Media literacy seminar launches into sea of necessity
As American winds down the road toward the election, it's become abundantly clear, if it wasn't already, that social and traditional media are being weaponized by political operatives and malevolent foreign actors against the American people.

How can we fight back? I think one of the best ways is through media literacy. 

Media literacy is the thrust behind a project I'm spearheading this fall. Sponsored by a Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund Rapid Response award from the U.S. Department of State, the project is titled, “Media Literacy for Students: Lessons from Covid-19.”

It kicked off yesterday with a Zoom conference for Center Middle and Center High School students from Kansas City, and college students from Johnson County Community College (Overland Park, KS) and Park University (Parkville, MO).

Co-presenters Lewis Diuguid (journalist/multicultural education trainer), Allan Leonard (Fact Check Northern Ireland), and I presented the attendees with an introduction to mis, dis, and mal-information and an overview of mis/disinformation in media reports about Covid-19 and the recent civil rights protests. We armed the students with information about how to sniff out fake news (e.g. consider the source, the target audience, double-check info, examine the writer’s motivations, etc.); how to conduct their own fact checking; and how to implement their own basic content analysis study to detect media biases. The students did an excellent job coming up with coding lists designed to discern differences, for example, in reports about hydroxycholroquine (a Covid “cure” promoted by Donald Trump) on Fox News vs. CNN.

The project will continue this fall as students produce a media-literacy themed magazine and podcast. Stay tuned for details.