News Literacy and Democracy

Seth Ashley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429863066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

News Literacy and Democracy invites readers to go beyond surface-level fact checking and to examine the structures, institutions, practices, and routines that comprise news media systems.

This introductory text underscores the importance of news literacy to democratic life and advances an argument that critical contexts regarding news media structures and institutions should be central to news literacy education. Under the larger umbrella of media literacy, a critical approach to news literacy seeks to examine the mediated construction of the social world and the processes and influences that allow some news messages to spread while others get left out. Drawing on research from a range of disciplines, including media studies, political economy, and social psychology, this book aims to inform and empower the citizens who rely on news media so they may more fully participate in democratic and civic life.

The book is an essential read for undergraduate students of journalism and news literacy and will be of interest to scholars teaching and studying media literacy, political economy, media sociology, and political psychology.

PART I Why News Literacy?

1What is News Literacy? Content and Context

DOI: 10.4324/9780429460227-2

“The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads” was the title Walter Lippmann gave to the introduction of his 1922 book, Public Opinion, about one of the central problems of democracy. A leading political journalist and media critic, Lippmann began the book by describing an island in the ocean and its inhabitants who, in 1914, received news of the outside world by way of a British mail steamer that came only once every 60 days. For more than six weeks, the Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans who lived there did not receive word of the fighting that had broken out in Europe, now known as World War I. “For six strange weeks, they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies,” Lippmann wrote. “There was a time for each man when he was still adjusted to an environment that no longer existed.”¹

How we get news and information and where it comes from are just as important as the news itself. Today, most of us don’t sit around waiting for the mail ship to arrive, but we still experience the same gaps between the world as we see it and the world as it really is. What we read or see on Facebook or CNN provides the “pictures in our heads,” but the perceptions generated for us by the powerful purveyors of our news environment don’t always match the world outside. Some things have certainly changed since Lippmann’s day. Knowing our environments is no longer a question of simply accruing information; instead, we are bombarded with it. The more significant interval has become the one between information and knowledge, between ideas and understanding. Lippmann’s century-old point about these gaps is as relevant as ever: “Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which we nevertheless live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.”² The connection news gives us to the world around us may be indirect, but the news we consume and share is central to shaping our perceptions of that world and of our place in it.

Democracy has always been a bit of a tenuous proposition, but I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say we now live at a crossroads for democratic life. Democracy is ultimately about citizen participation in the organization of society. We are governed by elected representatives, and because representative government requires an informed citizenry, we need news that gives us an accurate picture of our environment. But the morass of information out in the world today poses a real threat to our ability to govern our societies. As individuals, we now have more control than ever over what we see and hear, which is a good thing, but it also puts a lot of pressure on each of us to know what we’re doing. We each curate our own news consumption based on the seemingly limitless options provided in the digital era, and the picture of the world we end up seeing has enormous power to shape our perceptions of reality, which in turn shape our behavior and our attitudes. So the job of curating our own news consumption is an important one, and it’s become harder than ever. Where should we direct our limited attention? Whom should we trust and why? What should we believe? Why should we tune into news at all? Trying to find the good and avoid the bad is a daunting task. Faced with a sea of infinite “content,” many of us have just stopped trying, preferring to tune out altogether, while the rest of us often flounder in shallows. As author David Foster Wallace once wrote, “to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.”³

News literacy can be the help we need. While there is much to fix in our information environment, an easy place to start is with ourselves. We all need a holistic education in how and why news and information are produced and consumed, and we need it now. Not only are we forced to contend with the rise of so-called fake news and online hoaxes, but we face a host of arguably bigger problems. Journalism and press freedom are declining around the world, and authoritarianism is on the rise. Commercial media systems often put profits ahead of public service, and news is constrained by market forces. In the online environment, once heralded as the levelest of playing fields, power has been usurped by a small handful of monopolies that sell our personal lives for private profit and take advantage of our worst human tendencies toward tribalism and emotionalism. As a result, we fail to engage our critical reasoning skills, we retreat to the worlds we know and are most comfortable in, and we lose our capacity for empathy and compassion.

Calls for news literacy have surged in the 21st century. As misinformation swirls around the internet, news literacy is viewed by many as the antidote. Indeed, the ability to analyze news content is vital to getting accurate information and preserving democratic practices. But many people have tended to approach news literacy with a narrow web-based focus on hoax spotting and fact checking. These are vital skills, but equally and perhaps more important are the political, economic, historical, and cultural contexts in which news and information are produced and consumed. A critical, sociological approach—with an emphasis on the institutions and structures of news media systems—is essential for anyone who wants to develop meaningful news literacy. A narrow focus on news content cannot adequately address or explain patterns of news coverage, the influence of markets and audiences, the pressures created by algorithmic sorting, the monopoly power of digital giants, or the role of human cognition. A critical approach to news literacy seeks to examine the mediated construction of the social world and the processes and influences that allow some news messages to materialize and proliferate, while others fade from view or are omitted entirely. Drawing on research across a range of fields including sociology, psychology, political science, economics, and communication and media studies, this book presents a context-oriented approach to the critical analysis of the production and consumption of news and information. The ultimate goal is to inform and empower the citizens who rely on news media to participate effectively in democratic and civic life and to get more out of their own lives at the same time.

