Media Literacy for Political Cognition in Higher Education

Civic education has long been a goal of liberal education, and many institutions are renewing their commitment to meaningful civic engagement as both a philosophical and educational goal of higher education. Civic engagement and media literacy are essential to fostering democracy. This chapter outlines the shared ideological and pedagogical approaches to civic and political engagement and its connection to media literacy education. The 2016 election cycle has presented a number of challenges for civic engagement and media literacy educators. Many of the core values and beliefs related to critical thinking and information literacy have been challenged.

The Biased Truth

Consumers of news should expect to consume reports, which are an accurate and unbiased reflection of local, national, and world events. However, due to limitations that affect the packaging and presentation of many news stories today, consumers may not be experiencing a true reflection of those issues. This exploratory study examined three genres of news for objectivity and bias in the reporting of news stores: local news, national news, and satire news. The study found that although local news reporters attempt to report news stories with an objective narrative, it is often the news story's subject that impedes the process of objectivity. National and satire news programs also lose their objectivity based on the narrative presented by the hosts of the program.

Building Media Literacy in Higher Education

Through detailed discussion and review of the work done in media literacy in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, including curricular alignment, engaged scholarship, and a media literacy certificate, this chapter shares how faculty, students, and community partners work together to bring media literacy theory and practice to action. The Department of Communication places a high value on media literacy across its programs and curricula and this chapter describes the department's carefully structured approach to media literacy.

Communication and Media

The field of communication is large and varied. There are different types and levels of communication. Mass communication allows for mass media: books, newspapers, magazines, recorded sound/music, film, radio, television, video games, and the internet. Scholars have identified a handful of common functions of the media. The chief function of media is that of entertainment – providing diversion. Though it varies from country to country, people are spending much more time with the media than at any time in history, often spending more time with media than sleeping. This chapter discusses a number of concepts and terms related to contemporary mass media: globalization, digitalization, convergence, consolidation, fragmentation, personalization, and (hyper) commercialization.

Movement Intellectuals in Popular Music

Institutions of higher education continue to face the pressing values of neoliberalism. As such, colleges and universities seek to produce human capital. Critical media literacy offers one means of education to challenge neoliberal assumptions. However, current research lacks a conceptual understanding of how musical artists can serve as critical pedagogues through their music. The current chapter seeks to understand the role of movement intellectuals in popular music among educators. More specifically, this chapter proposes the following definition of a movement intellectual in popular music: an artist who observes, collects and disseminates warranted counter-narratives through the medium of their music. Ultimately, through exploring germinal and contemporary literature, this chapter attempts to offer a language for talking about critical music literacy as a means to challenge nihilism within the environment of a neoliberal higher education.

Real-Life and Virtual News Sources Can Be Flat-Out Wrong

Eyewitnesses play a very important role in news coverage. Yet, scholarly research on eyewitness misidentification and memory distortion is virtually absent in scholarly work in journalism and related academic fields. This chapter emphasizes the need for such a research agenda by analyzing the amount of mistakes student journalists made in a news report they wrote during a 20-minute classroom exercise. Each of the stories about a staged bar fight, except for one, contained pieces of misinformation because the students often blindly trusted eyewitnesses and messages on social media accounts. The results indicated that there is a need for more advanced information and media literacy modules in journalism curricula to avoid inaccurate information from eyewitnesses to be disseminated to the public.

Teaching Media Literacy From a Cultural Studies Perspective

This chapter outlines an approach to teaching media literacy from the perspective of cultural studies. It argues that this perspective is especially well-equipped to meet the challenges and demands of media literacy in the twenty-first century, and as such would be of use to scholars in multiple disciplines. Briefly, the course examines the various ways that media shape public culture by analyzing histories of propaganda, public relations, and news framing. In addition, students consider the role of social media in their lives through a focus on the variety of ways in which media shape messages. The chapter describes the logic of the course, key readings, and primary assignments geared toward synthesis of media concepts, democracy, and culture.

Media Literacy Facilitation as Service Learning and Public Engagement

This chapter offers insights from a 15-year partnership between a public university and local K-12 schools to explore how the facilitation of media literacy education (MLE) programs by university students can offer rewarding outcomes for both research and learning. The MLE program that serves as the case study for this chapter takes place at local elementary schools each spring in conjunction with an undergraduate communication course and includes interactive media analysis discussions as well as a culminating creative production activity. Reflections and written feedback from participating graduate, undergraduate, and elementary students emphasize the strengths of this pedagogical model for collaboration and learning while also acknowledging the practical constraints of such a partnership. By detailing the institutional-level support, instructional design, and practical implementation of this MLE program, the chapter enumerates the benefits and challenges of engaged research and service learning for advancing media literacy goals.

Preparing to Be Digital

Today most media messages are shaped by and circulate within the multi-faceted, always available, participatory communication space called the digital environment. This participatory, de-centralized space indicates a paradigm shift in media and communication, and therefore in the culture at large. In the new paradigm, comprehensive media ecology-infused media literacy is necessary not only in the disciplines of communication and media studies, but across higher education. One media department at a U.S. urban university is beginning to implement a comprehensive five-part model of activist media literacy education as it transitions from traditional media industry training to deeper media literacy-informed education. The five-part model engages core concepts from media ecology, critical cultural studies, and critical pedagogy, with a final goal of educating enlightened media practitioners interested in seeking social change. In the emerging media environment, messages, forms, and new ways of thinking and being ought to be the mandate of twenty-first century higher education.

An Introduction to Media Literacy

In today's information society, the media have important functions in the formation of certain perceptions by regulating the social lives of individuals. This occurs through messages that come in different formats (verbally, audibly, visually etc.) from the media. It is through the media literacy that enables reading messages from the media and interpreting them critically. The aim of this chapter is to provide some theoretical perspectives on media literacy. In this context, media literacy has been explained in detail. For this, primarily the differences between reading-writing and literacy are revealed. Besides conceptual media literacy, its necessity and some examples of practices in the world related to its education are mentioned. The chapter also addresses the basic paradigms in media literacy.