Media Literacy: Quotes

“Media study does not replace text. It broadens and deepens our understanding of texts.”
Philip M. Anderson, “Visual & Verbal Thinking” in Media Literacy, A Reader

“We need a lot more critical thinking and media criticism taught in schools at a very early age.”
John Stauber author of “The Best War Ever” (from Sept.2006 interview)

“The more I grasp the pervasive influence of media on our children, the more I worry about
the media literacy gap in our nation’s educational curriculum.  We need a sustained K-12
media literacy program—something to teach kids not only how to use the media
but how the media uses them.  Kids need to know how particular messages get
crafted and why, what devices are used to hold their attention and what ideas are left
out. In a culture where media is pervasive and invasive, kids need to think
critically about what they see, hear and read.  No child’s education can be complete without
this.” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps (prepared remarks at June 2006 event)

“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap. These include
the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power,
to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt
them to new forms.”
2005, New Media Consortium’s definition of New Literacies

“Media literacy empowers people to be both critical thinkers and creative producers of an
increasingly wide range of messages using image, language, and sound. It is the skillful
application of literacy skills to media and technology messages. As communication
technologies transform society, they impact our understanding of ourselves, our
communities, and our diverse cultures, making media literacy
an essential life skill for the 21st century.”
(The Alliance for A Media Literate America, 2000) 

“Media literacy is concerned with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding
of the nature of mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these
techniques. More specifically, it is education that aims to increase the students’ understanding
and enjoyment of how the-media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they
construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media
products. ”
(Media Literacy Resource Guide, Ministry of Education Ontario, 1997)

 

Amy Goodman/Democracy NOW: “Thanks for the question. Media
literacy is critically important to a democratic society. The great
journalist IF Stone told journalism students there are two words they
should remember: governments lie. I think many people have a natural
skepticism about what government officials say. The problem is when the
media act as a megaphone for those in power. The media is supposed to be,
as we call our book, “The Exception to the Rulers.” In the old
Soviet Union, people knew to read between the lines of Pravda. Here in
this country, the media has acted as a conveyer belt for the lies of the
administration (and previous administrations). Just look at FAIR’s study
in the week leading up to and after Gen. Colin Powell gave his speech at
the UN. Of the 393 interviews done by the 4 major nightly news casts
around the issue of the war, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS’s Newshour, only 3 were
with antiwar representatives. That does not represent mainstream America.
At the time a majority were against the invasion, for inspections and for
diplomacy. This is not mainstream media, this is an extreme media, beating
the drums for war and misusing the public airwaves.”

“When people talk to me about the digital divide, I think of it not so much about who has access to what technology as about
who knows how to create and express themselves in the new language of the screen. If students aren’t taught
the language of sound and images, shouldn’t they be considered as illiterate as if they left college without
being able to read and write?”
George Lucas, filmmaker (Sept.2004, Edutopia, Life on the Screen)

“Media Culture is the result of the industrialization of information and culture. Images, sounds and spectacles help produce the fabric of life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their identities.”
Doug Kellner

 

“Being literate in contemporary society means being active, critical, and create users not only of print and
spoken language but also of the visual language of film and television….Teaching students how to interpret and create visual
texts….is another essential component of the English language arts curriculum. Visual communication is part of the
fabric of contemporary life.”
NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts (1996) as
quoted in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 48:1, September
2002, pps.74-75

“Our young people need to be educated to the highest standard in this new information age, and surely this includes
a clear awareness of how the media influences, shapes, and defines their lives,”
says Richard Riley, U.S. Secretary of Education. “And let us also recognize this important fact:
These young people are the future media leaders of this nation.”
Quoted in Linkup, June/July 2002

“Media literacy is not just important, it’s absolutely critical. It’s going to make the difference
between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.”
Linda Ellerbee, producer/host, Nick News

“No matter what the source, information is only powerful if students know what to
do with it. As students are inundated with media messages, the challenge is not to amass
more information, but to access, organize, and evaluate useful information from a variety
of print and electronic sources.”
Kathleen Tyner, author, “Literacy in A Digital World”

“While media campaigns and other prevention strategies are essential ingredients
for reducing substance abuse among adolescents, it is simply not possible for any federal
agency, state organization, or private sector group to reach all young Americans with
compelling and frequent messages about the dangers of drugs. So, instead, we must help
give our young people the essential critical viewing skills to assess those messages–both
direct and indirect– that glamorize drug-taking behavior, so that youth can see through
the glitz and glamour to the underlying social ills of substance abuse, and to prepare
their own prevention messages for peers, parents, and opinion leaders. We are learning
that media literacy can provide this vision and skill in a powerful way…”
Robert W. Denniston, of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention of SAMHSA/HHA,
on the links between media literacy and problems associated with drug use by young people

“I firmly believe that more media literacy instruction can be very useful in our
efforts to promote tolerance and combat violence. With the increased exposure of young
people to an incredibly broad array of messages from an equally broad array of media
messengers, it¹s all the more important that we teach our young people how to make sense
of what they¹re seeing, hearing, and feeling. We need to teach them how to separate fact
from fiction and fantasy. Only if we provide appropriate guidance can we expect our young
people to understand that not everything on the screen has a place on the street corner or
in the classroom.” US Attorney General Janet Reno, in interview with Cable
In The Classroom’s Al Race, 1999

