​Thinking Critically About Media Messages


Telling fact from fiction has become increasingly difficult in the age of filter bubbles, echo chambers and misinformation. When today's rely on social media to be their main source of news, the need to teach face checking skills is greater than ever.  Stanford History Group developed 3 key questions to fact check information online. 
  • Who's behind the information?
  • What are others saying?
  • What's the evidence?
View an in depth analysis of a lesson from the Stanford History Group here. 

As you can see Media Information Literacy can take many forms. Regardless of the subject and grade level you teach, a critical pedagogy of media and information literacy education is analyzing and evaluating media messages. Developing a criteria with guiding questions to prompt student thinking is an effective method to scaffold this process for students. The Center for Media Literacy suggests Five Core Concepts as a starting point.
  1. All Media Messages Are “Constructed”
    Whether it’s the morning newspaper, a hip-hop video, or the image of a young woman on a magazine cover: they’re all constructed.
  2. Media Messages Are Constructed Using a Creative Language with Its Own Rules
    ​Each new medium or technology brings a new vocabulary, for example the language of film.
  3. Different People Experience the Same Media Message Differently
    The headline “Paris Liberated” might be interpreted by an older person to mean World War II, but might also mean “Paris Hilton getting out of jail” to someone younger.
  4. Media Have Embedded Values and Points of View
    The image of President Bush with a dunce cap, sitting on a stool in the corner of the room (on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine) reveals much about the point of view of the publication.
  5. Most Media Messages Are Organized to Gain Profit and/or Power
    In 1983, fifty corporations controlled the majority of American media; by 2004 that number was four. What are the ramifications if only four companies control much of what you see, read and hear?

    (Thoman & Jolls, 2003, p. 18)​
Explore some of the additional resources below. What ideas seem to be recurring throughout? How might you adapt these resources based on the needs of your students and the subject matter you teach to develop a classroom resource of your own?
When students have been taught how to use digital tools to be active, critical consumers they are better equipped to navigate their digital lives. They approach media with a healthy dose of skepticism. This leads to better decision making. In a democratic society, everyone benefits from better decision making. Digital annotation tools also engage students in close and critical reading skills which scaffold reading informational text and improve comprehension overall. Digital annotation tools can slow down the process of consuming media. The annotation process chunks the media message for students. Highlighting and annotating different forms of media essentially chunks the media message. When students engage in practice deconstructing media, they begin to see that all media messages are constructed to achieve a desired purpose. 

Consider the type of media you would like to start modeling the process of deconstructing for your students. Explore a digital tool that supports the type of media desired as well as the needs of your students.
For more ideas on how to use digital annotation tools in the classroom, check out
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Media Literacy Across the Content Areas
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Analyzing Media Messages