Media Literacy is the practice of taking in media messages and understanding their influence on your thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
When you interact with a media message it can be helpful to ask yourself some key questions:
When you ask these questions, you're developing your media literacy. The goal of media literacy is thoughtful engagement and informed decision-making about the information you consume. Another example of media literacy in action is working to uncover any kind of bias that might be present within a message.
Bias can be defined as prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair (Oxford Languages Dictionary).
Identifying bias can be tricky because it is not clearly stated. Bias can exist on a spectrum of political ideology, religious views, financial influence, misinformation, and more. All sources should be evaluated for potential bias - from a tweeted link to a scholarly article. When you suspect you may be engaging with biased media a good best practice is examining the language and tone of the message. Other times, bias can be identified due to a lack of cited sources. Or the sources the author chooses to cite may be questionable or unverified.
When using newspapers and newspaper articles, remember that they may be biased. Using a number of different sources can help you get a clearer picture of what occurred, and challenge bias. Newspaper articles may also be inaccurate, because they are often written with a tight deadline, and in the rush to go to press they may be poorly edited or incomplete.
This can be true for modern and historical news articles. All need to be read with a critical eye and context from other sources.
Fake News is false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke (Cambridge Dictionary). The two most common types of fake news that you might be familiar with are disinformation and misinformation. There are some similarities between each, but there are differences too. In an era when you are critically looking at sources, it is important to know about these different types of information and their intent.
Disinformation is false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media (Oxford Languages). It is often known to be false by the communicator at the time is was shared. It is deliberate.
Misinformation is false or inaccurate information thought the be true at the time is was shared (Oxford Languages). Misinformation is often a mistake. It's often a bit more of a catch-all phrase too.
Ithaca University Libraries Media Literacy LibGuide and University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Bias LibGuide helped with the creation of this page.