by Aimee Edmondson, AJHA President

Four months after Joe Biden took the oath of office and moved into the White House, one quarter of all American adults believed Donald Trump was the “true president” in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May 2021.

In fact, Biden won by more than seven million votes, and U.S. courts have rejected Trump’s challenges to the 2020 presidential election results in at least 60 different lawsuits as baseless conspiracy theories continue to permeate the media ecosystem.

Similarly, about a third of Americans believed that it is “definitely” or “probably” true that “powerful people” intentionally planned the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a June 2020 Pew Research Center Survey.

Given the urgent need for an informed citizenry in a functioning democracy, media literacy topped the list of AJHA officers’ goals in 2020-2021 under the leadership of Donna Lampkin Stephens. To continue these efforts, I ask our members to continue to help combat the flood of misinformation and revisionist history narratives that remain all too common.

Media Literacy Week is Oct. 25-29, and there’s lots we can do as journalism educators and media historians in our continued search for truth in this fractured environment where people don’t — or can’t — even agree on basic facts.

Please check out the fantastic resources provided by the sponsor of this effort, the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), a nonprofit organization whose members are as motivated as we are about helping people become more critical thinkers and understand how to evaluate news sources.

Here’s a list of events co-hosted by NAMLE, all for free, next week (I’m particularly interested in the Amanda Knox session as well as the session on mis- and dis-information relating to algorithms via social media). You can also join NAMLE for free, with access to newsletters, new resources, curriculum ideas, along with opportunities to attend or present at the organization’s biennial conference as well as connect with other members.

In addition, here’s a cool set of classroom ideas and events for post-secondary educators with examples of what some faculty members and universities are planning for Media Literacy Week. We know that media literacy is most vital for K-12 students as educational attainment can have a huge impact on one’s critical thinking skills.

And as Donna mentioned during the AJHA’s conference earlier this month, we as AJHA members can get out into our own communities to talk about media history and media literacy. We can speak to our local Rotary Club or at our neighborhood elementary school. After all, it should be as cool for third graders to meet a real journalist as it is to meet a real firefighter! (Career day, anyone?)

We face a continued crisis in funding of local journalism and the polarization of voters who have scattered to digital media echo chambers on the left and the right. As such, we must provide the historical context to show the importance of verified information and the role of journalists to provide an accurate view of critical issues facing our communities and our country.

In case you missed it, the AJHA has already worked closely with the good folks at NAMLE:

NAMLE executive director Michelle Lipkin (@ciullalipkin) spoke at the 2020 AJHA virtual conference on the panel on media literacy and inspired us to get involved in the effort.

Our own AJHA members have also become members of NAMLE, including Nathaniel Frederick II of Winthrop University, who attended his first NAMLE conference way back in 2013 where he met educators, academics, activists, and students with a similar passion for understanding media messages and the role of media in our culture. He began incorporating critical media literacy into his own courses and even held a series of sessions at Winthrop entitled “News Literacy and the Future of Journalism.” The series included eleven events over eight months that sought to deepen the public’s knowledge and appreciation of the vital connections among democracy, the humanities, journalism, and an informed citizenry. Topics included the history of fake news, editorial cartoons, investigative journalism, and the future of journalism. In his Intelligencer column published in April 2021, Frederick encouraged the AJHA membership to take advantage of our new-found emphasis on virtual conferencing to Zoom in media literacy experts into our own classes and campus programming.

The Intelligencer has also hosted guest commentary from Kristy Roschke, an expert in media literacy. She is the managing director of the News Co/Lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and serves on the NAMLE board. In her column, “Why teach students about media literacy – and how,” Roschke gives the AJHA membership tangible ideas for incorporating such information in courses in media history, reporting, introductory mass communication, and media law, for starters.

I’m eager to hear your ideas as we continue the conversation about media literacy and media history.