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.

How People Are Impacted by Violent Media

How People Are Impacted by Violent Media
I was honored to speak at the +Peace “Peacebuilding Action Week” on Monday, 14 Sept. The +Peace team assigned me an interesting topic: How People are Impacted by Violent News.” 

I begin with a quick overview of the ubiquitiousness of violence in news media, which has been well documented by numerous researchers. I put my own spin on the topic, and added a new source of violence (and its accompanying fear) in the media: campaign commercials, and especially those from the Trump campaign. I showed one commercial featuring an older women menaced by a burglar intended to deliver an “unsafe in Biden’s America” message. 

The meat of my presentation, following a break-out discussion asking participants to analyze media images, was on peace journalism, and how it can offer an antidote to the traditional violent narratives that I discussed earlier in my presentation. Specifically as it relates to violence, I offered nine suggestions for applying PJ to reducing violence and sensationalism: 

• Provide context; report trends
• Make crime coverage less episodic 

• Don’t sensationalize 

• Bloody images necessary? 

• Don’t glorify the crime 

• Use neutral language, not: slaughter, bloody, massacre, martyr 

• Call out fear-mongering politicians
• No notoriety for shooters/manifestos 

• Report about solutions 

+Peace’s Peacebuilding Action Week continues Wednesday-Friday this week. “Peace in our homes and communities” is the theme today, followed by “Peace in our Cities Thursday,” and “Peace in our World” Friday. You can register and find out more at https://pluspeace.org/peacebuilding-action-week-2020 . 

 This was my first and, I hope, not my last engagement with +Peace, which “is activating a global movement of people that are invested in building a culture of peace - grounded in our peacebuilding realities & the hope of our collective futures,” according to its website.

Events spotlight media-social justice, safely covering protests
While the world may have almost come to a stop, peace journalism hasn’t, as evidenced by the two events I spoke at this week. 

The first, on Wednesday, was a Zoom presentation to kick off the annual Greater Kansas City Peacebuilding Conference. I discussed “Media Narratives: Impeding Social Justice.” I led off with a discussion about the divergent partisan narratives of the Black Lives Matter protests (see chart), and went on to explain how this coverage has impeded social justice by inaccurately tarring protesters with a “violent” label and “stigmatizing protesters as deviant and depicting protests as violent.”  Also, such coverage is episodic, and doesn’t generate “substantive information about the event’s background or the grievances or agendas of the movement behind the protest.” (See-- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1940161219853517 .) 

Several of the audience questions dealt with how to better inform oneself. This led me, inevitably, into endorsing media literacy. I urged the audience to break out of their ideological news bubbles, and to seek out news that contradicts their worldview. In a nutshell, liberals should watch Hannity and read the Wall St. Journal, and conservatives should read the Washington Post and watch Rachel Maddow. 

The next event in the Greater Kansas City Peacebuilding Conference is a discussion by journalist/activist Lewis Diuguid titled, “Disinformation, Civil Rights Protests, and Social Justice” at 1pm CST on September 21, the international day of peace. To register or read more about the conference, see https://www.jccc.edu/conferences/peacebuilding/ . 

KC BLM protests, by Carlos Moreno-KCUR

My second event on Thursday, sponsored by the International Relations Council, was a Zoom forum on the safety of journalists. I began by giving a brief overview of challenges to reporters posed by both Covid 19 and covering the Black Lives Matter protests. Then, I was joined by KCUR multimedia journalists Carlos Moreno, who detailed his experiences covering the BLM protests in Kansas City.  I talked about threats to press freedom around the world related to Covid, then presented about the arrests and harassment journalists have faced covering the BLM protests. Moreno shared his photos of the protests taken in Kansas City, along with his general impression about his safety. He said that both protesters and police treated him well, and that with the exception of one small incident, he never felt threatened.

We also discussed the Committee to Protect Journalists tips on safely covering protests that include wearing protective gear and utilizing situational awareness.