Journalism, Society and Politics in the Digital Media Era

Nael Jebril, Stephen Jukes, Sofia Iordanidou, Emmanouil Takas, Nael Jebril, Stephen Jukes, Sofia Iordanidou, Emmanouil Takas

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789381689
• eBook ISBN: 9781789381702
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Journalismus

Advances in digital communication have affected the relationship between society, journalism and politics within different contexts in varied ways and intensities. This volume, combining interdisciplinary academic and professional perspectives, assesses the impact of the digital media environment on citizens, journalists and politicians in diverse sociopolitical landscapes. The first part evaluates the transformative power of media literacy in the digital age and the challenges that journalism pedagogy encounters in global and fragmented environments. The second part critically examines the methods in which social media is used by politicians and activists to communicate during political campaigns and social protests. The third part analyses the impact of digitalization on professional journalism and news consumption strategies. The fourth part offers a range of case studies that illustrate the significant challenges facing online media regarding the framing and representation of communities in crisis and shifting contexts. The book is intended to introduce readers to the crucial dynamic and diverse challenges that affect our societies and communitive practices as a result of the interplay between digital media and political and societal structures.

PART I

Civic media literacies and journalism pedagogy

Civic media literacies: Re-imagining engagement for civic intentionality¹

Paul Mihailidis

As new media structures and systems further define and disrupt the core relationship between media, citizens and society, media literacy is in a fight for relevance. Advocates for media literacy often argue that if there is more media literacy, then the contemporary challenges societies face with regards to media systems and messages would be alleviated. As the fight for legitimacy continues, media entities, both mainstream and grassroots, continue to curate new information ecosystems, tools and platforms, intent on perpetuating distrust of basic institutions, trading truth for ideology, and normalizing spectacle above nuance and meaningful dialogue. As a result, media literacy’s long-standing approach of critical inquiry through reasoned deconstruction and the creation of media texts is less and less relevant to the current ecosystem for media’s influence in daily life.

Out of the new information and communication norms of digital culture emerge a series of questions for the media literacy movement: How can media literacy remain relevant in contemporary digital culture? How can media literacy respond to the ever-changing digital media landscape? What values do media literacy initiatives and interventions need to uphold to create impact?

These questions are difficult, with perhaps few concrete answers. They are important to explore however, considering the renewed calls for media literacy to be a solution to the recent rise in harmful populist and extremist rhetoric that is playing out simultaneously in the mainstream media and in the digital underbelly of the networked web.² National elections in France, Turkey, Austria, the Netherlands, the United States and beyond became spaces for contestation of ideas and ideologies, increasingly debated through vitriol and aggressive rhetoric online, and supported by dangerous reductionist narratives by politicians and fringe groups in the mainstream media. Many of these debates were being staged not with others in dialogue, but through mobile devices that connected individuals in homophilous networks premised on the support of peers to advocate values and ideologies in ever more aggressive and extreme ways.

The result is the re-emergence of populism and fringe political groups that have found a sense of place, and vast support, through networked publics. Further, these groups have been legitimated by mainstream media, increasingly giving life to the spectacle of stories that gain momentum through alternative media publications, and that take advantage of algorithmic designs to garner like-minded communities in collective online spaces. Platforms like Breitbart News become widely read sources of information, eclipsing mainstream newspaper and television stations (Hynton 2017), while their stories are appropriated and shared out across myriad interconnected networks, supported by peers, with little room for dissent.

These online networks and alternative media platforms have seeded the legitimation and vindication of hate groups in the United States, the jailing of thousands of academics and political opposition groups in Turkey, increased the presence of nationalist parties in progressive countries like Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany, and further cemented the distrust of our major civic institutions. Further, the pace of communication in digital spaces is beyond the capacity of what many institutions can respond to. As a result, we’ve seen some of the largest social and civic issues of our time – from migration to climate change and global conflict – played out in the depths of the Internet as much as it is in public dialogue. In the United States, political memes ignited an alt right movement around national elections, a Reddit forum launched and perpetuated a fabricated news story that grew to global mainstream media coverage, and a presidential candidate’s early morning Tweets set national daily media agendas for months on end. The role of media organizations, particularly digital media and social networks, in the emergence of populism, polarization and partisanship, brings to bear the question of how media literacy interventions can and should respond.

This chapter interrogates the relevance of contemporary media literacy initiatives and interventions in responding to this new media and sociopolitical realities of our time. This chapter will argue for the need to re-imagine media literacies for renewed relevance. danah boyd (2017), in a recently published blog post, articulated what she sees as the main constraint for media literacy today:

Anxious about the widespread consumption and spread of propaganda and fake news during this year’s [US] election cycle, many progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy programs. Others are clamouring for solutions that focus on expert fact-checking and labelling. Both of these approaches are likely to fail – not because they are bad ideas, but because they fail to take into consideration the cultural context of information consumption that we’ve created over the last thirty years. The problem on our hands is a lot bigger than most folks appreciate.

This chapter will argue that traditional approaches to media literacy are alone not sufficient to respond to the realities of today’s information environments. Media literacy, boyd (2017) argues, ‘asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another’. In unpacking its relevance problem, this chapter will articulate some of the new norms of digital culture that are further challenging media literacy’s ability to effectively respond to present media challenges.

