Articles
Beware the Anti-Media Literacy Lobbyists
February 1, 2004
Chris M. Worsnop
Beware the Anti-Media Literacy Lobbyists
Neil Seeman of the Fraser Institute has issued a brief article http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/admin/books/chapterfiles/Beware%20the%20Media%20Literacy%20Police-Jan04ffseeman.pdf
entitled "Beware the Media Literacy Police" which claims to have discovered a conspiracy in education circles aimed at teaching students that the right wing way of interpreting the world is not the only way. Seeman sinks to the level of slinging mud at media literacy by describing it as an initiative to "wage war against capitalism".
Nobody should be surprised that, coming from the Fraser Institute, this screed bases its central argument upon the assumption that right-wing ways of viewing the world are natural and sensible. By extension it assumes any other ways of viewing the world to be unnatural and not sensible. By further extension it proposes that these so-called unnatural and senseless ways of viewing the world ought not to be allowed in society, let alone within the educational system. Seeman seems confident in his assumption that governments should protect capitalism from scrutiny, and certainly from criticism.
He seems to be reviving the Cold War practice of looking for communists under every bed. Both Seeman and the Institute of which he is a fellow display naïve oblivion to the fact that their own publications are very highly politically-charged. They issue shrill complaints that others explore political philosophies that might be at variance with their own, and accuse them of preaching politics, while blissfully delivering their own political sermons as an antidote. They seem puzzled that governments do not adopt the Fraser Institute’s view of the world as government policy.
The huge logical leap performed by the Fraser Institute in its argument against media literacy lies in the assumption that those parts of the school curriculum that include analytical and critical theory originating among left-wing scholars actually have the intention of recruiting students into left-wing thought. [Let us ignore the fact that the purpose of the Fraser Institute is to recruit people into right wing thought, or that other parts of the school curriculum, such as business studies, may well have the same agenda as the Fraser Institute.]
Anybody who has spent any time observing media education classes - and it is painfully clear that Neil Seeman has rarely if ever set foot in a media classroom - will note that students are encouraged to exercise a broad range of critical and analytical skills not just one set. In short, unlike the Fraser Institute, media teachers do not believe in teaching polemics. Media students are taught how to discover the ideological and political messages that reside within all media messages. Media teachers believe that students should become adept at identifying political and ideological bias of all stripes wherever they encounter it, whether in the writings of the Fraser Institute or of Noam Chomsky. The Fraser Institute, it seems, would prefer that students not be allowed to study Noam Chomsky at all, except perhaps as an exercise in finding Chomsky's political and ideological errors.
Good media education courses do not focus on propagandizing students into a single way of thinking. They provide students with a broad range of critical and analytical skills to help them make their own choices and decisions about the ideological and political messages surrounding them in 21st-century culture, whether it be Survivor or Masterpeice Theater. Media education teachers focus on respecting students' choices and decisions regardless of their orientation, provided those choices and decisions are well formed and properly supported.
Neil Seeman accuses media educators of "anti-corporate muckraking", a charge that may contain a note of irony in these days of apparent corporate and governmental corruption. One needs only to mention a few names (Parmalat, Enron, Hollinger, the Federal Liberal Government "sponsorship" scandal) to illustrate this point. It would be interesting to debate with Seeman if he believes that the Federal Liberal Government should be open for scrutiny and criticism, but not the corporations.
With simplistic logic, Seeman argues that media literacy displaces instruction in the curriculum for reading and writing. Long live the good old “either or" argument! Seeman wants his readers to believe that 21st-century culture contains only one important kind of literacy - print literacy. Media teachers do not deny for a moment that print literacy is important, and they give every support to the teaching of print literacy. They also point out, though, that 21st-century culture is not as strongly rooted in print as was the culture of earlier centuries. 19th and 20th Century developments of radio, film, recording, mass production and advertising, television, computers, the Internet have all impacted upon the culture of our time to the point where a huge proportion of the information we are exposed to is screen-based not paper-based; image-based not word-based.
The reason that reading and writing were so strongly embedded in the school curriculum in the 19th-century was that the culture at that time was almost exclusively founded in print. In a time when the base of our culture has expanded so greatly, we can not claim to be studying our culture unless we provide a prominent place in the school curriculum - beside print, not instead of it- for the kinds of literacy needed to understand the new media. The old rationale was that everyone should learn to be the master of language, or else they would be doomed to be its servants. The modern rationale merely adds the new media into the slogan beside language - not in place of language.
So what is this conspiracy that media literacy threatens? Is it a conspiracy to use up time in the school program so that students will not be able to learn reading and writing? Is it a conspiracy to train a generation of students into left-wing philosophies that will drive them to the barricades to fight against corporate capitalism? Or is it perhaps a campaign to equip young people of the 21st-century with the skills, knowledge and insights they need to be able to live in and understand the broad-based culture of their own society without becoming the servants of that culture?
In the spirit of good media education learning, individuals should examine both the arguments put forward by the Fraser Institute and the ones voiced here and come to their own, best-informed conclusions.
© 2004 Chris M. Worsnop
Chris Worsnop is a former member of the Executive of the Association for Media Literacy.