Truthiness and Trust: News Media Literacy Strategies in the Digital Age Jennifer Fleming, Dept. of J

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Truthiness and Trust News Media Literacy
Strategies in the Digital AgeJennifer Fleming,
Dept. of Journalism, CSU Long Beach

• Anonymous sources are to journalism what silicon
  enhancements are to the feminine figure they
  look impressive to the gullible, but something
  doesnt feel right.
• - Anonymous

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Source?

• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vL_kADup_wZw

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Merging Theory with Practice

• Source layering (or literacy?)
• Outcome
• The ability to identify, question and critically
  analyze layers of sources embedded in digital
  news media texts
  
• Demonstrated by
• Activities (online and in-class) that encourage
  reflective thinking through independent and
  collective critical analysis of digital media
  texts sources and sources within digital texts
• Online viewing discussion forums (in personal
  space)
  
• In-class discussion and reflection pieces based
  on student-produced data and discussions
  
• Online responses to forums, discussions (in
  personal space)

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Media Literacy

• Instead of scurrying into the corner and wailing
  about what media are doing to use, one should
  charge straight ahead and kick them in the
  electrodes. They respond beautifully to such
  resolute treatment and soon become servants
  rather than masters.
• Marshall McLuhan (cited in Tyner, 1998, 54)
• Centre for Media Literacy
• Five Core Concepts
• Five media literacy knowledge structures (Potter,
  2005)
  
• Media effects, media content, media industries,
  real world and self
  
• Media literacy is the ability to decode,
  analyze, evaluate and produce communication in a
  variety of forms
  

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Cultural Studies

• Media culture/contested terrain (Kellner, 1995)
• Diagnostic critique
• Race, class, gender power relations
• Dominant cultural order (Hall, 1980)
• Any society/culture tends to impose its
  classifications of the social and cultural and
  political world. These constitute a dominant
  cultural order we say dominant because their
  exists a pattern of preferred readings and
  these both have the institutional/political/ideolo
  gical order imprinted in them and have themselves
  become institutionalized (p. 134)

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Journalism/Media Studies

• Liberal/democratic praxis watchdog role of
  press
  
• Sources
• They journalists lack the experience or
  education to evaluate the credentials of many
  people who could serve as experts in news
  stories so they chose people not on the basis of
  knowledge but on their appearance of expertise
  and their willingness to tell a good story
  (Potter, 2005, p. 108)
• Fabrication, bias and use of anonymous sources
• Society of Professional Journalists (1996)
• Code of Ethics Seek Truth and Report It

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Teaching Education

• Dewey (1933) Critical thinking
• Reflective thinking is the active, persistent
  and careful consideration of any belief or
  supposed form of knowledge in light of the
  grounds that support it and the further
  conclusions to which it tends (p. 9)
• Freire (1970) Curriculum as Conversation
• To alienate human beings from their own decision
  making is to turn them into objects (p. 85)
  
• Deep learning opportunities
• A motivational context that encourages students
  interest in the subject, active learning,
  opportunities for students to interact with
  others, and new information presented in a
  logical, integrated format to establish
  well-structured knowledge base (Cross
  Harris-Steadman, 1996).

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Merging Theory with Practice

• Source layering (or literacy?)
• Outcome
• The ability to identify, question and critically
  analyze layers of sources embedded in digital
  news media texts
  
• Demonstrated by
• Activities (online and in-class) that encourage
  reflective thinking through independent and
  collective critical analysis of digital media
  texts sources and sources within digital texts
• Online viewing discussion forums (in personal
  space)
  
• In-class discussion and reflection pieces based
  on student-produced data and discussions
  
• Online responses to forums, discussions (in
  personal space)

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Student-generated results

• Sources
• Dateline/NBC/MSNBC 29
• wnwz/Manziar 27
• www.olbermannanation.com 15
• Keith Olbermman 7
• Perverted Justice 4
• Comments 2
• No answer 17
• The Video segment is an excerpt taken from
  Dateline NBCs "To Catch a Predator". The video
  is posted by a person under nick name wnwz,
  which is really vague. But besides that, as we
  can see at the beginning of the video, The video
  was posted, or taken, from www.olbermannnation.com
  , a site that contains videos related to TV
  reporter and commentator Keith Olbermann. Keith
  Olbermann works for NBC as an anchorman, best
  known for hosting the show Countdown with Keith
  Olbermann. On the website, www.olbermannnation.co
  m, I could not find who posted it, so it probably
  was a just a home made tivo recorded excerpt or
  something like that.

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Student-generated discussions

• Purposes
• Catch predators
• Increase awareness of issue
• Entertainment
• Ratings
• Promote Keith Olbermann
• Truthiness
• I do not think the video presents a good level of
  truthiness at all the clip is mere exposure for
  MSNBC, using the best exploitation duo available
  children and sex. The people orchestrating the
  whole thing are following their gut feeling of
  justice, that every man they catch is a rapist
  who deserves whatever he (does this show even
  attempt to target females?) he gets, but
  everything about the set-up is falsified, from
  the decoy to the home setting. At least the men
  who want sex are up front about it

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References

• Cross, K. Harris Steadman, M. Classroom
  Research Implementing the Scholarship of
  Teaching. San Francisco Jossey-Bass
  
• Dewey, J. (1993). How we think. Boston D.C.
  Heath.
  
• Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New
  York Continuum. Originally published in 1970.
  
• Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/Decoding.In S. Hall, D.
  Hobson, A. Love and P. Willis (eds.), Culture,
  Media, Language, pp. 128-38. London Hutchinson.
  
• Kellner, D. (1995). Media Culture cultural
  studies, identity and politics between the modern
  and the postmodern. London Routledge.
  
• Potter, J. (2005). Media Literacy, 3rd Ed.
  Thousand Oaks, CA Sage Publications.
  
• Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) (1996)
  Code of Ethics retrieved from SPJ website on June
  2, 2008 http//www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
  
• Tyner, K. (1998). Literacy in a Digital World
  Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information.
  Mahwah, New Jersey Lawrence Erlbaum