The National Association for Media Literacy Education
The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) is a professional association for educators, academics, activists, and students with a passion for understanding how the media we use and are created to affect our lives and the lives of others in our communities and in the world.
CML empowers people to be critical thinkers and makers, effective communicators and active citizens. It represents a necessary, inevitable, and realistic response to the complex, ever-changing electronic environment and communication cornucopia that surround us.
NAMLE enunciates six key principles of Media Education (ME), namely which:
(a) requires active inquiry and critical thinking about the messages we receive and create.
(b) expands the print age concept of to include all forms of media.
(c) builds and reinforces skills including print for learners of all ages skills required for integrated, interactive, and repeated practice,
(d) develops informed, reflective and engaged participants as a prerequisite for a democracy.
(e) recognises that media are a part of culture and function as agents of socialisation.
(f) affirms that people use their individual skills, beliefs and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages.
In parallel with academics several prominent organisations have made invaluable contributions to the articulations of critical media. The association’s project to transform the 21st learning and teaching pedagogy from kindergarten to andragogy for college to ensure that people of all ages become critical thinkers, effective communicators and active citizens in today’s world is highly acclaimed. The underlying aims of the Centre are to enable people to detect and understand all forms of communication. It is ‘inevitable and a realistic response necessitated by’ the complex, ever-changing electronic environment and communication cornucopia’. (NAMLE)
This resource is dedicated to providing ‘leadership, public education, professional development and evidence-based educational resources’ globally. It fosters media education as a framework for accessing, analysing, evaluating, creating and participating with media content by imparting CT and media production skills to the young to enable them to actively participate in 21st century media culture. Its guiding philosophy is based on a trinity of concepts to scaffold its vision of ‘Empowerment through Education”:
(1) Media literacy is education for life in a global media world. This traditional skill ensures that individuals can participate fully as engaged citizens and functioning adults in culture and society characterised by multi-modal SM and multimedia.
(2) The heart of media is informed inquiry is pivotal on a four-step model of inquisitorial process of: (a) Awareness which is conditional on having access to pluralistic sources of information, (b) Analysis involves exploring how different media’s messages are constructed, (c) Reflection requires the ability to evaluate media content. (d) Action requires the ability to produce, express and share media content with a media lens to help young people acquire an empowering set of ‘navigational’ skills to participate in a global media culture.
(3) Media literacy is an alternative to censoring, boycotting or blaming ‘the media.’ Embracing the principles of First Amendment and freedom of expression media stimulates independent thinking and critical dispositions as an ultimate media education goal to enable the citizens to make informed decisions and choices.
News Literacy Project
The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan education nonprofit founded in 2008 is a dedicated initiative to promote news literacy competence to boost public appreciation and understanding of news stories. “News literacy is the ability to determine the credibility of news and other information and to recognise the standards of fact-based journalism to know what to trust, share and act on”
Professional journalists, trainee journalists as well as the audience need to be exposed to core competencies to identify essential questions, knowledge and skills for planning. This includes the ability to identify credible information, recognise and avoid misinformation, and appreciate the role that a free and independent press plays in a robust democracy. Individuals need to learn an effective approach to evaluating bias; and review several core fact-checking and digital verification techniques that are quick and easy for students to apply.
Key objectives : Define news literacy and develop an understanding of the field’s core competencies. Learn the importance of teaching students to distinguish between different kinds of information according to primary purpose:
- Analyse signs of credibility in news sources.
- Evaluate online claims using verification skills.
- Discuss how to help students reflect on and cultivate healthy media habits.
- Describe signs of credibility in journalism.
- Analyse how “red flags” that violate standards of quality journalism appear in questionable sources.
- Consider resources for incorporating standards of quality journalism in learning experiences.
What Makes News Biased, And Who Decides?
What role do our own biases play in our perceptions of bias?
It is vital that you grasp this perennial topic as it disfranchises citizens to meaningfully evaluate the fairness and impartiality of news coverage. Reflect on the ideal of avoiding bias as a standard of quality journalism.
Analyse actual examples of news and other information and reflect on the nuanced, highly subjective nature of perceived bias in news. New bias is determined by the three actors:
- Audiences: Personal beliefs and confirmation bias heavily influence perceptions. People may label a report as biased simply because it challenges their worldview.
- News Organisations: Editorial policies, ownership (e.g., corporate interests), and journalist backgrounds shape coverage. For example, outlets with partisan leanings may highlight stories aligning with their ideology.
