Abstract
Rapid dissemination of fake news; amplification of harmful conspiracy theories; covert propaganda; election interference; threats to democracy; clandestine surveillance; data theft; enablement of online incivility, trolling, hate speech, abuse and radicalisation; underage access to pornography and other explicit and harmful content; addiction to online gambling, gaming and social media; cause and exacerbation of mental health problems, depression, suicide, obesity; unprecedented global market concentration; exploitation of digital labour; the collapse of the high street; damaging representations of, well, nearly everybody . . . There are not many social ills that ‘the media’, particularly digital media, has not been blamed for, one way or another, in recent years.
Of course, there are more positive aspects to ‘the media’. It continues to entertain us, educate us, inform us, connect us and unite us. Today more than ever, digital media has enabled many of us to work, learn, party and even protest remotely. It is a defining feature of the digital age.
One would think, then, that critical study of ‘the media’ would be central to our compulsory education systems. Surely, the case for helping young people (and the wider population) develop a critical understanding of the institutions, industries, policies, regulations and practices that shape ‘the media’ and the texts that we watch, read, listen to, post, tweet, like, share and otherwise engage with has never been stronger.
By the time they reach early adulthood, many young people understand the value of developing a critical approach to the media. University admissions to media and communication degrees have been rising steadily over the last 5 years, despite increasing student fees, a demographic dip and a drop in EU student applications.
Yet within compulsory education systems, Media Studies is continually marginalised. In the United Kingdom, it is offered only as an option at GCSE level, and many schools and colleges do not even offer it. GCSE enrolments have been falling for years, from a high of around 70,000 in 2008, to 31,470 in 2019 (Ofqual, n.d.), or around 4% of students. The subject is often derided as ‘lightweight’, ‘a soft option’, a ‘Mickey Mouse’ course for Goofys and Dumbos who cannot study books (Brabazon, 2019; Buckingham, 2019: 104; McDougall, 2019: 185). It is no surprise that those most commonly peddling such nonsense are those with the most to lose from a critically engaged media literate citizenry (certain vocal factions in politics, mostly, as well as some in the media itself, who prefer to work unfettered by scrutiny), but mud sticks, and puts off parents concerned for their offspring’s options.
Across Europe, media education through compulsory schooling varies widely. In a 2002 review of media education in 12 European countries, Hart and Süss (2002) found that in parts of northern and eastern Europe, such as Finland, Norway, Hungary and Slovenia, media education plays an important role in the core curricula, whereas in many parts of southern and western Europe, there is very little requirement for, nor coordination of, media education (p. 8). A 2013 review of European media literacy research and policy, led by Sonia Livingstone and Monica Bulger (2013) as part of the Media Literacy Task Force, found that policy and practice still varied widely, and that movement towards a shared approach achieved between 2006 and 2010 had lost momentum when the policy area was relocated to a different department of the European Commission (p. 4). A 2014 study concluded that media education within European classrooms remains ‘a black box’ (Hartai, 2014: 139), with a wide variety of approaches to teaching, learning, content and assessment. The report describes media education as ‘a sitting duck . . . prey to whoever is interested or is delegated to teach it, regardless of whether he or she has relevant qualifications or not’ (Hartai, 2014: 140) and recommends that ‘serious efforts need to be made at European Union level so that the development of media literacy in formal education should become a mandatory study field and not just an elective or optional course’ (Hartai, 2014).
Both of the books discussed here attempt to deal with this challenge. Both set out the case for making media education compulsory for all children and young people, arguing that media studies, media education and media literacy have been marginalised for too long – that the need for critical engagement with media is now more important than ever.
However, the approaches taken by the two authors differ significantly. Readers wishing to get straight to the point might prefer David Buckingham’s Media Education Manifesto, a succinct manuscript of just 118 (small) pages which authoritatively sets out his position. ‘Half-baked ideas about media literacy will lead us nowhere’, he argues, ‘we need a comprehensive and coherent educational approach’. Buckingham’s arguments draw on his experiences as a UK media educator over several decades, and his work with media educators in more than 30 different countries. He concedes that his proposals may not be very transferable to other contexts, but argues that the UK approach to media education has been highly influential worldwide.