“Film and television, newspapers, books and radio together have an influence over
individuals that was unimagined a hundred years ago. This power confers great
responsibility on all who work in the media…[as well as] each of us who, as individuals,
listen and read and watch….it is not the case that we have no power over what we take
from the media.”   “When the media focuses too closely on the negative
aspects of human nature, there is a danger that we become persuaded that violence and
agression are its principle characteristics…good news is not remarked on precisely
because there is so much of it.”  Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso’s) 1999 book
Ancient Wisdom, Modern World”: Ethics For A New Millennium”  p.210-212

” Media literacy courses can give young people the power to recognize the
difference between entertainment, television that is just bad and the information they
need to make good decisions.”

What they need is “a clear awareness of how the media influences, shapes and
defines their lives.” Richard Riley, US Secretary of Education, December 13, 1995

“Media education can and has revolutionized the way we think about public health.
The shift to a focus on the environment rather than the traditional focus on the host or
agent has come about largely because of media education. We’ve begun to see all kinds of
problems that used to be seen as individual choices or flaws — from violence to substance
abuse to eating disorders — as partly the result of the environment in which people make
their choices. And the most important aspect of our environment, of course, is the
media.”
“Huge and powerful industries — alcohol, tobacco, junk food, guns, diet — depend
upon a media-illiterate population. Indeed they depend upon a population that is
disempowered and addicted. These industries will and do fight our efforts with all their
mighty resources. And we will fight back, using the tools of media education which enable
us to understand, analyze, interpret, to expose hidden agendas and manipulation, to bring
about constructive change, and to further positive aspects of the media.”
Jean Kilbourne, author: Deadly Persuasion : How Advertising Manipulates Us in an
Age of Addiction

“It’s important that parents and citizens really lobby for media literacy to
be taught in schools, starting with kindergarten. We’re doing our students a real
disservice if we don’t teach them to become critical consumers of the media.”
Jean Kilbourne, quoted in Christian Science Monitor, November 24, 1999

“It is no longer enough simply to read and write. Students must also become
literate in the understanding of visual images. Our children must learn how to spot a
stereotype, isolate a social cliche, and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from
banter, and important news from coverage.”
Ernest, Boyer, President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: Former U.S.
Commissioner of Education.

” Television may well be the most important innovation in
communication since the printing press, and it communicates in images that
as much visual and aural as verbal: learning the vocabularies of the arts,
including the media arts, is an essential tool for understanding, and
perhaps one day communicating, in the medium of television.”
1988 National Endowment for the Arts report Toward Civilization

“First of all, I don’t think anyone could claim to be media
literate if he or she didn’t understand that one of the principle functions
of commercial media is not so much the provision of information or
entertainment, but the segmentation and packaging of audiences for delivery
and sale to advertisers… It’s the audience which is the real product of
the media, and not the programs.” – Len Masterman

“We must prepare young people for living in a world of powerful images, words and
sounds.”
UNESCO, 1982

“The professional persuaders have the upper hand: money, media access, sophisticated
personnel utilizing scientific techniques, aided and abetted by psychologists and
sociologists skilled in analyzing human behaviour. All of that on one side. On the other
side the persuadees: the average citizen and consumer. Who trains the citizen?….There is
no coherent, systematic effort in the schools today to prepare our future citizens for a
sophisticated literacy.”  Hugh Rank, 1976,  “Teaching About
Public Persuasion: Rationale and A Schema.” Teaching About Doublespeak

Media literacy is a basic tool for citizenship in an Information Society.
Pat Aufderheide, Professor, School of Communication, American University

Patricia Aufderheide, Associate Professor of Communication, American
University, writes about the necessity of becoming media literate in a
report of The National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy:
“Media literacy, the movement to expand notions of literacy to
include the powerful post-print media that dominate our informational
landscape, helps people understand, produce, and negotiate meanings in a
culture made up of powerful images, words, and sounds….

A media-literate person – and everyone should have the opportunity to
become one – can decode, evaluate, analyze, and produce both print and
electronic media. The fundamental objective of media literacy is critical
autonomy in relationship to all media. Emphases in media literacy training
vary widely, including informed citizenship, aesthetic appreciation and
expression, social advocacy, self-esteem, and consumer competence” (Aufderheide,
l993).

“The development of curricula in media and visual literacy will not only sharpen
people’s ability to decipher their world, but it will also contribute to a broadening of
the public sphere. Literacy is never just about reading; it is also about writing. Just as
early campaigns for universal print literacy were concerned with democratizing the tools
of public expression–the written word–upcoming struggles for media literacy must strive
to empower people with contemporary implements of public discourse: video, graphic arts,
photography, interactive digital media. More customary mainstays of public
expression–expository writing and public speaking–must be resuscitated as well.
“Media literacy cannot simply be seen as a vaccination against advertising, public
relations and other familiar strains of institutionalized guile. It must be understood as
an education in techniques that can democratize the realm of public expression and will
magnify the possibility of meaningful public interactions. Distinctions between publicist
and citizen, author and audience, need to be broken down. Education can facilitate this
process. It can enlarge the circle of who is permitted–and who will be able–to interpret
and make sense of the world, of who will be seen and heard from in America’s future.”

