Tuning Out the Noise: Rethinking Media Literacy in the Age of Distraction

The town of Dakhla, famous for kite surfing, is situated on a sandy windswept peninsula on the Southern coast of Western Sahara. On June 20th and 21st, about one hundred journalists from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Spain gathered there to attend the region’s first journalism conference organized by the Moroccan Press Council. I was fortunate to be among them to participate in a conversation about “The complementarity between quality journalism and media education.”

While listening to these journalists earnestly focus on the problem of disinformation or what is more popularly known as fake news, I have to admit that I bristled at the many calls for stronger media literacy in education. It’s an obvious answer but it isn’t the only one and fails to recognize that formal education alone can’t solve all of society’s ills. Also, it smacks of the third party effect, that we tend to think that other people are stupid and believe disinformation so it’s up to the school system to smarten them up.

Further, calls for more media literacy education miss the challenges we are currently facing in education. The news profession started to come up against massive changes to its ecosystem about two decades ago while education is just now facing a reckoning with AI. We struggle to get our students’ attention, which is why I’ve made the decision to ban laptops from my classrooms next year. (Wish me luck!)

Yet, even when many of us do find ways to add media literacy into our already packed courses, this only goes so far. This is mostly because it’s not just young people who need to learn how to consume solid news sources and shun the questionable ones, the media landscape has changed so quickly that everyone needs to be constantly updating these skills.

Who can reach a wider audience? The media. We can and should use our megaphones to educate the public about how they can consume better more reliable news sources.

So here goes: the most important question you can ask as you read and watch a piece of journalism, is “who paid for this?” Many publications aren’t transparent about who they are and how they are funded but reputable ones are. If you know that Xinhua is a news agency owned by the Chinese government, then you know that Xinhua will reliably tell you the Chinese government’s point of view. Besides news agencies, many governments fund international broadcasters in different languages and of course, in Europe, much of the legacy TV media is publicly funded. Depending on the country, this may mean that a given public media source is government mouthpiece or not.

There’s also corporate media, which is under the gun to sell advertising to fund the news. While this can be good: corporate media, like the New York Times, can fund a lot of coverage and investigative journalism. Something that independent media has a difficult time doing. But as corporate news organizations are part of bigger and bigger media conglomerates, they lose some of their independence.

Knowing who paid for a given news piece is just the start, but it’s a strong one. And if you can’t find that easily, then I’d recommend that you pass on that information. When it comes to opinion writers, you might want to see who they are and what qualifies them to write about a given subject. (Go ahead, Google me!) Another question is if a given journalist sharing sources of key figures or studies they are citing? News organizations and their journalists can best build trust with readers through transparency.

Yet, the only way to get as close as possible to the truth is to read a variety of media, ideally from different countries. This asks a lot of citizens, but this is what democracy demands. Yes, there are more web tools to help us do this. My own answer is to have about 25 news applications on my phone and scroll through the notifications throughout the day. This keeps me informed but also gives me a fascinating view of who covers what, how quickly and what spin is put on that coverage.

All of this is further complicated because we live in an “attention economy,” meaning that our attention has been commodified by social media which is designed to be addictive. What do we do about this? I believe governments should demand more transparency about the algorithms that are designed to keep us transfixed with these apps and also give consumers the ability to change the algorithm settings. There is very little chance, however, that this will happen because then how would X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok make mountains of money?

In an effort to take back control of my own attention, I took all social media notifications off my phone a couple years ago. This has made a big difference. More recently, I bought an old-fashioned alarm clock so I don’t have a bunch of notifications in my face first thing in the morning or last thing at night. I’ve found that the more I stay away from social media and just off my phone in general, the less I feel like I’m missing anything of value.

We can hope that schools to get better at media education or the government to do something to solve the problems plaguing truth in the media and social media. But we can actually do something by turning our attention away from the apps that try to trap us and towards what’s valuable, meaningful and beautiful. Try walking down the street without looking at your phone and instead notice the people, children, new shops and bars, beautiful architecture or how the trees are all leafed out and greening and gracing Madrid’s streets.

This is the English version of my column, La Globalista, in El Español.