Tag: media literacy

Media Literacy and the Obesity Crisis

On February 13, 2018

Many schools have already implemented Media Literacy classes to help young adults sift through what’s real, what’s semi-real, and what’s totally false in their newsfeeds and Snap stories. From politics to “adult entertainment,” these media literacy classes attempt to equip students with the tools they need to discern the information they should base their decisions on.

One surprising area? Food advertisements. In the US, children suffering from obesity go on to develop lifelong problems, including diabetes, joint pain, cardiovascular diseases, and more. Some blame the problem on the lack of accessibility of healthful foods for both geographical and fiscal reasons. Others blame poor nutritional education, both on the parents’ part and the children’s part. The advertising industry has also taken some of the flack for marketing the salty, oily snacks to kids and using devious tactics to make the snacks seem better than they are.

Advertising dangerous activities to children has been taken very seriously for some time. In the 1990s, the cartoon camel used to advertise Camel Cigarettes came under fire as children began looking forward to the cartoon and associating the camel, and thus smoking, with fun. The company chose to settle a lawsuit alleging its complicity in convincing children to smoke and pulled the cartoon ad altogether.

Some nations have taken some more drastic measures to stop the promotion of harmful substances and snacks to kids. In 2016, eight nations declared that no advertisements for junk food could be aimed at children, and Chile took an especially drastic approach by outlawing the beloved mascots Tony the Tiger, among others, that make junk food appealing to kids.

In the US, though, such sweeping policies aren’t likely to catch on, so educators are taking a different approach — media literacy for food advertisements. That way, young people are more aware of the marketing tactics, half-truths, and imagery that snack companies use to convince them to purchase junk over healthful options.

Virginia Tech rolled out a program designed to help people practice looking at snack ads with a critical eye to point out what information they’re omitting and the other ways their desires for the foods are being manipulated. For example, ads often suggest that a person can become more popular or attractive if they purchase and consume the snack in the ad. The program asks users to create “counter ads” to sugar drinks by drafting alternative taglines that offer more truth than the original.

While widespread inclusion of food literacy may take some time, but it could save lots of money down the road in healthcare costs once today’s youth become adults.

Fake News and Honest Mistakes are entirely different things

By Brecke Boyd

On January 10, 2018

In Brecke Boyd, Media Literacy

Now that 2017 is over, pundits and analysts alike have looked back on a year of “fake news” allegations and the way the public evaluates the veracity of various online stories and reports. In fact, many have named “fake news” as one of the phrases of the year for its use (and arguably over-use) in the public arena over the past twelve months. While the term “fake news” originated to describe false information intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive readers, it’s taken on a life of its own. Nowadays, the term has so many common uses that it has ceased to mean much of anything at all.

Most recently, the term has been applied to reports or stories that contain honest mistakes or unintentional factual inaccuracies. Journalists have made mistakes and broken stories without fully vetting their sources, fact-checking their information thoroughly, or simply not editing closely enough. Politicians and sympathizers have long accused each other of manipulating the truth and telling only one side of a story, but any time a reporter makes an honest mistake, all mayhem breaks loose.

There’s an important distinction between fake news and a mistake in reporting, but both bolster the same point — Americans want to be able to trust their journalists and news sources, and both of these issues have seriously damaged reader’s trust in news media sources.

As I’ve written about before, the original intention of the phrase “fake news” was to describe malicious sources that knowingly spread wholly false information with the sole purpose of deceit, particularly bots that attempted to sway voters during the 2016 US Presidential Election. Those sources take pride in misleading readers and make it their mission to convince visitors to change their behavior based on the fallacious reporting.

Unlike intentional fake news, though, legitimate news sources do what they can to make amends if they realize they made a mistake and publicized incorrect, fraudulent, incomplete, or mis-written information. Knowing the responsibility they have to the public, news sources enforce high penalties for reporters who fail to adhere to the highest levels of journalistic integrity in reporting stories, live-tweeting events, interpreting data, and smearing someone’s good name. A number of times throughout this past year, reporters have had to resign because their failure to thoroughly vet their sources.

