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Lately, I’ve been struggling with the glut of information, news, and media I’m interacting with on a daily basis. It often seems difficult to filter through all of the big issues and questions, as well as the local things that matter to me and my community. And I know I’m not alone in this! 

As a major election nears, our media landscape can shift dramatically. Information starts running wild, trying to pull us in specific directions. It takes time to understand what is news, fact, opinion, or even artificially generated content. The ads, articles, and posts are designed to catch our attention. We are all doing our best to take in information, think critically, and keep up with the world around us. but things have gotten a little bit messy out there.

In the United States, October 21-25 is the 10th annual National Media Literacy Week, making it a good time to reintroduce the concept of media literacy. We know the importance of staying informed, and we’ve heard about the dangers of misinformation. Whether or not you regularly assess sources and credibility, think you’d never fall for misinformation, or think you don’t interact with media enough for this to matter, this is still a great time to think about how we get and share information.

Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using any form of electronic, digital, or print visuals and messaging. Think of it as an extension of traditional literacy. As we learned as kids to look at symbols to learn how to read, we now want to be able to look at media and learn what to do with it. You might get your news from a print newspaper, the newsfeed on your phone, Facebook, or even a meme someone sends you. Here, we’re mostly looking at media literacy in relation to understanding the news. 

All media has a specific perspective, context, and purpose. You can see this by looking at different news outlets and noticing that they present different stories on the same day. Or even when the same story is presented, there are often different angles on the same issue. To a certain extent, we all have to give our power of interpretation to news outlets, journalists, or favorite content creators, since we don’t have enough time or resources to use all of the primary source material. It’s important to have a baseline understanding of the substance and significance of their viewpoints.

The other side of this coin is that we are all active participants in consuming media and need to make sense of the world around us. One example is to think about how no two people experience the same movie or TV show the same way, and how advertisers are always targeting a specific audience. Your tastes, judgments, and values help you interpret messages in a specific and potentially unique way. Others are making sense of things in their own ways as well. 

With media literacy, we can think through not only the constructed nature of media with its viewpoints and goals but also our different interpretations. Asking questions about what we experience helps prepare us to evaluate messages and ultimately decide what to trust. Media literacy also teaches us to look beyond our immediate reactions to things. Because the news moves so rapidly, it can be really easy to rely on information that already makes perfect sense to us and fits into how we believe the world is (or should be). 

It can also be easy to cast aside any information that doesn’t immediately fit with our point of view. Loren Collins writes in Bullspotting: Finding Facts in the Age of Misinformation:

“We favor information from people or sources we like. We distrust information that’s inconsistent with our personal biases and beliefs. We accept information when it supports a conclusion we like, and we deny it when it supports the opposite. 

Using such shortcuts is not necessarily wrong. Indeed, it’s often necessary, given the sheer volume of information we’re confronted with each day. One can hardly be expected to research and validate every new piece of information encountered; life would be a perpetual series of mundane research projects on insignificant subjects.”

Media literacy helps us navigate ways to engage and reflect that leave room for greater exploration. Yes, we need to have go-to trusted resources that we can rely on, but as we start thinking about viewpoints--our own and the media’s--we start building respect for different opinions. We can then engage in meaningful reflection with different people or news sources, even as we disagree on certain things.

Overall, media literacy helps us understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility to create and share information that is meaningful, fact-based, and just plain helpful. Media literacy asks us to prioritize curious, open-minded, and self-reflective inquiry while emphasizing reason, logic, and evidence. 

It is never too late to cultivate this skill. There’s no magic potion; there are hardly even right answers. What there should be is a determination to keep a healthy level of curiosity toward what you’re learning and experiencing. In another blog post, we discuss some of our favorite tools you can use to help you navigate all the information out there. To keep learning about media literacy, check out the sources below:

• National Association for Media Literacy Education 
  The creators of Media Literacy Week, this nonprofit was founded in 1997. It works to empower people to interact with information, with resources for educators and individuals. It’s a great place to get started learning the basics.
• News Literacy Project
  Another nonprofit, this group focuses on how we can incorporate news literacy into high school education to create critical thinkers. Check out their “rumor guard”’ tool for helping guard against misinformation in breaking news, or follow them on social media for really great fact-checking tips and tricks.
• Center for Media Literacy
  This is the oldest organization (1989) dedicated to media literacy education.