Media Literacy in the Modern Age

I am a skeptic. If an advertisement claims to the best I immediately look for something better.

Micellar Water (Image Maire Claire)

There is a prevalent type of "journalism" called the publireportaje or publicity report. Essentially it is a paid advertisement disguised as an article. You see them here int he U.S., but it is identified by the word advertisement somewhere near the top. In Mexico this designation is rarely noted on the article. You can usually smell a publireportaje, but some folks interpret as objective journalism.

Students need to be taught to be skeptics and critical consumers of information of all types, including digital media. They must be able to identify credible sources of information from the garbage that is out there. Here is an example of critically thinking about information, about one of the industries most prone to over promising on what their products delivers, the cosmetics.

I recently read an article in Marie Claire about micellar water from France. I read it and almost immediately ran out to buy some, This was going to fix all of my skin flaws and it must work because its FRENCH! I was in the store with it in my hand. Then my inner skeptic turned on telling me to wait and do my research. A quick Google search lead me to several manufactures of the product and several recent magazine articles. The frequency of the magazine articles made me think there must be a big push by the cosmetic companies to move this stuff. It was difficult to find an objective review source. I found an article from a publication of Readers Digest Canada. Page two of the search results yielded probably the best source of information Amazon product reviews. I know that all of these people at least actually purchased the product. Although I would not encourage citing Amazon reviews as sources for expository writing, they were perfectly valid for this purpose.

This has got me thinking about ways to teach media literacy to my fifth grade students. I could show them paid advertisement disguised as article and have them research the facts and identify persuasive language used.

I would also like them to think about how consuming information makes them feel, and relate that to the creators purpose. This video from the Urban Alliance on Race Relations made me feel angry when I first watched it. I wanted to believe that you could have put a picture of a white grandma there and I would have thought she was the perp the way the video was designed. But them I thought I probably would have thought she was the victim. Your original feelings will probably change after you have had time to internalize your thinking. That's what I want for my students, for them to be critical consumers of media.