This book is about Media Studies.
To clarify terms, at the outset, Media Studies is a subject in schools that leads to qualifications. It develops media literacy and is part of the broader project of media education.
Itâs written for teachers, students, academics, librarians, journalists and researchers with an interest in Media Studies or concerns about fake news or both.
It explains how Media Studies can help us with our anxieties about fake news and misinformation.
But itâs also for parents, politicians, policymakers and everyone else who wants to think seriously about the role of media in our society and the role of education in response to the ever-changing media landscape.
For all its intended audiences, the book makes an argument for the teaching of Media Studies in schools and it makes a new case for changing the status of the subject for students from optional to compulsory.
Centralized gatekeepers, human fact checkers and algorithmic verification can only do so much to combat the spread of false information. In the end, for us to truly combat disinformation in the digital world, we need to teach the public how to think critically about information and where it comes from. (Leetaru 2019: 2)
Seriously. We need to talk about Media Studies.
A paradox has emerged, and we need to face up to it. In educational, political, media and policy discourse, concerns about Fake News and misinformation are widespread. A plethora of events, conferences, articles, documentaries, initiatives, policies, projects, toolkits and online resources pose the questionâwhat can we do about this pressing societal challenge before it becomes a crisis, if it hasnât already, with the potential to be as threatening to our democracies as climate change is to our environment? But the answer is right there, right now, in most of our schools, but only for the minority of young people who choose Media Studies as an option. For a number of reasons, all of the influential stakeholders in young peopleâs education are ignoring it or looking for answers elsewhere.
By Media Studies, I am referring to the optional subject currently only taken by a minority of students in UK schools.
I am arguing that it should be compulsory.
But that doesnât mean the current Media Studies curriculum, exactly as it is, in the form of the specifications Media teachers are forced to use, in order to get them through the exam. Lots of the ideas, teaching strategies and resources I draw on in this book wouldnât directly map to the GCSE and A Level qualifications as they are currently. I am referring to the school subject, as framed by the key learning areas published as its subject content (DfE 2016).
Again, to be clear, media literacy refers to the goal and desired learning outcomes of Media Studies. Media literacy features prominently here because I draw on international perspectives, and outside of the United Kingdom, media literacy is used rather than Media Studies. I also refer to examples from Media Studies in universities. Again, this is because those ways of working inform the subject in schools, just as the school history curriculum responds to the work of historians in higher education. To re-state then, the book draws together viewpoints and examples from a wide community to support, and exemplify, the argument that teaching Media Studies to all young people in schools is the best response to the problem of fake news.
A decade ago, I was interviewed on the Radio 4 Today Programme about this old debateâthe academic credibility of Media Studies. The conversation commenced with the command to Defend Your Discipline!!. I did pretty well, I think, but the same argument kept coming back at me: the presenter relentlessly comparing the kinds of learning I was giving as examples with more important aspects of Maths and Physics and, of course, the works of Shakespeare. This book wonât spend any more time than this on those arguments. Itâs not going to be defensive, responding to either the BBC class snobbery nor the Physics v Media Studies economic binary (for a detailed deconstruction of the latter, see Cramp and McDougall 2018). That work has been done and the framing of the derisionâbound up in ideas about academic substance, a self-preserving media establishment and resistance to bringing popular culture and digital/social media into schoolsâis well rehearsed by now.
Instead of wasting time on the haters, then, this book will go back to the energy generated by the Manifesto for Media Education (CEMP 2011) which the research centre I lead crowd-sourced at the start of the decade, around the same time as my grilling on Today. It will make the case that we need to prepare all young people to engage as positive citizens in our society in the era of fake news and misinformation. Media Studies is already doing this work, but only for the minority who choose it:
My Year 13s this year have been exploring the role that the media play in shaping the identity of minority groups. Case studies that have been explored include; the negative representation of Muslims in light of the ISIS moral panic, how transgender people have utilised new media to develop more pluralistic identities, and how governments reinforce heterosexual ideologies through manipulative representation. Students have used theorists and concepts like Baudrillardâs post-modernism and Butlerâs Gender Trouble to further examine these case studies. Within this module, we have delved into sociology, cultural studies, politics, psychology, philosophy, history and more. Try telling these students that Media Studies is a âdoss optionâ. (Gardiner 2018: 7)
The 2011 manifesto was an open access collection of prominent media educatorsâ visions for Media Studies, in the same spirit as this book but with a broader scope. A discourse analysis of the outcomes of that project arrives at four dominant themesâthe central role of the media in the continuing transformation of societies and the need for a philosophical dimension in Media Studies; the importance of media education for the critique of power and of technology; the individualâs role in developing creative thinking and making and the need for teachers to embrace participative pedagogies so that learning design includes problem-solving, experiential learning, collaborative learning, scenarios, simulations, models and interdisciplinary learning. Given we asked for manifesto-type contributions, many of them were ambitious and at the end of the decade, weâd be stretched to claim the discipline had warranted the claim for it to be a disruptive catalyst transporting learning into the third millennium, if weâre honest.
The hypothesis at hand for this new manifesto is this. Fake news and misinformation may be old wine in new bottles or a brand new problem, an inevitable symptom of imploding capitalism and austerity politics or an in-built destabilising strategy as foreseen by William Rees-Mogg at the end of the last century who âpredicted that digital technology would make the world hugely more competitive, unequal and unstable. Societies would splinter. Taxes would be evaded. Governments would gradually wither away. Welfare states would simply become unfinanceable. In such a harsh world, only the most talented, self-reliant, technologically adept person, the âsovereign individualâ would survive.â (Beckett 2018: 32). But, however we analyse the moral panic over fake news, it exists and has the nervous attention of the media, politicians and educators (see Shafer 2016).
Enter Media Studies.
Or rather, the teaching workforce are already there, trained and doing the job. The curriculum is âon the shelfâ, with accredited examinations and a route to higher education. The exams taken in schools donât currently focus on fake news, so this is not a textbook or a teacherâs guide for those current specifications. But the broader Media Studies subject knowledge set out by the Department for Education does require an overarching critical understanding of media in society. The argument this book is making is that a more media literate citizenry, a population who has received a Media Studies education at school, will already be more resilient to fake news or misinformation. And if this campaign, this new manifesto were successfulâmeaning that every young person studied the media in schools, as a mandatory citizen entitlement, complying with UNESCOâs declaration that, âAs access to information and participation are core principles of todayâs society, MIL (Media and Information Literacy) must be regarded as an enabler of human rightsâ (2016: 6), then we would have large cohorts of media undergraduates ready and waiting to develop into teachers to do the work.
Itâs a no brainer.
Methodology
The argument is presented as a set of recommendations from research, specifically the validation of this hypothesisâthat Media Studies is the best weapon to arm young people with resilience in the fight against Fake Newsâthrough an ethnography of Media Studies and journalism in 2018â2019. This ethnography is conducted through three workshops and a set of interviews with media teachers, journalists, some people who are in both categories and some intersection stakeholders, such as librarians and historians. The interviews took approximately 45 minutes and were held in a variety of locationsâclassrooms, offices, coffee shops, pubs, conference rooms, through Skype/Hangout, by email; one participant made a film, another a blog post in response to the questions.
In each case, the interviews were semi-structured, but circulating around the core line of enquiryâtell me how Media Studies can help with this problem of Fake News. After each interview, participants sent me an example, to write about and analyse, as part...