Lastly, this chapter will advocate for the development of civic media literacies that reframe how we think about the media interventions designed for what I call civic intentionality: a set of design considerations for all media literacy initiatives that are based on the value systems of agency, caring, persistence, critical consciousness and emancipation. The ideas presented below are not a repudiation of the decades of impactful and meaningful work in media literacy around the world. Rather, this chapter builds on those foundations to develop an approach to media literacy work that re-imagines engagement in a digital era, based on relation and intentionality. The concepts below will argue for civic media literacies initiatives that can reframe how we meaningfully engage in a culture of partisanship, polarization and distrust.

Structural constraints on contemporary approaches to media literacy

Media literacy definitions are wide-ranging and varied, but a general axiom has been adopted as ‘the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication’ (Aufderheide 1993). In simple terms, ‘media literacy builds upon the foundation of traditional literacy and offers new forms of reading and writing. Media literacy empowers people to be critical thinkers and makers, effective communicators and active citizens’ (NAMLE). These definitions provide avenues for initiatives and interventions in media pedagogy and practice to articulate a process. This process entails deconstruction, critique, reflection and engagement. Media literacy initiatives normally achieve such ends through inquiry that is grounded in core concepts. The Center for Media Literacy, for example, provides the following set of key questions and concepts to articulate its vision of media literacy.

Constructions like this can be found in many different media literacy and education initiatives. From UNESCO to the US-based National Association of Media Literacy Education, foundations, principles and frameworks have been meticulously developed to support media literacy work in the classroom and beyond. The digital media age has been met with new approaches to teaching and learning about media. In her policy paper titled Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action (2010), Renee Hobbs argues that policy-makers, educators and curriculum designers must transcend traditional approaches to media literacy in designing new initiatives in classrooms. She articulates her essential elements for digital and media literacy as follows:

	Keyword	Five Core Concepts	Five Key Questions
#1	Authorship	All media messages are ‘constructed.’	Who created this message?
#2	Format	Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.	What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
#3	Audience	Different people experience the same media message differently.	How might different people understand this message differently from me?
#4	Content	Media have embedded values and points of view.	What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in; or omitted from this message?
#5	Purpose	Most media are organized to gain profit and/or power.	Why is this message being sent?

TABLE 1: Media LitKit. Center for media literacy. Source: http://www.medialit.org/readingroom/five-key-questions-form-foundation-media-inquiry

Essential Competencies of Digital and Media Literacy
1.	ACCESS Finding and using media and technology tools skillfully and sharing appropriate and relevant information with others
2.	ANALYSE & EVALUATE Comprehending messages and using critical thinking to analyse message quality, veracity, credibility and point of view, while considering potential effects or consequences of messages
3.	CREATE Composing or generating content using creativity and confidence in self-expression, with awareness of purpose, audience and composition techniques
4.	REFLECT Applying social responsibility and ethical principles to one’s own identity and lived experience, communication behaviour and conduct
5.	ACT Working individually and collaboratively to share knowledge and solve problems in the family, the workplace and the community, and participating as a member of a community at local, regional, national and international levels

TABLE 2: Digital and media literacy: A plan of action. Source: https://knightfoundation.org/reports/digital-and-media-literacy-plan-action

Hobbs’ work in digital and media literacy responds to the increasing presence of technology in daily life. Her constructs provide a strong conceptual foundation and grounding for how media literacy is articulated and can be applied. These constructs, while not far removed from traditional media literacy pedagogy, articulate application to technologies and social networks. Others in media literacy have put forth a different way to explore media literacies in the digital age. Jenkins et al. (2009) developed a set of new media literacy skills that embraces participatory culture, where they question, ‘do kids have the basic social skills and cultural competencies so that when they do get computers in their classroom, they can participate fully?’ The skills Jenkins and his team articulate – play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking and negotiation – present a different set of considerations for implementing media literacy interventions, based on empowerment dispositions, voice and a context of participation.

Such constructs are certainly helpful, and have allowed for the development of media literacy initiatives that help people – particularly young people – learn to critique and create media texts. They help educators and community stakeholders map lessons and facilitations onto concrete approaches, and they help media literacy research and practice find common voice, when possible. Within these approaches have emerged some strong initiatives around media literacies, specifically in the context of critical inquiry, news, data and digital culture, in increasingly imaginative ways. There exist, however, constraints within the application of these frameworks that, while not diminishing their impact, emerge from new norms of digital culture.

First, many of these approaches assume a critical distance from media, where the reader, viewer or consumer is able to meaningfully step away from media texts and critique or engage with them from an objective point of view. Research on confirmation bias, selective exposure and on source layers shows that this critical distance is an ideal outcome but less realistic (Del Vicario et al. 2016; Lee et al. 2014; Kang and Sundar 2016). Second, contemporary approaches to media literacy are transactional. They often lead with skills attainment. The notion of attaining skills leads one to believe that once skills in media critique or creation are learned, then one has attained a level of media literacy. Research has shown that such approaches can backfire, leading to increased cynicism and less meaningful engagement (Mihailidis 2009). Third, media literacy is often deficit-focused, concentrating on deconstructing the ways in which media manipulate, skew or insert bias into information. Lessons in deconstructing advert...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction the Digital Media Era: Challenges and Transformations
• Part I: Civic Media Literacies and Journalism Pedagogy
• Part II: Social Media and Political Participation
• Part III: News Making and Consumption Strategies
• Part IV: Media Framing and Representation
• Notes on Contributors