The strangulation of Media Studies

With only a couple of specifications awaiting final approval, the government’s reform of the examination system in England and Wales has now almost concluded. So where do the reforms leave Media Studies?

This time two years ago, it seemed possible that Media Studies would be deleted from the curriculum entirely. This is a fate that has befallen several other subjects – albeit those with much smaller cohorts of students. In other cases (such as ours) some concerted campaigning was required.

The good news is that Media Studies has been spared the axe. The bad news is that it has undergone some pretty fundamental changes, both in content and in modes of assessment. We may have won the war, but we have lost several key battles. Ultimately, the survival of Media Studies may prove to be something of a Pyrrhic victory.

I have blogged about this struggle at various points over the past couple of years. Back in Spring 2015, I was writing about the threat to practical coursework; and I went on to propose an alternative approach to evaluating media learning. Last March, I wrote about the misguided inclusion of a list of specified ‘theorists’ in the examinations, particularly at A-level; and again, I went on to propose a more productive approach to teaching media theory.

These criticisms still stand; and as the government’s overarching statement (the Subject Content document) has been developed into more detailed specifications by the examination boards, things have gone from bad to worse. Now that the process is more or less complete, I’ve written a lengthy analysis of what has taken place, which can be found elsewhere on this site.

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To say the least, this has been a very frustrating business, which reveals a good deal about the making of education policy more broadly. Government officials have imposed a series of arbitrary and often contradictory requirements, in an apparent attempt to implement a ‘knowledge-based’ curriculum. As the process went on, the goalposts repeatedly shifted, leaving examination boards ‘second guessing’ about the intentions of policy-makers.

The headlines are as follows. Practical media production coursework has been significantly reduced, from 50% (in most cases) to 30%. Students are no longer required to reflect critically on their coursework, depriving them of a significant opportunity to combine the theoretical and practical aspects of the subject. Opportunities for longer, research-based essay writing have completely disappeared.

The absurd list of ‘theorists’ is now compulsory, although some names have arbitrarily disappeared, and some more ludicrous ones have taken their place. As last year’s report by the Media Education Association suggested, it’s as though somebody has Googled ‘media theory’ and simply copied down the results. The published specifications are already including bullet-pointed lists of key ideas (three points for 16-year-olds on Judith Butler or Jean Baudrillard, anyone?). What we have here is theory as a set of instrumental ‘facts’, not as a body of ideas to be used and challenged.

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In an attempt to reduce overlaps between subjects, film has been marginalized in Media Studies; while the study of the film industry and film audiences has all but disappeared from Film Studies. In these and other respects, Film Studies appears to have returned to a 1960s or 1970s conception of the subject, almost wholly preoccupied with textual analysis.

As the revised specifications have been drafted and redrafted, a whole range of other problems have arisen, largely as a result of the manic drive towards ever-greater prescription and compulsion.

Thus, the original definition of ‘media’ in the Subject Content document included an indicative list of nine different media that were likely to be covered in Media Studies. This list has now become compulsory, meaning that students must show evidence of having studied all nine media. Examination boards have been required to specify set texts, and to observe some quite bizarre stipulations in selecting them. There is little requirement or opportunity here to demonstrate knowledge of a wider range of media texts.

Reading the draft examination papers is quite dispiriting, to say the least. Concepts and ‘theorists’ are arbitrarily linked to specific media examples; complex intellectual debates are reduced to exercises in factual recall; and the selection of set media texts seems to lack any coherent rationale.

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One of the professed aims of the government’s reforms was to increase the ‘demand’ (that is, the difficulty) of qualifications. Yet almost all of the changes would seem to point in the opposite direction. They make it easier for teachers to ‘teach to the test’, and for students to simply regurgitate content in the examination. The new specifications require a superficial grasp of a large quantity of material, and very little in-depth engagement. The marginalization of practical work undermines a key opportunity for creativity, and for exploring and generating new theoretical insights. None of this provides anything like effective preparation for university courses, which is one of the primary functions of A-levels.

Media Studies has been strangled, although it continues to draw breath. Committed, creative media teachers will still engage and challenge their students – although now they will be doing so despite the framework of assessment, rather than being enabled and supported by it.

You can read all the gory details here.

Waking up from the digital dream: media education and media reform

I was recently invited to write this piece for the Japanese magazine 5 (Five). It’s a kind of manifesto.

In the early days of the internet, technological developments were often led by pioneers with libertarian political ideals. In retrospect, many of those ideals seem highly individualistic – and indeed they align rather well with consumer capitalism. Yet many digital evangelists saw networked technology as the means to bring about a democratic revolution. Open access to information would undermine the control of large media corporations, creating a golden age of free expression, civic participation and progressive political activism. Only a few decades on, it is hard to see any remaining grounds for such optimism. The digital dream is turning into a nightmare.

Images by Moma Propaganda

The advent of ‘Web 2.0’ and social media brought a similar wave of political euphoria. Six years ago, many commentators were celebrating the role of social media in the so-called Arab Spring: these were apparently ‘Facebook revolutions’, facilitated (if not caused) by popular access to digital technology. Yet technology has not prevented the slide back into authoritarianism and chaos in many Arab countries. Social media are being used very effectively by anti-democratic forces like the so-called Islamic State, and as means of surveillance by oppressive governments around the world.

One of the lessons we might take from the election of Donald Trump is that the political right has become exceptionally skilful in using social media – and, some would argue, much better than most on the left. Trump’s use of data analytics – which is much more extensive than the focus group politics of old – played a major role in his campaign, alongside his high-profile social media presence – not to mention the allegations of hacking, fake news and digital espionage. Far from promoting democracy, networked technology has been a massive boon for terrorists, white supremacists, fascists and the so-called ‘alt-right’.

Of course, the internet has long been a medium of conspiracism and rumour: fake news is merely the most recent instance. Meanwhile, social media such as Twitter have become vehicles for trolling, abuse and hate speech. Such things seem a very long way from the idea of the ‘networked public sphere’ that still appears to inspire some academic commentators. Yet to some extent, these phenomena are merely symptoms of much broader problems. Levels of trust in democratically elected representatives and experts of many kinds have steadily fallen, leaving space for populist politicians, mostly of the xenophobic political right. Politics in general has become significantly more polarized – as has been apparent, not only in the US, but also in the Brexit campaign in the UK, and in recent elections across Europe. Social media may not have caused these things, but it is hard to see any evidence that they are improving the situation.

Meanwhile, the internet has increasingly come under the commercial control of just two global corporations. Almost two billion people (one quarter of the world’s population) are on Facebook, while two thirds of web searches are made using Google. Both companies generate annual profits of around ten billion dollars, and have a net worth of hundreds of billions. This duopoly has also eaten up smaller companies (Google owns You Tube, Facebook owns What’s App), while countless others have gone to the wall. These two gargantuan corporations now effectively own and control the world wide web – although Apple, the world’s leading digital hardware company, is coming up fast behind.