Mistakes happen by people with the best and purest intentions, and as the news-consuming public, it’s hard for us to forgive and move on when we feel deceived or mislead. However, we need to be able to discern between mistakes by our present journalistic media that works to uphold responsible reporting, over malintent snake oil salesmen who purposely create fake news.

What do we do with Oral Histories?

By Brecke Boyd

On September 21, 2017

In Media Literacy

On the popular question and answer forum Quora, one user asked, “Is there any time fake new is a good thing?” Naturally, many Americans’ knee-jerk reaction is “absolutely not.” In the US, we highly value the verifiable and documented truth, and as such, we hold our journalists to extremely high standards, both legally and societally. When we discover that a journalist has been spreading false information, they face both the courts of law and a public crucifixion of their reputations. However, if we zoom out a little, the issue is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as we would say it is today.

For long stretches of human existence, “history” was not the cold hard science and exercise in forensic archivism that it is today. Rather, history was passed down orally from elders to younger generations as a means of building a unified cultural identity. Consider the famous Greek tragedies, The Iliad and the Odyssey. Today, we regard these works as highly fictionalized accounts of battles that probably did take place in real life — although, not with the intervention of petty deities. At the time, though, the purpose of the stories was not to provide a factual portrayal of what happened — instead, these tales taught morals and religion.

Countless cultures practiced the passing of oral history. Throughout the entire continents of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, indigenous people used oral histories infused with the supernatural to pass on creation stories, societal values, and explanations for natural phenomena and royal succession.

Fast forward to the Enlightenment Era in Western Europe. The development of the Scientific Method required scientists to test theories and ideas ruthlessly by collecting evidence, drawing on past research, and applying the most critical lens possible to the issue at hand. Naturally, this fundamental shift in what it meant to test a theory and declare something “true” was not confined to the hard sciences. Soft sciences like sociology, politics, and economics also adopted the perspective and required hard proof to determine what’s accurate.

History was soon caught up in this fit of proof and evidence, too. Governments, educational institutions, religious institutions, and laypeople alike all began record keeping on unprecedented levels. To this day, the British government maintains logs detailing every moment of their time as colonizers and the exact amount of damage they inflicted. The majority of society has benefited from relying more heavily on evidence — we have better medicines, more accurate predictions, and highly advanced technology as a result. However, all this innovation left oral histories in an uncomfortable spot.

Oral history now inhabits a peculiar crevice in academia. We can’t teach oral histories as “facts” because they are completely unprovable. However, discounting them totally means that the history of Africa, parts of Asia, and the Americas gets omitted from textbooks and instead are relegated to “myth and folklore” courses. History purists and activists who tout more inclusionary agedas clash often about what to do with these histories and where they do or don’t belong.

Ancient oral histories are different from today’s fake news epidemics in many ways, most notably in the latter’s intent to malevolently deceive. But still, both terms refer to the intentional dissemination of semi- or wholly false information with the end goal of shifting the culture. So to the original question of whether “fake news” can ever be a good thing, the answer has more to do with what we call “fake news” and the purpose of the information.

Back to School Media Literacy

By Brecke Boyd

On August 29, 2017

In Brecke Boyd, Media Literacy

Brecke Latham Boyd Back-to-school Media Literacy It’s getting to be back-to-school time again. In addition to all the frantic shopping that parents are doing to prepare their kids for a fresh school year, parents also spend these last precious days and weeks mentally and emotionally preparing their students for the realities of the social scene. From bullies to the “popular kids” to respecting teachers and law enforcement officers, there’s a lot of precarious navigating that young people have to do in between — and often during — learning time.

