.
Connolly’s school doesn’t have a formal curriculum for media literacy. Neither does mine. She’s in a private school in an urban setting, I’m in a public school in the surburbs. We follow our respective curricula. In public schools, media literacy shows up in the Core Curriculum Content Standards as a brief list of proficiencies appropriate for language arts, history or health class. Click on the Scope and Sequence prompt for more material and there’s not much there. Each clickable spot under “Grade 9-12” gives me a description of an assignment about Thoreau. I teach journalism. It seems I’m on my own to develop a good, solid program that teaches kids how to be critical media consumers.
There’s plenty of material on the Internet. Rutgers has a list of sites, having turned its own media literacy project into a gateway to get to others that are producing great material. For teachers, the best material includes research and lesson plans.
I was surprised to see that one of the best sites for teachers, the Media Education Lab at Temple University, is listed incorrectly on the Rutgers site.
Click on “Media Education Lab and you’re taken to a site called reneehobbs.com. Dr. Renee Hobbs is, indeed, the Temple professor and director of the Media Education Lab. The site you’ve been sent to, though, is apparently her personal site. Teachers beware. The correct address for the Media Education Lab is http://www.mediaeducationlab.com/.
Hobbs has done groundbreaking research in media literacy. Her biography lists her as a founding board director of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA). She wrote a scholarly article called, “Seven Great Debates in the Media Literacy Movement -- Circa 2001,” which outlined our challenges. It seems the experts can’t even agree on a way to proceed.
According to Hobbs and other writers on the subject, these experts often gather to set their agenda, then the conference degenerates into debates that rarely move beyond a statement of each side’s positions.
Hobbs’ list of the seven great debates hit on questions that Connolly and I face every day. Should media education aim to protect students from the evils of the mass media? As she points out, we do it at our peril, since kids hate the idea that they’re helpless victims of the media and need to be protected.
Should we teach media production as a part of literacy? Some educators argue that we’re just teaching kids how to imitate Hollywood with all of those bells and whistles, and not how to be critical media consumers.
Should we include political goals in our media lit instruction? For example, should we set goals to clean up commercial TV, or to boost public television?
Should we teach media literacy as a subject of its own, or add it to existing curricula? And should TV networks and newspapers finance our media literacy efforts, or do they have a conflict of interest?
Whatever we decide, we better do it quickly. Our students are in news vacuums, with little interest in entering the world of political discourse.
“I could care less if Palin is too inexperienced to be effective,” one of my students wrote for a blogging assignment. “It does not impact me personally. If a new foreign trade policy is started. . . that doesn't help me. If there is a crack down on illegal immigration. . .that doesn't help me. Even if by some miracle a politician can get gas prices to go down. . . I can't drive so that doesn't impact me!
“… Politics are pointless to everyone unless you are named Barack Obama or John McCain,” he wrote.
We’ve got work to do.