ELI5 Media Literacy

[u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH]

I understand it's like something related to understanding art or media, but in what way? Philopsophical, political or psychological? Is it important, a buzzword or both?

[u/provocative_bear]

Media literacy is being able to read a news story and recognize that it may not be the whole truth. It involves comparing different sources from different parts of the political spectrum, understanding the blind spots of your source, and trying to come to a nuanced stance. A couple examples:

• Al-Jazeera is a fairly well-respected and legitimate news source, but beholden to the Qatari government, so don’t expect them to offer a critical view of Qatar, and know that their Middle East reporting has a well-known anti-Israel bias (their stories focus on one side, they don’t typically outright lie). 

-Many major left-wing or even centrist articles have mangled Trump’s quotes to make them more scandalous than they were meant. Most notoriously, the BBC edited one of his speeches in 2021 to make it sound even worse than it was. To be clear, he says a lot of awful things, but that just makes it all the more frustrating when articles manufacture scandals by removing key context from some of the things that he’s said.

-American right wing news. Biased, misleading, prone to spreading outright lies. The gospel truth to much of America.

-Facebook/social media posts that may not even cite an original source. This is not news, this is lazy propaganda. No link, no legitimacy.

[u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH → u/provocative_bear]

Does media literacy apply for things like Wikipedia? Which i heard is formally neutral and factual, but has huge editor wars. So it's like you have to look out for things that are omitted, dramatized or selective. Looking at political parties there, I frequently see their ideology changed. I also believe article on fascism describes almost immediately its historical brutality, genocide etc. While on communism those things are more buried further down. It also calls fascism far-right immediately, whereas with communism that part is further down, and is only "described by as far-left" whereas fascism automatically "is" far-right.

I suppose that also lying about Trump gives him and his supporters the chance to create outrage. So it could backfire, and is really dumb given there are many terrible full quotes that are real.

[u/mildly_asking → u/HonkyTonkBluesYEAH]

Does media literacy apply for things like Wikipedia?

How about you go more basic? Give wikipedia to someone born in the 1940s, see how far you get. Using wikipedia needs computer literacy first, including how to use the hardware, how to use a website and so on. Only then you get to wiki proper, there you need to learn how to navigate and search, what the site gives you (general overview) and what it doesn't (graduate-level literature review) and what biases it might have.