This year, though, it’s more important than ever for parents to equip their kids with the tools to wade into the political thickets, social media swamps, and rumor weeds and come out the other side educated and unscathed. With the modern state of politics, the ubiquity of social media, and the crashing waves of information and data that enter people’s purview hourly, young people need some sound advice and a strong moral compass for determining who to trust and where to go for the facts. Here’s some ways you can equip your child for the upcoming school year emotionally and mentally.

Ask For Sources | Rumors get started because nobody fact-checks information, and stories get exaggerated at every retelling. As you prep your child for the realities of returning to their 8-3 schedules, encourage your child to pause and consider how they can verify what they’ve just heard. Can they Google the claim? Can they ask the subject of the story? Even in a classroom, it’s well within the etiquette of respectful discourse for your child to ask a teacher where a claim about a historical fact or statistic came from.

Find Out What Others are Saying | Critics all across the political spectrum have been accused of “cherry picking” their news sources and academic studies such that they cite only those that bolster their viewpoints and omit those that prove detrimental to their agenda. Teachers aren’t immune from this, and neither are kids at the mercy of rumor mills. If your child happens upon a claim that seems a little too good to be true or a story to which there may be multiple sides, urge your child to explore what dissenters are saying. Where is their information coming from? What are some of the underlying assumptions on any side of an argument?

Don’t Repeat Unchecked Info | As I’ve talked about lots and lots of times before, social media has exacerbated the issues of people spreading unverified information. Claims, accusations, and “discoveries” will cross your child’s consciousness all day long. In insular communities like school buildings, students determine their social standing by when word of a rumor hits their ears, and as such, it’s tantalizing for students to spread both current events or juicy personal details as soon as they hear it. Get your student in the journalistic mindset of seeking out truth and professionally-researched opinions before they report on it to their friends and Twitter followers.

Teens & Media Literacy

By Brecke Boyd

On May 31, 2017

In Brecke Boyd, Media Literacy

Among those most vulnerable to falling for the pandemic of false information are young people in middle school and high school who don’t have the real-world experience yet to discern factual reporting from sensationalized nonsense. Some schools have begun to include classes in news and media literacy to help students think critically about bias, narrative, and “end goal” for the viewer, and it seems to be helping to create a stronger generation of media consumers, but we need more, and we need it now.

Buzzfeed recently polled school-aged students on their sensitivity to sensationalized news to get a sense of where we are now and what work still needs to be done. The same way that most people would classify themselves as good drivers, most young people classify themselves as adept at identifying lies on the internet. Buzzfeed partnered with the social media app After School whose target audience is exclusively grade school students. In all, 39,000 students completed the survey. In its analysis, Buzzfeed admits that its poll likely does not meet the standards of scientific rigor, since any student with the app could submit answers and there’s no way to determine the authenticity of the answers, but the responses are still worth noting.

According to the poll, a little over 80% of teens believe themselves to be very good at identifying falsities when they cross their newsfeeds. As Stanford has noted, though, many teens are not as good as they think they are, especially when it comes to determining the source of a claim. About 65% of students said that, when they spot bad intelligence online, they choose to ignore it, while around 30% said they call it out.

Among those teens who had never encountered the term “fake news,” a little over 65% still believed that the news publishes and promotes factually inaccurate stories. Surprisingly, though, only about half of those who identified as unfamiliar with the term believed that they could identify an example of fake news.

The author of the Buzzfeed piece noted that these results are unfortunate but not shocking at all. As per a 2016 poll conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, about three out of four adults had trouble spotting a fake news story when it came across their screens. In addition, the pollsters asked respondents to identify which of five headlines they’d seen come across their radars, and many said that they had seen headlines that had indeed been completely made up by the pollsters.

As the summer approaches, parents and children can embark on missions to combat fake news together. Dinnertime discussions about what’s going on in the news can help families consolidate all the news each member has individually consumed and check it against what other members have read. Many libraries also offer summer sessions on news literacy and discussion groups that may help all family members learn about avoiding the lure of click bait.