Social media do undoubtedly enable users to share and distribute their own content in ways that were impossible before. Yet with the exception of Wikipedia, almost all this activity takes place on commercial platforms. This so-called ’sharing economy’ generates massive profits for companies, while also depriving users of ownership and control of their personal data. Facebook and Google have almost total control of online advertising; and as with ‘old’ media, advertising funding inevitably distorts the kinds of content that are available, and what it is possible to find – hence the phenomenon of ‘clickbait’. Digitally automated (or ‘programmatic’) advertising results in commercial messages appearing next to inappropriate content, a phenomenon that is now becoming a cause of concern for brands themselves. Meanwhile, the press is losing advertising revenue, causing some to foresee the demise of printed newspapers, and even of professional journalism – although newspapers continue to be subject to laws on content that don’t apply to digital media companies.

So what of the hopes for a new digital democracy? Some years ago, I directed a pan-European research project exploring the potential of the internet for promoting civic participation among young people. While we found some very effective grassroots initiatives, for example among NGOs and charities, many of them were inadequately funded. Online services were very useful for young people who were already politically active, but did nothing to reach out to those who were not. Compared with older media (and even leaflets and face-to-face meetings), the internet seemed to reinforce inequalities in participation, and even to prevent wider public debate. As it becomes easier for us to filter out content that we disagree with, it is likely that this polarization will increase, creating what some have called an ‘echo chamber’ effect.

To some extent, education might appear to provide a solution to some of these problems. Enabling young people to be critical of media might encourage them to use those media more skeptically and carefully. Thus, recent debates about fake news have led some to call for greater media literacy education. Media educators have a long history of teaching about media representation and bias. However, this is a complex issue: rather than simplistic checklists to help distinguish between fact and fiction, we all need a more in-depth critical understanding of how these media work, not least on an economic level.

While I would agree that media literacy is increasingly necessary, I am concerned that this is an individualistic response. It is often promoted by governments and regulatory bodies which are otherwise reluctant to intervene in the commercial market. As government abdicates responsibility, it leaves the problems of the media to individual consumers to solve. In my view, this is not enough. Media educational initiatives need to link more firmly to movements for media reform. This happens to some degree in the informal NGO sector, where media production projects are linked to wider forms of civic activism, especially among young people; but it is less apparent in formal education.

In the UK and elsewhere, much of the emphasis in campaigns for media reform has been on old media – especially on journalism and the press. This is important, but there is now an urgent need to focus on new media. As I have implied, there is an emerging media ecology here that is even less democratic – and certainly less accountable – than old media. Google, Facebook and Apple are much more powerful than Rupert Murdoch – even if (or in fact because) much of their power is invisible.

A starting point here would be to consider the internet as a basic public utility, like water and air – although, in the latter cases, we can see that the regulation of public goods is not going too well right now. If we are to have a non-commercial public space in which information can be truly shared, we need institutions and structures that will keep it so. When it is run (even partly) by private companies, there needs to be tight regulation and accountability, and commercial monopolies should be actively prevented and broken up.

At the very basic level, this means that these digital companies should pay their taxes, much of which they currently manage to avoid. Despite the rhetoric about digital democracy, there are still significant inequalities in people’s access to media, and in the skills and understanding needed to use those media creatively and effectively. There is a continuing concern about net neutrality – which is now returning to the agenda, given Trump’s reluctance to regulate. If these companies were to pay their taxes, the income could be used to fund non-profit initiatives, such as the creation of reliable online content, the provision of access and training for excluded groups, and the production of tools and resources for media literacy education.

A second fundamental point is that companies like Google and Facebook need to be seen as media companies, irrespective of who creates the content that they provide. These companies like to present themselves merely as technology companies providing services – as neutral intermediaries. This allows them to escape any editorial responsibility for the material they publish and circulate. Taking editorial responsibility would mean that these platforms would need to come into line with existing forms of media regulation, for example relating to political advertising, and to hate speech and harassment. While such laws do exist, there is little coherence in how they are applied online.

In the wake of the fake news controversy, Facebook is now saying that it will support fact-checking services – although their proposals thus far appear superficial and tokenistic. Meanwhile, in response to companies’ concerns about programmatic advertising, Google is saying that it will take down violent or extremist videos from YouTube – although here again, it is not clear how much of this will be done merely by algorithms or by volunteers. Editorial responsibility requires much more serious investment than this, yet it is something these companies are bound to resist, because it is not in their commercial interest.

A third key area is around the use of personal data. In accessing these platforms, users have to sign over the rights to their personal data, which is sold on to third parties to use as they wish – although few of us understand what is at stake in checking ‘agree’ on the terms of service agreement. Again, there is a role for education here; but even if users understand what is happening, they generally have few alternatives. We are surely entitled to greater transparency, and to much greater control over the collection and use of our personal data, both by companies and by governments.

There is undoubtedly an urgent need for media education in this new media environment. But education should do more than simply enable us to understand and to cope with what already exists. It should also encourage us to imagine alternatives, and to demand change.

Media and the sharing economy

There are some significant shifts going on in how media companies make their money. The so-called ‘sharing economy’ seems to be based on feel-good ideas about reciprocity and trust. Yet for companies like Uber, Airbnb – and for social media companies like Facebook and YouTube – it has become a new business model, which is massively profitable.

Back in the 1970s, the Canadian scholar Dallas Smythe developed the idea that the media audience was not just a collection of consumers, but also itself a kind of commodity – something that was bought and sold in the marketplace. Smythe was one of the key founders of the political economy approach to media, which focuses on the economic aspects of media production and distribution, and their political implications. The main business of the media, he argued, was ‘selling audiences to advertisers’. The actual programmes we watch or the stories we read are merely an inducement to look at the advertising. Media content, Smythe declared, was just a ‘free lunch’.

When it comes to contemporary social media, this argument needs to be extended. The business model for media companies like Facebook and Google is not just about advertising: they offer us free content, but in exchange we provide them with large amounts of valuable data about our consumer preferences and behaviour (Facebook, for instance is alleged to have an average of 98 bits of personal data on each of its users). What’s more, much of the ‘free lunch’ – the content – is stuff we bring along and cook for ourselves. There is a significant shift here in the business models of media companies, and in the behaviour of media users – and these are shifts that media teachers and students need to understand.

To some extent, we can see these social media companies as examples of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Various terms and models have been used to describe this new economy. It has been called a ‘peer-to-peer economy’ and a ‘collaborative economy’, although the most familiar term (over a decade old now) is the one I’ll be using here. My online dictionary neatly defines the sharing economy as ‘an economic system in which assets or services are shared between private individuals, either free or for a fee, typically by means of the Internet’. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this are Airbnb and Uber; but I would argue that media companies like Facebook and YouTube are using a very similar approach.

The sharing economy is a fast-growing sector: Uber, for example, has recently been valued at 60 billion US dollars, while Airbnb is worth around 30. Aside from these two well-known companies, there are many others providing a wide range of services, like car sharing (Zipcar, Lyft), help with small everyday tasks (Taskrabbit), rental of tools (Neighbourgoods), holiday homes for dogs (Dogvacay), and even money-lending (LendingClub). The sharing economy has attracted much political interest. For example, the British government’s 2015 budget contained ‘a package of measures designed to help unlock the potential of the sharing economy’; and NESTA (the leading government-funded innovation agency) has generated a range of initiatives and reports on what it calls the ‘collaborative economy’.