- Third-Party Evaluators: Platforms use methodologies to rate political bias and reliability. These charts, however, are critiqued for oversimplifying complex issues and ignoring nuances like regional reporting differences
Explore the limitations of popular media bias charts and rating systems:
- Review how algorithms shape the information we see and find online. Explore the impact of social media companies’ use of data and algorithms to personalize information and online experiences to sell targeted ads in today’s “attention economy.”
- Understand key concepts in generative AI, including large language models (chatbots) and image generators.
- Detect AI-generated content and verify authentic content with various resources and examples that you can use directly with students
The Council of Europe, the European Commission Group of Experts, the European Media Charter, OFCOM, OECD, EBU and a number of media regulation organisations.) In conjunction with some researchers’ concerns for the role of education in delivering critical media, the contribution of the voluntary sector in inducting students and citizens into dialectic culture is evident.
In Europe the term media education ‘as used through 1990s by the scholars, policymakers and practitioners ‘who defined it as “providing the critical knowledge and the analytical tools that will empower media consumers to function as autonomous and rational citizens.” (Khan, 2008).
These concepts emphasise the relationship between authors and audiences, messages and meanings, and representation and reality. Among educational practitioners and scholars, an interest in media pedagogy has developed to explore how critical analysis of media texts, tools and technologies is integrated into elementary, secondary and higher education, as well as in libraries, museums and other informal learning settings.(CoE – Council of Europe Report, (2017)
The European Charter of Media Literacy 21, has cited seven areas of competencies (or uses) related to media:
Use media technologies effectively to access, store, retrieve and share content to meet their individual and community needs and interests.
- Gain access to, and make informed choices about, a wide range of media forms and content from different cultural and institutional sources.
- Understand how and why media content is produced.
- Analyse critically the techniques, languages and conventions used by the media, and the messages they convey.
- Use media creatively to express and communicate ideas, information and opinions.
- Identify, and avoid or challenge, media content and services that may be unsolicited, offensive or harmful.
- Make effective use of the media in the exercise of their democratic rights and civil responsibilities.(Approaches ML in Europe)
Livingstone (2004) appraises it as an empowerment tool for media users to shift their role from passive to active, from recipient to participant, from consumer to citizen because the internet ‘par excellence’ is a ‘greatly under-utilised’ medium for ordinary people to create online content for the public. (Livingstone, Sonia (2004). In India net users spend over 48 hours a month watching and sharing video content on YouTube. ‘One cannot engage in CT simply by knowing what it is and how to do it; real action needs to be taken to practise in order to develop the ability’. (Yue Lin (2014).
In the last fifteen years media audiences have become empowered by the overwhelming accessibility of technology, everyone is now their own producer (Jenkins, 2006). Now that each individual can create media, media not only affects us, it is us. The following statement by Alan Kirby (2006) leaves us in no doubt that we are what we never thought we are: “We are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.’ (Dr Alan Kirby, 2006).
There are various definitions of media which confound us. The European Commission Expert Group on Media (2016) defines it as a set of “technical, cognitive, social, civic and creative capacities that enables a citizen to access, have a critical understanding of the media and interact with it.” Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator’s definition as “the ability to use, understand and create media and communications in a variety of contexts,” is simply a reflection of CML’.
The EU and supra-government bodies UNESCO, World Bank and professional organisations and public service media organisations and broadcasting union – European Broadcasting Union (EBU) had also positively impacted the development and deployment of CML, globally and internationally.
With the growing importance of media the terms used to define “media ” – such as ICT and , information, and UNESCO’s Media and Information (MIL), – have become more intertwined and overlapping. For example, the term ‘’ is often used in a similar way to ‘information’ “in the sense of an ability to effectively and critically access and evaluate information in multiple formats, particularly digital, and from a range of sources, in order to create new knowledge, using a range of tools and resources, in particular technologies” (UNESCO, 2013)
The UNESCO’s conventional definition of media encompasses the technical, cognitive, social, civic and creative capacities that allow us to access and have a critical understanding of and interact with media: ‘ is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written (and visual) materials associated with varying contexts. involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential and to participate fully in the wider society’. (UNESCO)
In 2013 UNESCO kept its momentum with its MIL Framework to equip policy makers to ensure media and information competences of citizens. It was designed to help member countries to evaluate their citizens’ and teachers’ competence relative to sustainable development and ‘in using information, media, Internet and the digital technology so that they ‘enjoy the full benefits of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, particularly freedom of expression and access to information.’ (UNESCO -MIL 2013).
