Sifting through the Media

Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole by Charlie Warzel
New York Times, February 18, 2021

The Librarian War Against QAnon by Barbara Fister
The Atlantic, February 18, 2021

New approaches and ways of thinking about media literacy offer some hope for students developing what may be a democracy-preserving skillset. Counter-intuitively, the method espoused by scholars Michael Caulfield and Sam Wineburg cautions practitioners to "stop overthinking what you see online" and instead see "our attention [as] a scarce commodity that is to be spent wisely." Caulfield's model, the SIFT approach, gives students a methodology that better reflects the nature of news consumption and production online. Writing in The Atlantic, Project Information Literacy's Barbara Fister issues a similar call for an approach to information literacy that includes "an understanding of information systems: the architectures, infrastructures, and fundamental belief systems that shape our information environment, including the fact that these systems are social, influenced by the biases and assumptions of the humans who create and use them." Among the many reasons that media literacy is often under-taught is the fear of partisanship, but these theorists note that these approaches, by focusing on how information is produced and spread, avoid some of the pitfalls of more partisan approaches; Warzel notes that "[t]he goal isn't to make political judgments or to talk students out of a particular point of view, but to try to get them to understand the context of a source of information and make decisions about its credibility." Fister encourages teachers to emphasize "democracy" rather than filtering curriculum through a partisan lens: "this means being willing to take a strong stand on behalf of ethical research practices, the voices of qualified experts, and the value of information systems that judiciously vet and validate information, along with a willingness to clearly reject the notion that truth is simply a matter of political allegiance or personal choice." Fister offers other helpful framing advice, including connecting media literacy to broader ethical concerns, tapping into others' expertise, and building off of students' own generational grasp of social media.