Sharing is a feel-good term. It implies the communal use of resources, and relationships of reciprocity, trust and mutual support. Sharing is often aligned with arguments about social justice and democracy. Potentially, it challenges waste and unnecessary consumption, through the lending or recycling of under-used resources. Sharing seems to involve openness, inclusion and equality.

Yet the sharing economy is another matter. Sharing implies non-commercial exchange between individuals, motivated by generosity or a wish to help others; but an economy is about market relationships, where goods and services are exchanged for money, and ultimately for profit. Critics of the idea argue that a sharing economy is a contradiction in terms: it’s not really sharing if people are buying and selling.

Some research has suggested that users of companies like Airbnb or Uber aren’t very interested in the warm ideas about community that such companies tend to promote in their publicity materials – they just want convenience and a cheap price. Yet such companies are not only extremely profitable: they also aim to replace public provision, and to bypass public regulation in areas like employment law, taxation, and health and safety.

The most forceful criticisms of the sharing economy can be found in Tom Slee’s book What’s Yours Is Mine. Slee has conducted detailed research on the reality behind the feel-good rhetoric of sharing. For example, Airbnb claims to offer the opportunity to ‘live like the locals’ by renting spare rooms in people’s houses; but in reality, most lenders are not individuals, but private landlords who are renting out several properties. Many critics of the company have argued that Airbnb is changing the character of city communities, as more and more people sub-let residential properties to tourist visitors.

Meanwhile, Uber claims to provide a ‘ride-sharing’ service for people with spare capacity in their cars. But in reality it is simply a digitally enabled taxi service, which bypasses regulations that official taxi services have to follow (the screening of drivers, the inspection of vehicles, employment laws) and makes it easier to avoid taxation. The company gets a large rake-off simply for maintaining a technological platform, while pushing the costs onto drivers. Such companies are also exceptionally skilful at avoiding taxation, not least by routing their profits through international companies and offshore tax havens.

Despite the popular rhetoric of caring and sharing, these are large companies backed by venture capitalists with deep pockets. This kind of ‘platform capitalism’ often requires a substantial upfront investment in the technology itself. Success in this market depends on becoming a monopoly provider of a particular service, and this means ruthless competition from the outset. Just as we automatically ‘google’ (rather than search online) for information, so many of us will ‘call an Uber’ (rather than a cab): other search engines and cab companies are available, but the aim for the companies is to dominate the market, and thereby achieve large economies of scale (because once the technology is in place, it becomes cheaper to provide for each new customer).

How does any of this relate to media? On one level, the sharing economy largely depends upon social media (in the form of the internet, apps and mobile devices) to market its services, and to develop reputations via user rating and recommendation systems. In this respect, it uses media technologies as tools. However, many of the same arguments apply to the sharing of media artefacts themselves – where the media are products rather than merely tools.

In this sense, platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Pinterest and Twitter could all be seen as examples of the sharing economy. They present themselves as services that enable the free sharing of media material (whoever produces it), but they are all commercial platforms that generate (or promise to generate) massive profits for their owners. The only notable exception to this is Wikipedia, which remains one of the very few non-commercial sharing platforms.

This kind of online sharing began in a spirit of libertarian anarchism. Early ‘peer-to-peer’ or ‘file-sharing’ networks like Napster, Kazaa and Pirate Bay were touted as a direct challenge to large capitalist media corporations – record labels, software companies, publishers – and to the restrictive copyright laws that sustained them. But today such media sharing is fundamentally dependent upon the operations of commercial internet service providers, commercial platforms and commercial search engines, which earn their money from advertising and selling user data.

This is a different kind of commercial transaction from the likes of Uber – in that money does not directly change hands – but it is a commercial transaction nonetheless. Facebook and others are definitely selling audiences to advertisers in the manner identified by Dallas Smythe – but they are also selling data about audiences as well. We ‘pay’ for these services both by viewing the advertising they carry, and by giving them access to our personal data. The service may appear to be free of charge; but in this situation, we are no longer merely consumers – we are also the product itself.

Many of the criticisms made of sharing economy companies also apply to these social media platforms. By presenting themselves merely as technology companies, they manage to evade responsibility for the content they provide, and resist any attempt at government regulation (and indeed taxation). They present themselves as innocent intermediaries or ‘middlemen’, who cannot be held to account when things go wrong. Yet Uber is not just a technology company, but a taxi company. Airbnb is not just a technology company, but an accommodation company. And likewise, Facebook is not just a technology company, but a media company.

In the case of social media, many claims have been made about the potential of technology to empower ordinary users, and to create new vehicles for self-expression. Some years back, there was great enthusiasm about ‘user-generated content’ and citizen journalism – although much of what passed as citizen journalism was little more than eyewitness testimony. Today’s media frequently solicit contributions from readers, yet this often functions as little more than a convenient source of free content.

Meanwhile, professional journalists are losing their jobs. Just as Uber is putting trained taxi drivers out of work, and Airbnb is threatening the regulated hotel industry, so the rise of user-generated content is making it harder for trained professional journalists and media producers to make a living. These new forms of ‘sharing’ have contributed to the casualisation of labour in the media industries, and the rise of the so-called ‘gig economy’. Just like Uber drivers, citizen journalists generate profits for those who publish their work, but they do not have employment rights – for example, health benefits, security of employment, or a guaranteed living wage.

In some respects, the sharing economy of social media is a replay of the well-established political economy model – but in some ways, things are changing. In order to understand this, we need to think harder about who’s doing the work, and who’s getting paid. Each click represents a means for these companies to make money. By clicking and liking and following, as well as posting and uploading content, we do the work that is necessary for these services to keep generating profit – and we do it for free.

Op Ed, Drop Dead!

The rise of the opinion columnist is one side effect of the decline of newspaper sales. But are ‘op-eds’ (opinion columns) really a substitute for genuine journalism? What are the dangers of the new ‘opinion economy’, and can they be avoided?

There’s little doubt that newspapers are dying. Late last year, a ‘briefing’ in The Week summed up the parlous state of the British press. 2016 was a bad year: The Independent ceased to exist as a print publication, and went online; while a new title called New Day, launched by Trinity Mirror, one of our leading newspaper groups, lasted just two months. The Sun, formerly the country’s most popular newspaper, has seen its circulation halved over the past six years; while the same has occurred at The Guardian, the leading liberal broadsheet. Since 2005, more than 300 UK local newspapers have closed.

UK Newspaper Circulation (Wikipedia)

Perhaps predictably, young people are the least likely age group to read newspapers, while over-55s are the most likely. A YouGov report from a few years ago predicted that newspaper readership would die out with the older generation (although it didn’t actually compare readership over time). Even so, the report found that young people were the most inclined to seek news online, including from newspaper websites: the problem, it seems, is not so much with people’s desire for news itself, but with the form of the printed newspaper.

