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Wednesday 16 May 2018

The Medium Is (Not) the Message: Political Indoctrination Through Media Literacy Initiatives

Ed Hannan
INSURGE Intelligence

When misrepresenting recent events and exaggerating external threats have become standard practice, are we aware of the influence that bias in mainstream media has on young people?

 

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Anyone paying attention to popular culture trends in the West often disregard the messages that aim to shape political opinions of young people, whether this is through Hollywood or the gaming industry, TV shows or music. If the children that we know personally tend to have good mental health and carry a sufficient sense of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, then we’ll generally regard this messaging as innocuous. We would reserve more careful judgement for when these messages might influence vulnerable young people. But the problem with this is it has made us much less vigilant.

New efforts ostensibly intended to inform young people of the dangers of fake news and misinformation are increasing in line with collective Western attempts to contain Russia and China’s growing influence. However well-intentioned they are, even a cursory look at these efforts reveals they are promoting confirmation bias: their content ranges from mild propagandistic messaging to full-blown jingoistic deception. They have made it easy for critics to anticipate a process that will look subjectively instructional rather than objectively educational.

The BBC launched their iReporter game earlier this month. On March 15th it was received positively while news of the initiative spread online. We were told it aims to educate young people on “the dangers of Fake News” and predictably the mainstream reports welcomed this without any scepticism, and without a definition of what fake news actually is:
indy100.com: “Which sources should you trust? How quickly should you break the story with limited facts? And how are you going to do all this and keep your editor happy?”
belfasttelegraph.co.uk: “…led by the broadcaster called School Report, which also offers workshops and events featuring BBC journalists, including Huw Edwards.”
gizmodo.co.uk: “…designed for kids and their teachers, in an effort to show how to recognise which sources can be trusted and which ones are complete nonsense.”
huffingtonpost.co.za: “Fake news has become a problem over which both governments and social media companies have had to step in and take action.”
I have asked in a previous piece — which examines the meme of fake news — that if the dangers of misinformation are so great as to warrant legislation which can threaten our freedom of speech and right to privacy, then should not every article that sets out to inform us about misinformation do that task more rigorously?

As outlined in the mainstream’s stenography journalism, the game is part of larger initiative called the BBC School Report national programme to help 11–18 year olds identify fake news; and, they claim, to develop “critical thinking and media literacy skills” in young people. BBC cited A National Literacy Trust report which details (deep breath): the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy’s launch of the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools. Their claim is that one in five children believe everything they read online is true.

And so primary and secondary school teachers will be entrusted with leading new initiatives because they are described as “ideally placed” to help children develop the skills they need. I’d suggest that parents should hope the teachers will be open to refining their own critical literacy skills in the process. The director of the trust, Jonathan Douglas, had this to say:
“In this digital age, children who can’t question and determine the reliability of the information they find online will be hamstrung — at school, at work and in life […] By bringing together the greatest minds and authorities on fake news and education, the new parliamentary commission gives us a fantastic opportunity to make the case for critical literacy to sit at the heart of our education system.”
This is a very serious matter, so much that the greatest minds and authorities on fake news must be enlisted to help the children. I can’t argue with the case for critical literacy to sit at the heart of an education system, but how might one determine who the greatest minds and authorities on fake news are? I’d suspect it would be those who propagate the notion that fake news is a profound threat to our Western democracies. In which case we can rest assured that the children will indeed be guided by those with authority — how great their minds are, though, would remain to be seen.

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