Fake News or News With A Purpose
Finding The Facts in News With A Motive
Critical literacy is perhaps the hardest level of literacy to achieve. Critical literacy refers to one’s ability to identify a source, that source’s biases may be, whether or not that source is credible, etc. One must then be able to apply their deductions about the source to their use of the information provided by it. To make this less abstract, a critically literate person should be able to identify that I am the author of this article, that I am writing it for a class and that my life perspectives, the goals of this specific class, my place as a student, the audience I am writing for, etc., all greatly affect the actual information provided in this paper and can be reasoned to make me more or less credible.
In David Foster Wallace’s video, “This is Water,” (linked above) he discusses questioning the blind certainties you may not even know you have. This ties into my definition of critical literacy as identifying a source and the way that source affects information. A student may blindly believe an article published in a scholarly journal or an account of an event in a textbook or primary source. This student would not be critically literate. The student who sees that the person writing a textbook chooses to leave out some information, is writing for a specific audience and is trying to portray an immense amount of history in one, condensed book, and knows to question the information and perspective provided, is the critically literate student. How do students act critically literate, then? By questioning even the things that most ignore, by seeing and acknowledging the underlying information.
Figure 1 provides simple steps for how a student can be critically literate. It is from an article about critical literacy, published by MiddleWeb, a site geared primarily towards middle school teachers (Beers, Probst). This cartoon provides three questions to ask oneself while critically analyzing media: “What does it say? How does it look? How does it make me feel?” These are the questions students must be able to answer and understand in order to be critically literate. What is the source telling you? What language is being used, what is the main argument being made, why is this media being produced in the first place and who or what is producing this media? The answers to these questions allow students to understand the author’s purpose and how it affects the writing. The follow-up questions stand to further remind students that every media has a purpose. The way something is portrayed influences the way we think of it.
In the case of Brett Kavanaugh, CNN portrayed him as a hostile man, while Fox News showed a much calmer side. Different pictures were provided and different wording was used. Is either site providing the audience with fake news? Not necessarily. Instead, they are providing one side of the news. It is the job of the audience, the student, to successfully ask and answer these questions (Figure 1) in order to identify the biases and know how much information to take at face value.
Critical literacy in today’s world requires that one must be able to identify biases of many different multimodal sources (Literacy Daily). Students who wish to employ critically literacy must keep in mind that they should be able to analyze the sources of more than just news articles and primary sources. They must recognize that photographs, art, videos, movies, etc., all have an author or authors and must be critically analyzed to determine the biases and credibility of the source itself.
In the Harste article, “The Art of Learning to Be Critically Literate,” the author reminds us that students also need to be aware of the impression that their own media gives to other people. Students can be intelligent, critically literate people and forget that they are the author of their own posts, that they have a purpose for posting this media and that their audience may interpret their post differently than intended. Not only must students actively be critically literate as an audience member but, as an author or source, too. Students should analyze their own posts and the possible perspectives that others may have of their post to avoid misinterpretation.
Sources:
Harste, J. C. (2014). The Art of Learning to Be Critically Literate. Language Arts,92(2). Retrieved from https://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/LA/0922-nov2014/LA0922Art.pdf.
J. (n.d.). Jamie Sullivan. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv2iG3NjpQiZRSmxrdeU7rQ
Outside Sources
Beers/Probst: Fake News & Responsible Reading. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.middleweb.com/35047/beersprobst-responsible-reading-and-fake-news/
Literacy Daily. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2016/12/09/multimodality-as-a-critical-element-of-today-s-textsRequired Readings