The same appears to be true elsewhere, at least in Europe and the USA. John Oliver’s excellent satire of the situation in the US summed up some of the consequences for journalism. As its parody of the Spotlight trailer implied, the chances of old-style investigative reporting surviving in a much more commercially-driven, cost-cutting environment are pretty minimal. A few years ago, Nick Davies’ book Flat Earth News made some similar points through its detailed study of the changing working practices of British journalists. And as the Guardian’s Katharine Viner has argued, ‘clickbait’ and ‘churnalism’ – the recycling of press releases designed to attract attention online – are bound to take precedence over serious journalism.

Spotlight: A Different World?

The internet is generally seen as the culprit here, although (as The Week explained), the situation is more complex. The advertising on which newspapers depend has increasingly moved online, and online advertising on newspaper sites doesn’t make enough money to offset the decline in revenue. Most online advertising (and commercial data gathering) is in the hands of technology companies like Google and Facebook; while smaller ‘classified’ ads have now migrated to specialist websites. While some newspapers have resorted to paywalls – most notably The Times – this significantly reduces traffic, and tends to work better for upmarket specialist papers like The Financial Times.

While we might hope that journalism – across a variety of media – will survive, it’s quite possible that the physical form of the printed newspaper will not (although you might not think that as you wade through the piles of discarded freesheet papers on the London underground at the end of an evening). However, the history of media suggests that something more complex might occur. New media do not necessarily replace old media: what more often happens is that the functions of those old media – the reasons for which we use them – are subtly changed. As our repertoire of media choices widens, we tend to turn to particular media for more specific purposes.

In a world of instant communication, newspapers are less and less useful as a medium for news – that is, as a means of finding out about events that are happening right now. When there is a major news event, most of us turn to radio and 24-hour rolling news channels, and now to social media. We might read all about it the following day in the newspaper, but what we expect from newspapers now (and what we get) is rather different.

As a result, the newspaper is increasingly becoming a medium, not so much of news, but of commentary on news. More disturbingly perhaps, it is becoming a medium of opinion rather than a medium of information. I don’t have any research on this in relation to British newspapers, but my sense is that the proportion of commentary has grown while the proportion of news reporting has declined. Most newspapers continue to run ‘editorial’ columns: generally a single column, without a named author, that is seen to represent the newspaper’s position on the issues of the day. These seem to have changed very little over the years. However, what has changed is the number of authored commentaries, where a named journalist will produce a regular (often weekly) column on a range of issues that have come to their attention during the week – a practice that in the US is often called the ‘op ed’ (the page opposite the editorial). While some are focused on particular areas of content – politics, social issues, ‘women’s issues’ – many op eds seem to cover a wide range of topics.

Of course, this isn’t a new development: it goes back to the origins of the newspaper as a medium. Even so, the amount of ‘opinion journalism’ has grown over time, and the boundaries between news and opinion have become steadily blurred. With the advent of social media, we have seen the emergence of a kind of ‘opinion economy’, in which competing providers vie for readers’ attention (and the advertising revenue that follows it) by offering ever-stronger doses of opinionated prose. The claim that ‘bad news sells’ may be somewhat outdated: today, it is strong opinions that sell.

Certainly, such opinion columnists seem to have proliferated in recent years, and many have attained the status of celebrities. There are numerous examples in the British popular press: Tony Parsons, Kelvin Mackenzie, Katie Hopkins, Piers Morgan, Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips… Without exception, all of them are virulently right-wing. Of course, we might think that liberal-minded, ‘quality’ newspapers don’t do this sort of thing – but of course they do. In the newspapers I read, I am irritated on a regular weekly basis by the insistently strong opinions of the likes of Nick Cohen, Suzanne Moore, Barbara Ellen, Polly Toynbee, and several others.

These writers are members of what is sometimes called ‘the commentariat’. They are hired to generate content, typically in the form of several hundred words of opinions every week – and the stronger their opinions are, it would seem, the better. There is little space here for balance, nuance or speculation. In general, such columns are not based on journalistic research of any kind; and their writers are mostly not experts or specialists in any particular field. They are simply writers with strong personal opinions, who are considered qualified to comment on just about any issue that catches their attention. They are aptly parodied in the satirical magazine Private Eye, with their regular columnists Phil Space and Philippa Column.

There is a kind of continuum between the 500-word opinionated rants of these newspaper writers and the 140-character bursts of vitriol that can be found on Twitter. Indeed, many of these writers also broadcast their opinions on Twitter, thereby driving readers to their columns online and simultaneously generating advertising revenue. What’s required here is clickbait: sensational assertions are much more effective than accuracy or thoughtful discussion. Once readers arrive at the newspaper sites, they are further encouraged to comment ‘below the line’, adding to what often seems like a torrent of opinion – and which often seems to fan the flames of debate even further. While columnists themselves are sometimes encouraged to respond, they rarely do so.

Advocates of journalism have traditionally pointed to its role as a ‘fourth estate’ – an independent forum that holds the powerful to account. Others have argued that the press plays a major role in the modern ‘public sphere’, in which citizens come together to engage in rational debate about the issues of the day. For some enthusiasts, the internet is now the ‘networked fourth estate’, or a ‘virtual public sphere’, in which democratic political communication will thrive. Reading below the line on newspaper websites, or following some of the Twitter feeds of noted columnists, it is very hard to share such optimism.

Of course, there’s an irony here. I am blogging about this issue, and the blog is perhaps the ultimate medium of the highly opinionated. As a kind-of academic, I like to believe that this blog is a little more considered than some. But perhaps not. As the saying goes: opinions are like arseholes: everyone’s got one, and most of them stink.

Should we ban advertising to children?

A proposal currently under consideration by the European Parliament would result in a complete ban on advertising and ‘commercial communications’ targeting children. But what is the logic for such a ban – and what unintended consequences might it have, especially for children’s television?

The Audiovisual Media Services Directive, which is the key legislative instrument of European media and communications policy, is currently being revised to take account of changes in the wider media landscape. A new draft was accepted by the Commission last May, and amendments will be considered by the Culture Committee of the European Parliament in March, before returning to the full session.

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Amendment 144 is very broad in scope, but among other things, it proposes that ‘audiovisual commercial communications, during and between programmes, targeting children’s audience shall be prohibited’ [sic]. If passed in this form, the amendment will result not just in a ban on advertising to children (presumably aged under 16), but also on licensing, merchandising, sponsorship and other forms of marketing. Irrespective of Brexit, it will have significant consequences for the UK media industries.

Calls to ban advertising to children have been growing in recent years, not least in the wake of concerns about childhood obesity, which I have considered elsewhere on this blog. Yet while a ban on ‘commercial communications’ might seem to offer valuable protection to children, it is worth unpicking some of the arguments here, and considering some potential unintended consequences.

One of the problems with the debate about children and advertising is that it tends to conflate very different issues. It isn’t always clear whether the concern is about advertisers selling ‘bad’ things (junk food, for example); about the attitudes or values they may invoke in doing so (such as gender stereotypes); or about the very idea of selling things to children in the first place. In the latter case, the concern typically feeds into a broader narrative about the ‘commercialisation of childhood’, and fears of a more general cultural decline.