Stuart Ewen (excerpt from “PR, A Social History of Spin,” Used with
permission)

If, as Aristotle said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” so, in
today’s life, “the unexamined culture is not worth living in.”
George Gerbner, Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunication, Temple University,
Philadelphia

Media literacy is being able to engage not just with the immediate content of a media text, but also to be able to apply knowledge and understanding of institutional factors that have an impact on shaping the text itself and on the messages and values embedded within the text. Media literacy also involves knowledge and understanding of how different audiences in different times places may interpret the text in different ways. Crucially, the media-literate reader of the text is able to see that his/her own reading of the text may be at odds with that applied by some or all of the target audience.
Source: Wayne O’Brien -Media Education Assn, UK

“the ability to sift through and analyze the messages that inform, entertain and sell to us every day. It’s the ability to bring critical thinking skills to bear on all media— from music videos and Web environments to product placement in films and virtual displays on NHL hockey boards. It’s about asking pertinent questions about what’s there, and noticing what’s not there. And it’s the instinct to question what lies behind media productions— the motives, the money, the values and the ownership— and to be aware of how these factors influence content.”
Media Awareness Network

“To be successful in college and in the workplace and to participate effectively in a global society, students are expected to understand the nature of media; to interpret, analyze, and evaluate the  media messages they encounter daily; and to create media that expresses a point of view and influence others. These skills are relevant to all subject areas…”
College Board Standards for College Success, English Language Arts, 2006

“The more I grasp the pervasive influence of media on our children, the more I worry  about the media literacy gap in our nation’s educational curriculum.  We need a sustained K-12 media literacy program—something to teach kids not only how to use the media but how the media uses them.  Kids need to know how particular messages get crafted and why, what devices are used to hold their attention and what ideas are left out. In a culture where media is pervasive and invasive, kids need to think critically about what they see, hear and read.  No child’s education can be complete without this.”
FCC Commissioner Michael Copps (prepared remarks at June 2006 event)

“Media Literacy is the ability to ‘read’ and understand visual, aural and digital messages. It means having the skills to understand and interact with the media analytically, critically and knowledgeably.”
(Burton, Lee 2005, ‘What is this Media Literacy Thing? Primary and secondary classroom ideas from across Australia,
 in Australian Screen Education Online, Autumn 2005, issue 38, pp. 93-98.)

“Media literacy emphasizes the following elements: a critical thinking skill that allows audiences to develop independent judgments about media content;  an understanding of the process of mass communication; an awareness of the impact of media on the individual and society; the development of strategies with which to discuss and analyze media messages; an awareness of media content as ‘text’ that provides insight into our contemporary culture and ourselves; the cultivation of an enhanced enjoyment, understanding and appreciation of media content; and in the case of media communicator, the ability to produce effective and responsible media messages.”
(Art Silverblatt in Media Literacy, Keys to Interpreting Media Messages, 2001)

Media literacy is an expanded information and communication skill that is responsive to the changing nature of information in our society. It addresses the skills students need to be taught in school, the competencies citizens must have as we consume information in our homes and living rooms, and the abilities workers must have as we move toward the 21st century and the challenges of a global economy.
(Source: Telemedium)

Media literacy empowers people to be both critical thinkers and creative producers of an increasingly wide range of messages using image, language, and sound. It is the skillful application of literacy skills to media and technology messages. As communication technologies transform society, they impact our understanding of ourselves, our communities, and our diverse cultures, making media literacy an essential life skill for the 21st century.
(The Alliance for A Media Literate America, 2000) 

Media literacy is concerned with helping students develop an informed and critical understanding of the nature of mass media, the techniques used by them, and the impact of these techniques. More specifically, it is education that aims to increase the students’ understanding and enjoyment of how the-media work, how they produce meaning, how they are organized, and how they construct reality. Media literacy also aims to provide students with the ability to create media products.
( Media Literacy Resource Guide, Ministry of Education Ontario, 1997)

“It would be a breach of our duties as teachers for us to ignore the rhetorical power of visual forms of media in combination with text and sound…the critical media literacy we need to teach must include evaluation of these media, lest our students fail to see, understand, and learn to harness the persuasive power of visual media.”
(Source: http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.1/news/briefs/nctevis.html)

Media literacy refers to composing, comprehending, interpreting, analyzing, and appreciating the language  and texts of…both print and nonprint. The use of media presupposes an expanded definition of ‘text’…print media texts include books, magazines, and newspapers. Nonprint media include photography, recordings,  radio, film, television, videotape, video games, computers, the performing arts, and virtual reality…constantly interact…(and) all (are) to be experienced, appreciated, and analyzed and created by students.”
(SOURCE:  NCTE, Commission on Media, Carole Cox, 1994, p.13)

“being illiterate in the processes of any medium (language) leaves one at the mercy of those who control it.”
Neil Postman/Charles Weingartner (Teaching As A Subversive Activity, 1969)

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