Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

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This Is Not Fake News (but Don’t Go by the Headline)
Interview by SYDNEY EMBERAPRIL 3, 2017

Fake news — a neologism to describe stories that are just not true, like Pizzagate, and a term now co-opted to characterize unfavorable news — has given new urgency to the teaching of media literacy. Are Americans less able to assess credibility? Can they discern real news from disinformation?

These are some of the questions Paul Mihailidis explores with his Emerson College students. Director of a new graduate program, Civic Media: Art and Practice, Dr. Mihailidis studies the intersection of civic engagement and media literacy — the ability to evaluate, analyze and create media. In a paper to be published this spring, Dr. Mihailidis explores the creation and spread of fake news and argues that media literacy as currently conceived may not solve the problem.

What led to the proliferation of fake news during the presidential campaign?

There were, you could argue, decades of growing polarization and partisanship — and a lot of factors for that. But one is the growth of online networks that are self-reinforcing: Citizens engage with like-minded views more and more, and they feel secure in posting their thoughts and having a lot of reinforcement. This election was very heated, and citizens in these networks felt empowered to participate. That participation became more than simply a self-affirmation of things. It became designing and sharing things that they didn’t really care were credible.

What are the mistakes students make in interpreting the news?

Because they’re monitoring a lot of content at once, they oftentimes are sharing and repurposing information without taking the time to really think through a story. A lot of times, this is a media literacy problem. Students aren’t doing deep inquiry. We see a lot of implicit assumptions being made off headlines, off short videos; they’re not diving into who is sharing content.

Are you trying to combat that?

We are teaching a lot about how to do monitorial investigation of stories — looking through your social platforms and doing quick profile searches or looking at who’s writing and commenting. A lot of youth focus on their peers and their community — if they share it then it’s got to be fairly credible. Both on the liberal and conservative side that seems problematic. So we talk a lot about trust in communities online and what that means, being confident in your voice and persistent in how you interrogate messages.

Polls show a big lack of trust in the media. Why is this?

When we say “the media,” we find ways to distance it and abstract it into one machinelike blob. And it becomes a very tangible thing to resist. People trust their peer communities, research shows, far more than blind sources or things that are more removed. And when they’re getting information that’s constantly being refuted or constantly being supported in their peer networks, they come to trust certain worldviews that get perpetuated in networks that are more similar than they are diverse.

Do you see this with your students?

Young people in general — we’re working in universities all around the world — have a much more nuanced take. They understand how the media is being used by politicians to gain advances. I don’t think there is this sense of distrust.

How are you teaching students to interpret the news in this polarized media age? Has your approach changed?

Media literacy has often been apolitical. It was about the text and that was it: Can you tell me the sources? Can you tell me something about its accuracy? What’s missing? And creating media used to be: Can you make a video or can you tell a story? That part of media literacy, while helpful for certain age groups, no longer addresses the core issues it should address in this age of fake news — we don’t use that term — this age of partisanship and distrust and self-segregation.

Instead of just critiquing the voice, we’re trying to help people think about their voice in the community, the agency they have and what means they take to participate. Media literacy needs to be about connectivity, about engagement — and it needs to be intentionally civic.

Interview has been condensed and lightly edited.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/education/edlife/fake-news-and-media-literacy.html?ref=media