HAMPTON ROADS, Va. — How's your media literacy? It's an important question as voters are already heading to the polls in the race for the White House. The election year is ramping up, with content likely already bombarding your phone, computers and TV's. One local university has a lesson we could all learn about being critical news consumers.
Our cameras hit the streets of Hampton Roads asking people where they get their news from. The responses varied from social media, to TV, to online news coverage — one person we spoke with said newspapers.
But it's clear, the days of traditional news sources are fading, particularly with a younger audience. I spoke with some students inside the classrooms on campus of Virginia Wesleyan, asking how many of them get news from TikTok - several hands shot up.
"We need to be mindful about how we consume news from social media," says Dr. Leslie Caughell, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Wesleyan. In particular, she mentions Facebook, "because the incentive structure there is aligned to get people engaged and often angry. Often what that means is political content that's kind of divisive or is designed to upset people makes its way to the top of your feed and often time that political content is a little bit skewed or entirely inaccurate."
Dr. Caughell stresses that's not limited to social media, "Particularly when we're talking about things like opinion coverage, on 24-hour news channels."
Professor Kellie Holzer chairs the English Department at Virginia Wesleyan University, and she tells us, "we do a lot around media literacy and critical literacy." I ask her to elaborate on media literacy, "Evaluating the content and the source of the content. Media literacy is the critical evaluation of the stuff — is it reasonable? Is it reliable?"
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One of the ways they work on that is a class: Humanities 261 Fight Club Civil Discourse and Debate. It includes a mock debate, role-playing and skits on divisive issues."We encourage students to step into the shoes of a position they might not agree with, to look at multiple sources and corroborate information from different sources."
I asked Professor Holzer what role does media literacy play in what we're about to see this election year? "I think that Americans need to develop their media literacy skills — because there is so much click-bait available and the smartphone in their pocket will deliver to people, based on algorithms things they already think.
Dr. Caughell challenges us to, "Take that information and do your own search on it. Go into Google and pick different sources, look at what organizations like Politifact, Fact Check.org, Snopes, the Duke Reporters Lab, have on it because these are organizations that are non-partisan that have their entire purpose as taking information that's spreading on opinion news and social media and assessing its accuracy."
Another website, Allsides.com, has a color-coded media bias chart. It breaks down media companies in columns, a darker blue for organizations to the left, light blue for leaning left--purple for media companies in the center, pink for those leaning right and the names of media organizations labeled full-on red.
I asked Dr. Holzer whether people want to challenge what they believe. "So, I think we have come to a point where we don't want accurate information as much as we want something that affirms our world view."
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Which raises the question, if you identify as a liberal would you likely search out a conservative viewpoint? Or if you're a conservative would you likely search out a liberal viewpoint? I asked Professor Holzer how do you encourage people to set aside how they identify to do media literacy homework? "I would ask them to think about people they know, people they may be related to or in my case married to who hold very different political positions and think, how they---what kind of resources are they looking at?"
Perhaps an incentive for us to really do our homework, and not just during this election season.
For more information on the Allsides.com media bias chart, click here.