The call to ban advertising to children presses some powerful emotional buttons, and has appeal right across the political spectrum. For many anti-capitalist campaigners, advertising is an instrument of mass deception: it is how capitalism does its evil work. For many on the political right, it is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the modern world. Needless to say, both sides of the argument would be significantly weaker if they focused on adults: if we can claim that advertising (and the media more generally) are destroying childhood, we have framed the debate in a way that neatly undermines potential criticism.

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Yet the debate raises some complex questions about our conceptions both of childhood and of ‘commercial communications’, and of the relationships between them. We need to consider some fundamental issues here.

Firstly, why does the debate focus almost exclusively on children? And which children are we talking about here? Children are often assumed to be especially gullible when it comes to advertising, but the evidence here is very mixed. While some researchers argue that children cannot fully understand advertising before the age of twelve, others suggest that they are aware of its commercial intentions (the fact that ads are intending to sell you things) from around the age of six or seven.

Of course, we might well ask whether understanding advertising makes any difference: we can assume that adults understand these commercial intentions, but that doesn’t mean they are not influenced. Even so, it does suggest that lumping everyone under 16 together as ‘minors’ – to use the European Commission’s terminology – might be rather misguided.

Secondly, are we talking simply about advertising, or about ‘commercial communications’ more broadly? Advertising is merely part of a much wider world of commercial promotion and marketing. It makes up a declining proportion of promotional budgets, as companies increasingly use other means to get their messages across. Some of these means are fairly obvious (such as sponsorship) but others are much less overt. This is especially true of digital media like Google and Facebook, where commercial intentions may be much less apparent to users. If we consider the wider context of children’s media (the world of Harry Potter, Pokemon, Lego or Disney), the line between content, advertising and merchandising is very hard to draw: everything is effectively ‘advertising’ everything else.

When we conducted our government review of these issues some years ago, I argued that commercial forces are acting on children’s lives in all sorts of ways. The marketisation and privatization of public services in areas such as welfare provision, education and play has had significant implications for the opportunities that are available to children. Much of the evidence here suggests that these things exacerbate inequalities. Yet for some strange reason, government officials seemed reluctant for us to consider these issues…

Third, we need to consider the evidence about the effects of commercial communications. Child obesity, for example, is a complex phenomenon with multiple causes. The reasons why people are obese are partly genetic, partly about how much they exercise, and partly about diet. In the latter case, what they eat is partly influenced by advertising, but research suggests that advertising plays a relatively insignificant role. In fact, one of the biggest factors determining child obesity is poverty: poorer children are much more likely to be obese than more affluent children.

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For all their apparent concern, governments seem largely unable or unwilling to do anything about these other factors. Selling off school playing fields and privatizing leisure facilities – as UK governments have done over the past two decades – obviously reduces children’s opportunities to get exercise. Meanwhile, child poverty is growing at an alarming rate. In this context, blaming advertising provides a nice means of distracting attention from the more inconvenient issues at stake. This kind of scapegoating is apparent in many other areas of debate about children and media, not least in relation to the perennial topics of sex and violence.

Finally, we need to consider the unintended consequences of any ban on advertising to children. Of course, it would be possible to institute a ban, at least in principle. Sweden is one of very few countries that have done so, albeit only to children under twelve, and only on terrestrial TV channels. In the UK, there has been a ban in force since 2006 on advertising for foods high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) during programmes where a high proportion of children are watching.

The direct effects of these moves have been limited, however. The UK ban has reduced the amount of food ads children are exposed to, but children still see a lot of advertising during adult programmes, and especially through online and social media. The Advertising Standards Authority has recently introduced new guidelines on these latter areas, although a full-on ban seems unlikely. Meanwhile, children are surrounded by a whole range of other forms of food marketing and promotion (think about who sponsored the Olympics, for example).

More importantly, there is no evidence that banning such advertising has reduced levels of child obesity. Such evidence would be very difficult to establish in any case, but the latest statistics seem to show that obesity is rising, after having flat-lined or slightly fallen over the past decade.

However, the ban on advertising has had some very significant consequences for the production of children’s television. The problems here began with the 2003 Communications Act, which downgraded the public service quota requirements for children’s TV, meaning that commercial terrestrial broadcasters were no longer required to produce a fixed number of hours of original programming. Children’s television is expensive to produce and not especially lucrative in terms of generating advertising revenue: it is much cheaper to buy in programmes from overseas (such as US cartoons), and more profitable simply to target adults. In research conducted in the mid/late 1990s, we found that ITV – the UK’s leading commercial terrestrial broadcaster – was seriously considering abandoning children’s television production. The advent of the HFSS ban in 2006, in combination with the 2003 Act, effectively gave them the alibi to justify this.

Recent research by PACT and others clearly demonstrates the consequences of this. The production of UK-originated children’s programming is now in steep decline: over the past decade, spending on commercial terrestrial channels has declined by 95%. The BBC is now effectively the only player in this market, producing no less than 97% of UK children’s programmes – which is the very opposite of the plurality the government claims is necessary for a healthy market. Without competition, and under pressures of its own, the BBC’s expenditure on children’s programmes is now also falling. Groups within the industry have recently begun a campaign against these developments, arguing that intervention is needed to save children’s content.

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Horrid Henry, one of very few remaining ITV original commissions

Of course, there is no convincing evidence that children actually need good-quality television, any more than there is evidence that they need good-quality books. It is impossible to prove that they would somehow be harmed if their TV diet consisted entirely of wall-to-wall US cartoons or sitcoms. To argue that British children are entitled to good-quality, home-produced programmes that represent aspects of their own lives is ultimately a normative judgment about the kind of culture we want to have.

So, should we ban advertising to children? In the present situation, I don’t believe this is either necessary or realistic. The simple fact is that, outside the BBC, it is advertising that pays for children’s content. While we might fondly wish for children’s television to be publicly funded, this is most unlikely to happen: at a time when governments are privatizing the health service and the education system, it is implausible that they will give more money to public broadcasting.

If a European ban extends to licensing – for example, to programmes that feature commercial merchandise such as toys – it will completely undermine the basic business model of children’s television (including, one might add, the funding of a great deal of BBC productions, which rely on merchandising income as well). These programmes will continue to need buyers in European markets, even after Brexit. Ultimately, I would prefer us to have commercial television for children than very little children’s television at all.

There are good reasons to be concerned about children’s exposure to ‘commercial communication’, but a ban of this kind is merely a form of symbolic politics. It allows politicians to look as though they are doing something, while actually ignoring the real issues at stake. My alternative – which will come as no surprise to readers of this blog – is that we should enable children to deal with the challenges of a commercial world, rather than vainly trying to keep them away from it. For better or worse, advertising is a fact of life: we live in a commercial world, and children (like adults) need the means to understand that, to critically analyse it, and to make their own choices.

Some of these ideas were presented at a ‘citizens’ jury’ event at Warwick University. Thanks to the participants for their observations, especially Rosina Robson of PACT, and to David Rowthorn for the invitation.

Can we still teach about media bias in the post-truth age?

Bias – along with related ideas like objectivity, impartiality and balance – is a staple issue in public debates about media, and in media literacy education. Yet in the wake of the Brexit referendum campaign, the victory of Donald Trump, and the attacks on the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, many have argued that we are entering a ‘post-truth’ era. In this context, is bias still a useful and meaningful concept in media literacy education? And if so, how should we teach it?

