EDITORIAL Media literacy is a skill that should be taught in schools
The world was hardly a simple place in 1969, but it was a whole lot less complicated back then to be a consumer of news and information.
If you lived in or near a big city, you probably had a morning or afternoon newspaper that reliably landed on your doorstep. Local radio stations probably had reporters at crime scenes or city hall, and a couple of the television stations in town had news crews that offered half-hour updates three times a day. For national news on television, the United States could turn to Walter Cronkite on CBS, and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on NBC (ABC wasn’t much of a player when it came to news at that point).
The newspaper you read was staffed by reporters doing their best to get it right. And Cronkite was, according to at least one poll, “the most trusted man in America.”
Now, close to one-fifth of the way through the 21st century, things are much more tangled. The evening news has lost its supremacy, newspapers have experienced well-publicized struggles and most radio stations outside the noncommercial ambit have pretty much dropped news coverage. What was once a well-ordered, carefully tended garden is now a jungle that can be tough to hack through. While we now have the advantage of being able to access the best news outlets in the world at a mouse click, we also can be suckered into believing bunkum peddled by cyber snake-oil salesmen. Studies have shown that young people in particular can have a tough time distinguishing between legitimate online news outlets and sites that peddle falsehoods and propaganda.
That’s why media literacy needs to be part of the curriculum in our schools.
A handful of states have enacted legislation that require schools to offer some kind of instruction on media literacy. Pennsylvania is not yet one of them, though a bill was introduced in February 2017 by state Rep. Timothy Briggs, a Democrat from the Philadelphia area, that would have added media literacy to the social sciences curriculum for K-12 students in the commonwealth. In a memorandum, Briggs noted that media literacy courses were being developed on college campuses, but would be much more effective in primary and secondary schools.
In the last two years, the need for such coursework has hardly decreased. Advocates for media literacy courses say they would assist young people in developing critical thinking skills and understanding how the media helps shape our society and culture. Such courses would also show them how to recognize misinformation and bias.
Washington is one of the states that has put a media literacy curriculum in place, and Hans Zieger, a Republican lawmaker there, told the Associated Press, “I don’t think it’s a partisan issue to appreciate the importance of good information and the teaching of tools for navigating the information environment. There is such a thing as an objective source versus other kinds of sources, and that’s an appropriate thing for schools to be teaching.”
What the media landscape will look like 10, 20 or 30 years from today is anyone’s guess. If we want to help them preserve and strengthen our democracy, giving young people the tools to know what is real news and what is fake is one of the most important gifts we could give them.