This commitment was further reasserted as a key competency to be acquired by all citizens by the EU Council’s Resolution and Member States. This would be instrumental in promoting socio-economic development and inclusiveness in the EU through education to enhance young people’s and media as well as their ability to think critically, along with their social skills and citizenship competences involving a critical, reflective approach to information and a responsible use of the interactive media; ‘social and civic competencies, the ability to understand different viewpoints, a readiness to respect the values of others; and ‘cultural awareness and expression and a sense of identity as the basis for an open attitude towards and respect for diversity.
The Counsel urged the development of media literacy and CT through education and training. (EU Council, 2016). Lai, Emily R., (2011) has conducted an integrative literature review of media literacy by rounding up a number of research, which accentuates its importance as an outcome-focused learning.
In 2012 the European Broadcasting Union [EBU] promoted media literacy in Europe to highlight its value for society. Describing media literacy as “the ability to access the media, to understand and critically evaluate its content and communicate over a range of platforms” (EBU 2012:1).
The EBU cited three purposes, which are central to the promotion of media literacy: (a) bridging the digital divide, (b) empowering citizens to support democracy, and (c) creating a trusted space. (Gregory Ferrell Lowe & Fiona Martin. Eds.2014) The EBU which plays an active role in the EBU has issued a code of practice to help address the issue of false ‘news’ which it describes as “the information disorder”.
The revision of AVMSD is evidential of its cognizance of the high importance of media competency to critically decode, interpret, access, understand and interact with the media in today’s society.’ The Directive demonstrates EU’s commitment to promoting the increased role of CML Europe-wide as a tool to empower citizens in raising their awareness of the effects of the concomitant disinformation campaigns and false news in the media. Considering the central role of video-centric platforms the revised AVMSD also requires them to provide for effective media measures and tools. Moreover, platforms have the responsibilities to raise users’ awareness of these measures and tools (Article 28b)
According to EAVI the modern society is pluralist, inclusive and interactive which makes it more important than ever for individuals to learn how to decipher information, carry out critical analysis, use media to the common advantage, and how to produce content themselves in order to fully engage with democracy.that deficiency of media in an information rich society can lead to threat to democracy due to apathy, passive disengagement and the proliferation of false information.
EAVI states that knowledge contributes to power, full citizenship, cultural development and progression of democratic society. (EAVI – Study Assessment Criteria for Media Levels in All EU Member States, 2010) Individuals with high levels of SM usage would be exposed to high levels of information. (A Final Report, Oct 2009)
The concept of media may also be contextualised within two UNESCO advocacies. In this sense, the concept of media literacy may be encompassed under the idea of Education for Sustainable Development included in the United Nations’ Principles, of which UNESCO is the lead agency. The aim is to integrate the principles, values and practices of sustainable development into all aspects of education and learning including, necessarily, media literacy.
It is noteworthy that a number of important variables and activities which defines approaches to media cited by eu has not been acknowledged by scholars: (a) government (or related) policy activities, (b) family activities, (c) civil participation activities, (d) educational and training activities, (e) campaigns, media activities (f) mediation activities, (g) regulatory activities, (h) professional and business activities, (i) production skills activities, (j) orientation and reference activities and (k) exploratory, experimental, investigatory and evaluation activities. (EU – Study).
If nation states had found favour with the following UNESCO’s advice then the world would have better a much better habitat for humans and animals: ‘The UN General Assembly calls upon all Member States and other stakeholders “to develop and implement policies, action plans and strategies related to the promotion of media and information literacy, and to increase awareness, capacity for prevention and resilience to disinformation and misinformation, as appropriate”.(Resolution: Global Media and Information Literacy Week. A/RES/75/267)
Investigating and perceiving various points of view
As we stand on the precipice of a new era in journalism, the path forward demands collective effort. For professional journalists, trainee journalists, and citizen journalists alike, the challenges of digital transformation are not insurmountable. By embracing critical media literacy, addressing cognitive biases, and grounding their work in ethics and spirituality, journalists can navigate the complexities of the digital age with confidence and clarity.
The below mentioned suite of digital tools will be essential for you that will equip you to improve your creative performance and provide you with insights, and strategies necessary to thrive in this transformative landscape.