Two weeks ago, the BBC Trust – the body that regulates the UK’s national public service broadcaster – ruled that its chief political correspondent, Laura Kuenssberg, had breached impartiality and accuracy guidelines in her reporting of a story involving the British Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Given that the Trust is not exactly the most ferocious of media regulators, the ruling might have been rather surprising; although in light of Kuenssberg’s persistent misrepresentations of Corbyn’s views, it was by no means undeserved.

In my previous post, I wrote about the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, which has continued to gather headlines. On Monday, an official UK parliamentary enquiry was announced on the topic. Yet, as I argued, the focus on fake news rather leaves aside the question of ‘non-fake’ news – the news reporting provided by professional journalists. Clearly, it is not going to be possible – even for Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page – to eradicate ‘fake news’; but even if it were, it would be a mistake to believe that this would lead to a new era of reliable, trustworthy news reporting. Indeed, in some respects, the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and claims about ‘alternative facts’ places an even greater responsibility on professional journalists.

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Famously, ‘post-truth’ was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016. The editors defined it as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. As this implies, the term post-truth represents a critical, even sarcastic, claim about the world, rather than a celebratory one. It describes a situation in which politicians in particular have not only made false promises or tried to manipulate public debate, but actually told outright lies, and managed to do so with impunity. While this is most apparent with Trump – as in his claims about climate change or voter fraud, or about Obama’s place of birth – there have been similar instances in the Brexit campaign, and in the challenges to Corbyn’s leadership.

One leading UK figure in this respect – and one of the first British politicians to meet with Trump after his election – is the former Education and Justice Secretary, Michael Gove. Gove was party to the false claim made during the Brexit campaign that Britain was paying £350 million a week to the EU, and that after Brexit this money would be diverted into the National Health Service. When challenged by leading economists, Gove claimed that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ – as though established sources of knowledge carried no weight against the superior wisdom of ‘the people’.

It may not come as a surprise to readers of this blog if I admit that I voted for Jeremy Corbyn, and that I remain a (somewhat ambivalent) supporter. Yet in claiming that Corbyn has been subject to a campaign of biased media coverage from the outset – not just in the right-wing press, but also in more ‘liberal’ news outlets such as the Guardian and the BBC – I am not simply giving voice to my own bias. The BBC Trust ruling confirms what several people have been arguing for some time about the BBC’s coverage, and specifically about Laura Kuenssberg.

About six months ago, the London School of Economics published a detailed research report that substantiated such claims, at least as regards the newspapers. Of course, there are bound to be questions raised about such research. The researchers used content analysis to calculate the proportions of positive and negative stories. Yet what counts as positive or negative obviously depends upon the reader’s existing views; and enumerating negative comments does not in itself tell us anything about their overall meaning, let alone their effects.

Counting instances of bias is also much easier in situations where there is a straightforward binary choice – are we for or against Corbyn, or Brexit? – but it is obviously much harder when it comes to more complex issues. Even such seemingly simple choices play out against a background of wider social and political issues: so how we understand Corbyn’s line on nuclear missiles, for example, calls into question how we understand Britain’s place and status in the world.

Even so, it is impossible to deny that newspapers like the Sun, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail have systematically ridiculed and vilified Corbyn. In some instances, this has involved manipulation and misrepresentation of a kind that definitely amounts to ‘fake news’: the story about Corbyn apparently ‘dancing a jig’ while on his way to a memorial service at the Cenotaph in London comes to mind. ‘Quality’ newspapers like the Telegraph or the Times may be less crude and blatant in their approach; but apparently neutral, factual reports in such papers are often designed to press particular readers’ buttons.

As the media academic Robert Entman has argued, bias is ‘a curiously undertheorized staple of public discourse about the media’. Like ‘stereotype’, it is a commonsense concept that frequently recurs in everyday discussion. We might wish to replace it with something more academically ‘theorized’, or at least more precise; while some might argue that it is simply old-fashioned and irrelevant in a ‘post-truth’ era. Yet the idea is unlikely to disappear. Accusations of bias remain a persistent charge in debates about news media, and they have recurred throughout the debate about ‘fake news’. Ultimately, bias remains a useful umbrella term, although it is one that teachers and students need to work with and interrogate.

So what might we teach about media bias? Firstly, like other key concepts in media theory, we need to question and problematise the idea. Alongside bias, there is a cluster of terms that are frequently used interchangeably, such as objectivity, impartiality, fairness and balance. Yet while these terms may overlap, they do not mean exactly the same thing. Carefully separating these out, and looking at instances of each, would seem to be a necessary first step. There are several taxonomies of types of media bias that might be useful here – although again, they need to be used carefully and critically.

At the same time, we need to recognize the inevitability of bias. What we perceive as bias in the first place obviously depends upon our own biases – our own prejudices, assumptions or preconceptions. In the age of the ‘filter bubble’, there is a risk that this is becoming easier to ignore. We are increasingly able to select and customise our media environment in ways that are likely to confirm those biases. Encouraging students to reflect on their own media practices in this respect, and the sources of their own information and judgments, would help to illuminate the complexities at stake.

Secondly, we need to refine the idea of bias in order to apply it to a wider range of situations. Bias may be evident not just in overt commentary, but also (and perhaps more powerfully) in what a given report chooses to focus on and to ignore. It may be apparent in the connections that are made (explicitly or implicitly) across news stories, and in how key topics are defined in the first place. There is bound to be bias in how the news agenda is set – in what is seen to count as news in the first place – and in how particular topics are framed or defined – that is, what is included or excluded from consideration, or what is seen to be relevant or irrelevant. These two ideas – agenda-setting and framing – have generated considerable amounts of research. One could well argue that these less overt forms of bias are actually more influential, because they are harder for readers to notice, and hence to resist.

Thirdly, there is the issue of how we understand the institutional causes of bias. In some instances, bias may be a result of the direct interference of media owners or proprietors – most notoriously, of course, Rupert Murdoch. Yet this kind of institutional bias is often less direct: it is about the ‘culture’ of a news organisation, and how its staff are encouraged to behave. It may also reflect what the owners and the employees believe about the relationship between the institution and its audience. Journalists often argue that the bias of their own reporting simply reflects that of their readers. In this sense, there can be an economic motivation for bias: people will not pay to consume things that conflict with their own biases. Bias sells.

Institutional connections across and between media are also important here. Bias in one medium may well be reinforced by other media: even if specific positions vary, the overall agenda that is set is frequently shared, as news organizations compete with each other. However, it is important to beware of a monolithic view of media – epitomized by the blanket term ‘mainstream media’ (MSM). This term is becoming increasingly fashionable, not only on the political left (among supporters of Corbyn, for example), but also on the right: Donald Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon has apparently referred to the ’mainstream media’ as the new administration’s ‘opposition party’.

mainstream-media

This idea seems to rest on a very old-fashioned, conspiratorial account of the media simply brainwashing the masses. It assumes that ‘The Media’ are all the same; and it also implies that something preferable (the truth, perhaps) is only to be found outside the mainstream. Some on the Left – including some of Jeremy Corbyn’s media strategists – look to social media as a more effective vehicle for progressive ideas, ignoring the fact that the political Right (and not least Trump) have used such media with considerable success. Meanwhile, there’s a new irony as some are now looking to the same mainstream media to correct the excesses (fake news, hate speech) of social media.

