As promised in the December 2020 edition of the Intelligencer, your AJHA officers, along with some of our members, have collaborated to start an online repository of resources for our members to use as we work to address issues of media literacy.

The operative word is “start” — we envision this as a living list of tools that can be added to and tweaked as we all work to address the flood of misinformation and revisionist history that seems to be growing daily.

As we wrote in the Intelligencer, “With the crisis in funding local journalism and the increasing polarization of information, we can 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 nation.”

As you can see, our list includes readings, websites, a list of media literacy programs and courses, assignment ideas and the PowerPoint that Michelle Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, presented at our virtual conference in 2020. We are grateful that she has graciously allowed us to include it in our resource list.

Now that we’ve gotten a start, we ask for your feedback and seek your additions to our toolkit. People need to know — or be reminded — that it has always been the journalist’s duty to hold our elected leaders accountable. Our democracy depends on it.

Readings

Amy Callahan. Media Literacy Isn’t Coming to Save Us (But We Can Make It Better). Education Week, January 23, 2019.

Stephanie Craft, Adam Maksl, and Seth Ashley. Measuring News Media Literacy: How Knowledge and Motivations Combine to Create News-Literate Teens. MoSpace.

Tanner Higginbotham. News Literacy Resources for Classrooms.  Common Sense Education. January 12, 2021.

Laura Spilsbury. Studies Show Lack of Media Literacy in Students Has Negative Impact. The Daily Universe, February 9, 2018.

Amy Yee. To Recognize Misinformation in Media, Teach a Generation While It ’s Young. New York Times, October 23, 2020.

Websites

Center for Media Literacy
Center for News Literacy, Stony Brook University School of Journalism
Media Bias Chart
Media Education Lab
Media Literacy Articles & Websites
Media Literacy Now
Media Literacy Week
National Association for Media Literacy (Member Portal)
News and Media Literacy Resource Center
News Leaders Association
News Literacy Project
Poynter
The Center for News Excellence & Engagement

Media Literacy Programs

Universities with Courses in News or Media Literacy (Center for News Excellence and Engagement)

Ithaca College Media Literacy Minor

Descriptions of classes such as:

• Introduction to Mass Media
• Introduction to Media Aesthetics and Analysis
• Introduction to Media Industries
• Media literacy and the Psychology of Inquiry
  

Arizona State University

Free Media Literacy Course
Media Literacy BA

Brooklyn College Media Studies and Media Literacy

A growing movement among media scholars and practitioners, and educators and community leaders, to cultivate, teach, and demonstrate to people of all ages a critical understanding of the way communication media operate as processes, industries, technologies, and messages.

SUNY Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

The flood of fake news, propaganda, rumors, and advertising that often masquerade as news has made it harder than ever to separate fact from fiction. News Literacy can help students of all ages recognize the differences between fact and rumor, news and advertising, news and opinion, and bias and fairness.

Monroe Community College in New York COM 120 Media Literacy

An introduction to the critical consumption of media. This course will focus on the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate the process of creating and interpreting media in a variety of forms.

Course Learning Outcomes

• Identify the signs and symbols used as elements of a system of meaning in media messages.
• Access media in a variety of forms.
• Produce media in a variety of forms.
• Explain various ways in which a message is tailored to an audience.
• Analyze various ways in which audiences perceive messages.
• Evaluate the viewpoints embedded in, or omitted from, media messages.
• Evaluate the influence of media messages on society.
• Explain how media messages are a form of rhetoric
  

NAMLE’s AJHA PowerPoint Presentation (October 2020)

Assignments

Media Bias

For the next couple of weeks, keep up with the news across a variety of media, using the latest version of the Media Bias Chart, which rates media from left to right and from low to high quality.

For this assignment, choose a variety of media — from low to high quality and from most extreme left to hyper-partisan left, to skews left, to middle, to skews right, to hyper-partisan right, to most extreme right. You will follow those seven different media outlets for each day. Pay attention to how each outlet presents the news of the day. Did one bury a story? Trumpet it? Put a partisan spin on it? How did each cover the news?

You will present your findings in a paper that will be worth 100 points.

News Literacy: Should You Share It?

Take this news literacy quiz and report your results and your reactions. I took it from both the liberal and conservative perspectives and encourage you to do so as well.