When Confronting Media Illiteracy, It's Important Not to Replace It with Indoctrination

The July/August issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette contains an article about Penn alumna Erin McNeill's advocacy group Media Literacy Now. Properly construed, media literacy is an important issue, but I see reason to doubt whether her group's approach to it is truly evidence-based and free of ideology. I've submitted this letter to the Gazette:

Erin McNeill says, "Media literacy is about understanding the messages that we see and consume." But who decides what those messages actually are?

A repeated point of contention for several decades has been disagreement about what ideas various media -- from comic books, to sexually suggestive ads, to pornography, to video games and now comics again -- actually are conveying to their consumers.

In the 1950s, for instance, Fredric Wertham promoted a threat narrative about comic books which led to congressional hearings but is now largely discredited. Similarly, in the '80s one-sided hearings were held to promote a threat narrative about pornography which has little basis in science.

It troubles me that McNeill combines uncontroversial points like teaching young children about the decision-making structures and commercial interests behind what they see on television, with talk about identifying "bias, sexism, and racism in media," as if the question of what sorts of media content are actually promoting these and other kinds of bias were not, in fact, hotly disputed to this day.

Instead of a special subject of "media literacy" into which educators could inject their own ideological biases, it would be better simply to make the skills of critical thinking itself a core, ongoing part of the curriculum.