I believe we can and should still teach about media bias. The changing political and media context – the so-called ‘post-truth’ age – makes this more complex and problematic, but it also makes it more necessary. However, it is important to avoid simply blaming the media, or overestimating their power. Aside from anything else, this can lead to a situation where the mediation of politics comes to be seen as more important than politics itself. In the process, the apparent lack of media appeal of particular politicians (such as Corbyn) is seen to define their electability – as if getting the packaging and presentation right is the fundamental issue. Ultimately, such arguments reinforce a generalized distrust and cynicism that is increasingly shared across the political spectrum. It’s not something I would regard as a good outcome for media literacy education.

Fake news: is media literacy the answer?

Growing concerns about ‘fake news’ have led to calls for young people to be taught critical media literacy skills. Yet while media literacy would obviously be useful, it isn’t enough to address the problem. Media educators need to frame the issue more broadly, and join forces with those calling for media reform.

My apologies for the length of this post (believe me, I’m trying). I hope it won’t take you more than ten minutes to read.

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump, there has been considerable debate about the problem of so-called ‘fake news’. Trump’s opponents have accused his supporters – including the Russian government – of circulating fabricated news stories in order to gain support. Yet Trump himself has frequently used the term to discredit what he claims is false information about him.

The problem is somewhat less evident here in the UK, although the Brexit campaign and the attempts to unseat Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader have raised similar issues about media bias and misrepresentation. There may have been fewer outright lies, but there have been plenty of examples of the media – and, of course, of politicians themselves – manipulating the truth.

Back in 1710, the satirist Jonathan Swift noted that ‘falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.’ ‘Fake news’ has always been with us. Yet developments in technology, and in the wider media landscape, are undoubtedly making it a more urgent problem.

The dangers of fake news are fairly self-evident. The democratic political process depends upon the circulation of reliable information. If information can no longer be trusted, citizens have little basis on which to make political decisions. As such, there is now high-level concern about fake news among governments around the world. Barack Obama has gone so far as to describe it as a threat to democracy.

In the US in particular, there has been an interesting debate about the potential of media literacy education in this respect. Some difficult issues are at stake here – about trust and credibility, about epistemology (what’s fake? what’s truth?), about the role of educators, and about public knowledge more broadly.

These are not new issues for media educators. Media Studies teaching (at least in the UK) has always addressed questions about news bias and representation – to the point where it almost seems like an old-fashioned concern. The advent of the internet raised new questions about credibility, and about the need for information literacy: yet these have also been on the agenda for educators for many years.

Nor are these issues confined to new media. They also apply to ‘old’ media, and to the behaviour of politicians themselves. Politicians have always made false claims, and indeed told blatant lies – although the success of people like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson would suggest that they are increasingly able to get away with it.

Yet while these may be well-established phenomena, they are taking on a new form in the digital age. Social media has made it much easier for lies and misinformation to be circulated from person to person, bypassing the gatekeepers and regulators who controlled old media. So what is the role of media literacy education in what some are calling this ‘post-truth’ era?

What is fake news?

Most simply, fake news is news that is fabricated, and deliberately intended to mislead or deceive. As such, it’s important to distinguish it from satirical parodies of news (sites such as The Onion in the US) – although some readers may not always appreciate this distinction. Fake news typically appears on sites that masquerade as genuine news sites, although it is often picked up and re-circulated by mainstream media.

Fake news often has a political dimension: it is intended as a form of misinformation or propaganda that is designed to exert political influence. It may even constitute a form of ‘cyberwarfare’ between nations (although again, the history of the Cold War suggests that such activities are far from new).

However, in some cases, it may have a primarily economic motivation. Fake news often functions as ‘clickbait’, which will generate revenue thorough advertising and the selling of user data. Networking services – and in particular Facebook – will do most of this work for you: their entire business model depends upon it. As such, the fake news phenomenon needs to be understood in relation to the wider political economy of the internet.

These political and economic motivations may also be blurred. Although the Russian government may have been involved, much of the pro-Trump fake news generated during the 2016 election campaign apparently came from a cluster of sites run by teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles. These entrepreneurial young people claimed that they were making easy money simply giving Trump supporters what they wanted to hear.

There are now so many examples of fake news stories – Wikipedia has an interesting list – that it is bound to become harder to identify them, or to tell fake from true. Of course, many are blatantly and obviously absurd. Perhaps my favourite example was the spoof story about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un being voted the sexiest man alive. The story was posted on the US satirical site The Onion in 2012, but it was taken up by the official newspaper the China People’s Daily, which featured a 55-page photo spread on its website.

However, there are limits to such absurdity. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, the so-called ‘Pizzagate’ story made ludicrous claims that Hillary Clinton was involved in a paedophile sex trafficking ring run out of a Washington restaurant. Yet the laughter turned sour when a Trump supporter turned up at the pizza parlour firing an automatic weapon.

While there is little doubt that fake news was used extensively in support of Trump’s campaign, and is particularly driven by the political right, the charge runs across the political spectrum. Return of Kings is just one extreme right-wing site that identifies ‘fake news’ purportedly circulated by so-called liberal media. Trump’s latest claim that the US Intelligence Services have been circulating fake news about his exploits in Russian hotel rooms is a further example. It may have already happened, but in the near future we are bound to see fake news stories about fake news.

In some ways, the debate about fake news can be seen as a further deflation of the bubble of internet hype – especially the idea that networked technology would lead to a flowering of civic participation and democratic engagement. While some of us were sceptical about such claims from the outset, others – including early technology enthusiasts such as Timothy Wu and Wired magazine – have taken a little longer to get there.

While such technology might well be a great resource for progressive political activists, our research showed that it is also a valuable tool for anti-democratic forces, including the resurgent extreme right and those who peddle racism and other forms of abuse. The so-called ‘alt-right’ can also play the game of creating memes, optimizing search engines, trolling and tagging and going viral. Indeed, present evidence would suggest that they are much better at these things than those on the political left.

Technical solutions

Potentially, there are various ways of dealing with the problem of fake news. As with other problematic aspects of online content, such as pornography, some have called for a system of labeling. Sites might be encouraged – or even required – to obtain some kind of official certificate of approval from fact-checkers. ‘White lists’ of trustworthy sites might be established, or repeat offenders warned and then taken down by internet service providers.

Such responses would clearly require collaboration on the part of the technology companies. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg initially denied that his company had anything to do with the spread of fake news, although he has subsequently backtracked a little. Facebook has undertaken to block advertising by self-evidently fraudulent sites, and Google has claimed it will do this via its Adsense service. Facebook has also partnered with fact-checking websites on an initiative that will tag articles whose veracity is ‘disputed’.

However, any further steps along these lines seem unlikely. Such actions would imply that these companies are not merely technology companies, but media companies – and this is something they are very keen to avoid. Requiring them to take responsibility for content would completely undermine their basic economic model, which is premised on the claim that they are simply technological services that users are free to use in any way they choose.