And the stakes could not be higher. A host of issues ranging from climate change and inequality to potential nuclear war and cyberterrorism to public health and human rights will only be addressed if we have accurate understandings of the realities we face. None of the important issues of the day will have a fair shot in a polluted and toxic information environment. So it’s hard to overstate the significance of the current moment. Will we take advantage of the amazing potential of the digital revolution to inform and enlighten ourselves and each other, or will we squander it through willful ignorance and mindless consumption? The silver lining in today’s dark clouds is the opportunity we have to examine and reshape our information environment and to make the improvements to ourselves and our societies that will help ensure a bright future.

Are We Really Living in a Post-Truth World?

In the United States, the idea that we are living in a “post-truth” society gained traction in the context of the 2016 presidential election, where many saw facts take a backseat to falsehoods. Around the world, swirls of misinformation online and in traditional news media made the idea so popular that Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the “word of the year” and defined it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”⁴ Indeed, the emotional parts of our brains can be far more powerful than the reasoning parts of our brains, and that’s nothing new. Our basic human tendencies to feel with our guts more than we think with our heads go back much further than the 21st century and are well documented in psychological research.⁵ Thousands of years ago, our survival as a species depended on our ability as individuals to trust our guts and stick with our tribes without taking time to carefully analyze the facts. Our primitive brains are wired for this behavior, and it would be naïve of us to think this has changed just because we have come to control our environment in other ways.

After “post-truth” became a word of the year, the late-night television host Stephen Colbert jokingly complained that it was just a rip-off of his term “truthiness,” which he coined in 2005 in the pilot episode of his satirical Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.” “Truthiness” also became a “word of the year,” defined as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” Colbert’s blowhard character (modeled largely after Fox News opinionator Bill O’Reilly) explained his disdain for fact-based reasoning: “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart … We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.” In this comedic context, Colbert noted that the rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not supported by evidence, but for many, it felt like the right thing to do.

It’s fun to joke about having a penchant for feelings over facts, but this silliness reflects the deep misgivings many people have about the information environment we face and the ease with which many people are being taken in by falsehoods. This tendency was evident surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election, where Americans were inundated with “fake news” and other misinformation—both homegrown and from foreign sources—but it doesn’t stop there. Fake news and misinformation also made the rounds surrounding the Brexit referendum campaign in Britain, which contributed to the chaos over Britain’s exit from the European Union. Fake news was invoked in Myanmar, where state officials flat out denied the existence of hundreds of thousands of members of the Rohingya minority. In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad wrote off the deaths of thousands of military prisoners as fake news. And the disinformation provided by Russian influence campaigns has been used against pro-Western forces in Eastern Europe for years.⁶

To be sure, misinformation abounds on the web, and the intention by some to use digital media in this way illustrates some of our darker human tendencies. It may seem that fake news poses an immediate threat that can be defused by teaching people to sort real from fake. That’s partly true, but fake news is only a symptom of larger problems with the news media environment, and to be truly news literate, we need to know more. In fact, some evidence suggests that although many people have been exposed to fake news, and many people have trouble telling that it’s fake, most people’s news consumption is actually broad enough that they are not heavily influenced by fake news.⁷

Our perceptions of reality are just as likely to be based on the traditional and alternative news sources we consume, which can range from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to Fox News and CNN to our local television news, NPR, the BBC, the Today Show, Yahoo! News, the Huffington Post, Vice, Breitbart, Buzzfeed, Vox, Town Hall, The Daily Beast, and so on. And “news” today can also be anything we see on social media, from Facebook and Twitter to Snapchat and Instagram. So while it’s tempting to view news literacy simply as the antidote to fake news, a narrow focus on fake news, hoaxes, and misinformation keeps us from gaining a broad understanding of the news media environment. Fake news may be a good place to start, but it’s just the visible tip of an enormous iceberg below the surface.

We are living in an age of misinformation, but it began at least 500 years ago. The invention of the printing press in the 1450s made it easier than ever to pass along fiction as fact. As Mark Twain once wrote about the printing press, “It found truth astir on earth and gave it wings; but untruth also was abroad, and it was supplied with a double pair of wings.”⁸ In 17th-century England, pamphlets were written and distributed for profit and power with little regard for fact or expertise. Information was hard to verify, and “news” about sea monsters and witches spread widely. The American founding fathers made up stories about the savage brutality of Native Americans to encourage support for revolution. False reports of slave uprisings stirred up racist sentiments and led to violence against African-Americans.⁹ And fake stories about Jewish rituals were part of the Nazi propaganda machine that led to the Holocaust.¹⁰

Humans didn’t need the internet for any of this. Journalists in 19th-century America routinely published fake interviews and sensationalized dull stories. On the radio, many 1938 listeners were duped by Orson Welles’ famous “War of the Worlds” broadcast about a fake alien invasion in New Jersey. Reports of panic and chaos were widespread, and the tale lives on as “fake news” legend. Actually, it’s more likely that the reports of panic and chaos were the actual “fake news,” exaggerated chiefly by newspapers that wanted to demonstrate their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Why News Literacy?
• Part II Critical Contexts for Democratic Life
• Part III The Future of News Literacy
• Index