Defending democracy with fluency in finding fact amid all the fiction

As soon as I saw the report out of Massachusetts I forwarded it to my editor with a note, “This is consistent with all the research across the continent.”

The report, titled Media Literacy in Massachusetts: a landscape scan and policy recommendations, focused on assessing opportunities for media literacy education in schools. It had been delivered to my inbox from the Media Education Lab, a collective think tank composed of media literacy scholars from across North America.

I’ve been meeting with these folks for over a year now, and as I dig deeper into the research around media literacy, education, democracy and their inter-relatedness, there are a few themes that emerge omnipresent in the literature.

The first of these themes is the growing urgency and importance placed on the need for media literacy skills. We are facing a rising tide of misinformation from virtually all sides. As our lives move increasingly online, more and more of the messages and images that we encounter are those that have been curated for us by an algorithm. Our interests and attention are guided through a series of funnels we don’t truly have control over. We can lose track of the truth and scale of importance of issues when the algorithms make us believe everyone is focused on a set collection of topics.

We’re hard-wired to gather information, and to use that information to strengthen ourselves and our communities. But what happens when that information has been created specifically to fracture the ties that bind?

The future we’re facing is one that, in no small way, threatens democracy and threatens to silence the voices and stories that ground us in our identities and shared experiences. This is where it becomes obvious that democracy, media literacy and freedom of the press are inextricably co-dependent on one another.

All media is created for a purpose, and increasingly that purpose is to divide us in the pursuit of profit.

The problem isn’t that we’re getting information from a variety of sources, but that these sources are tailored for reaction. Because these algorithmically chosen suggestions are built with a goal of engagement, not enlightenment, they leave us wanting more while delivering little, and they’re extremely effective at limiting and redefining public opinion.

It takes some savvy to know how to make the machine work for us. The goal of media literacy is to ensure each of us have the skills to engage with media as a tool, not a master.

Unfortunately, the other most common theme from research is that we lack any agreed-upon definition of what media literacy is. We seem to all select “fact checking” as an essential component, but beyond that, things get less clear. We speak a lot of approaching media with suspicion, but that’s not sufficient, nor helpful, in a lot of contexts either, because suspicion predisposes us to a biased negative viewpoint of media instead of approaching with strategic curiosity and critical thinking.

This gulf between “we all think media literacy is extremely important” and “we don’t totally know what it is” is one that the Free Press is working to bridge through the media literacy project but also through our daily work reporting the stories that matter to Manitobans. Without a baseline of factual, faithful information to work from, what hope can we citizens have at discerning truth at all?

We can feel extremely fortunate here in Manitoba, that we have a source for news that is entirely locally owned, staffed and operated. The people gathering and telling stories, exploring who we are and what we care about are the same ones whose children attend school here, stand with us in the checkout line, trudge through the squeaky snow of the current cold snap in Sorels and garbage mitts.

Our continued effort to define and strengthen media literacy in Manitoba is in defence of democracy and in defence of our unique identity in this place. And it’s working. We’ve been visiting schools over the last few months, working with teachers, administrators and students to strengthen the ways in which independent journalism and school-based media creation can work together to ground the next generation in truth and security.

One very young journalist perhaps summed up her learning best when choosing a headline for her school paper. Mulling over the options, she pointed to one possibility, then said, “Not that one, that’s clickbait. We don’t do that here.”

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