Media literacy

With governments unlikely or unwilling to challenge this free-market argument, commentators often look to media literacy education as some kind of alternative solution. For example, when a recent study by researchers at Stanford University found that most young people were unable to distinguish between real and fake news, there were calls for them to be taught ‘internet literacy’. (It’s not clear why this argument applied only to young people, but we can let that pass…). The influential website Vice, for example, ran the headline: ‘we need to teach kids how to be skeptical of the internet’.

Most media literacy educators are likely to respond to this with a degree of weariness. Duh! Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do for decades – despite fact that we have been consistently marginalized within the mainstream curriculum?

Yet there is a broader problem here. Media literacy is often invoked in a spirit of ‘solutionism’. When media regulation seems impossible, media literacy is often seen as the acceptable answer – and indeed a magical panacea – for all media-related social and psychological ills. Are you worried about violence, sexualisation, obesity, drugs, consumerism? Media literacy is the answer! Let the teachers deal with it!

This argument clearly frames media literacy as a protectionist enterprise, a kind of prophylactic. It oversimplifies the problems it purports to address, overstates the influence of media on young people, and underestimates the complexity of media education. Thus, violence in society is not simply caused by media violence, and it will not be reduced by simply telling kids that movies are teaching them the wrong lessons – or indeed by stopping them watching TV, as some propose.

Similar arguments apply to fake news. Fake news is a symptom of much broader tendencies in the worlds of politics and media. People (and not just children) may be inclined to believe it for quite complex reasons. And we can’t stop them believing it just by encouraging them to check the facts, or think rationally about the issues.

Of course, this is not to say we shouldn’t try. The US media educator Frank Baker has assiduously gathered a set of checklists and recommendations for educators trying to tackle fake news in the classroom. Students are encouraged to cross-check online information, to verify and compare sources, to analyse the design and construction of sites, to check the provenance of the material, and to think about the producers’ motivations. There are several lesson plans and videos on Frank’s site, many of them undoubtedly useful.

However, there has also been some debate about the role of media literacy here. Microsoft’s Danah Boyd has claimed that, far from being any kind of solution, media literacy might actually be the cause of the fake news problem – a strange and muddled argument that has understandably exasperated practitioners.

However, there have been some other contributions that point to the need for a broader view. They argue that fake news is merely a manifestation of much broader problems, that apply to ‘real’ news as well; and that while media literacy is obviously important to pursue, it might not prove to be a sufficient solution. So what are the problems here?

Problems with media literacy

Firstly, there are some significant pedagogical problems in how we might deal with fake news in the classroom. Assessing the reliability and credibility of sources is arguably much more difficult with online media than used to be the case with ‘old’ media, although this is something that experienced media educators can probably handle. However, in this case, judging truth and falsehood must depend to some extent on knowing about content as well as form – understanding the topics at hand, rather than just how they are presented. This is particularly hard in a context where most of one’s students are unlikely to be interested in political or social issues, let alone knowledgeable about them (although again, this applies to adults just as much as young people).

Even if these critical skills can be cultivated, there is a further question about how far they will actually be applied outside the classroom. How many people are willing to routinely evaluate the reliability of online sources, or to cross-check information – especially in an age when we have become used to instant access to information? Personally, I am sorry to say that I rarely do this, and I doubt that I could persuade an average sixteen-year-old student to do so either.

Beyond this, there is the problem of epistemology. You don’t have to be a complete relativist to acknowledge that a given ‘fact’ can be interpreted in many different ways by different people in different contexts. There are some absolute truths and some absolute falsehoods, but between them lies a very large grey area.

And interpretation is a complicated business. As Maha Bali has pointed out, ‘real’ news often requires a great deal of critical and emotional energy to deal with. As such, discerning true from false – or, rather, identifying and coming to terms with the elements of truth and falsehood in most representations of the world – may only be the beginning of a much more complex educational journey.

There’s a danger here of assuming that we are dealing with a rational process – or at least one that can, by some pedagogical means, be made rational. But from an educational perspective, we surely have to begin with the question of why people might believe apparently ‘fake’ news in the first place. By no means all media use is rational. Where we decide to place our trust is as much to do with fantasy, emotion and desire, as with rational calculation. All of us are inclined to believe what we want to believe.

This is arguably much more complex at time when we can exercise much greater control over the media and sources to which we are exposed. In terms of digital media, this has led to growing concerns about the ‘filter bubble’, or the ‘echo chamber effect’. We can easily filter out things we dislike or do not agree with, and thereby remain in a comfortable world where everything appears to confirm our existing world-view. Research suggests that people positively want to remain in such filter bubbles – and, more generally, that news that plays to already-established positions or prejudices is much more inclined to be ‘liked’ (and hence to generate more income for social media companies). While this is partly a consequence of the proliferation and fragmentation of media, it is also a symptom of growing political polarization, and of diminishing trust in authority much more broadly.

False beliefs may derive from exposure to fake news, or be simply reconfirmed by it. But either way, it seems unlikely that they will be easily dispelled by a good dose of facts, or the force of rational argument. The history of media education certainly tells us this. Racism, for example, is unlikely to be dispelled by appeals to rationality, or by critically analyzing racism in the media. Indeed, it often proves extremely resistant to such teacherly strategies.

There is a further danger here, which media literacy education can easily play into. A critical perspective can easily slide into a generalized, superficial cynicism – a blanket distrust of everything and everyone, and especially of the media. This might appear nihilistic, but it is also quite a comforting position to adopt; and it is a stance that unites conspiracy theorists of all political persuasions.

Ultimately, media literacy is an individualistic solution. Policy makers accept, however regretfully, that the media are not doing a good job in informing citizens and promoting democracy, and that regulating them is impossible. And so they pass responsibility down to the individual consumer: it’s their problem to sort it out.

I have argued elsewhere that this approach informs many governmental endorsements of media literacy, and the work of regulatory bodies: it is key to understanding the history of media literacy policy in the UK, for example. While it appears to be about empowering consumers, it effectively absolves governments of responsibility for addressing problems that arise in a media landscape that is increasingly driven by the imperatives of the free market.

I am not arguing that media literacy is not the answer – or at least an answer – but simply that it is not enough on its own. Media literacy needs to be linked to wider campaigns for media reform. This is partly about professional practices. As Charlie Beckett has argued, there is now a growing need for professional journalists to be more sceptical, and more explicit, in their use of evidence, and more transparent themselves. Especially in the era of President Trump, mainstream journalism has a much greater responsibility to perform its traditional role of ‘speaking truth to power’.

However, there is a broader challenge posed by the ‘non-professional’ journalism of social media. As Evgeny Morozov argues, fake news ultimately exists because of the business model of what he calls ‘digital capitalism’: it exists because it’s profitable. If we want to challenge fake news, we have to challenge the enormous power of digital advertising and the global companies that thrive on it.

Like Paul Mason, Morozov calls for better government regulation, and ultimately for the break-up of the big data companies. This might seem an unlikely outcome, perhaps. But surely understanding this bigger picture is what critical media literacy education should be all about…