By contrast, Julian McDougall’s Fake News vs Media Studies: Travels in a False Binary sets a more leisurely pace, allowing the reader to join him on a journey of discovery, stopping off for a cup of tea and a chat with a plethora of interesting and provocative thinkers along the way. McDougall’s 239 pages offer a rich exploration of the discipline today, combining substantial and highly accessible contributions from a diverse range of participants, including media scholars, journalists, teachers, students, librarians and others such as Natalie Fenton, Sonia Livingstone, John Potter, Paul Mihailidis and the aforementioned David Buckingham. It is particularly interesting, and inspiring, to hear the varied paths trodden by these and other participants before they reached their current position, from teaching to journalism to psychology to community media to voluntary service.
In the vein of ethnographic studies, McDougall does not claim to offer an impartial or comprehensive approach. He describes at length his methodology, involving interviews and focus groups conducted at the Media Education Summit in Hong Kong; the English and Media Centre in London; the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Olympic Park, London. He defends his decision not to seek out participants from the alt-right community who might be more enthusiastic about the ‘much more powerful network that joins Steve Bannon to Russia Today to Nigel Farage and via YouTube to Alex Jones’ (McDougall, 2019: 11). He goes on to admit that his purposive, network-framed approach could be considered representative only of ‘an echo chamber’ (McDougall, 2019) that could well be argued is simply an exercise in the ‘liberal elite’ talking to itself.
Buckingham begins by outlining some of the key challenges that have emerged in recent years: We live in a world of almost total mediation . . . The global media environment is now dominated by a very small number of near-monopoly providers, who control the most widely used media platforms and services . . . The media are a central dimension of contemporary life – of culture, of politics, of the economy and of personal relationships. Most people would agree that in an intensively mediated society, media users need to become more autonomous, more competent and more critical. (Buckingham, 2019: 1−2)
He argues that media literacy seems to be viewed as a quick-fix solution, a way of shuffling off responsibility from the state to the individual, but that states possess only a limited sense of what media literacy might actually entail and how it might best be developed. Media educators have, he explains, been dealing with these issues for decades, most recently exploring and teaching about the complexity of modern forms of ‘digital capitalism’. If we really want citizens to be media literate, he argues, we need comprehensive, systematic and sustained programmes of media education as a basic entitlement for all young people.
As a Media Studies lecturer in a UK university, I agree with Buckingham’s contention that young people do not automatically develop the skills and understanding they need to effectively decode media texts and construct their own simply by engaging in the participatory cultures of social media, nor through the act of creative production. Rather, effective engagement in creative practice and social media is enhanced by student understanding of how and why media texts, online and off, construct meaning. Informed and educated students are in a much better position to effectively construct their own texts and meanings, making informed choices about all the multimodal resources available to them, with a clear understanding of their potential audience, and the ways in which such texts might be interpreted and responded to. Without such education, we should not be surprised if new entrants to the media-sphere simply mimic what they find there, whether that is socially, economically or culturally desirable, or not.
My own teaching blends theory and practice to develop student understanding of the communicative practices of video, in particular. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from both humanities and social sciences, I work with industry and social economy partners to co-design ‘live client’ assessment briefs that help students understand how to craft communicative texts with social, educational or commercial aims. While the module includes practical skills development in camera and audio production, animation and post-production, the aim is not to produce film or broadcast-style programmes, but short social videos that are tailored to the online environment in content, style and form that aim to generate viral patterns of engagement. Through this process, students learn to communicate in audio-visual form, a skill that will become ever more valuable not only for professional workers but for citizens of today’s increasingly digitalised global society.
Buckingham sets out how a manifesto must do two things. First, it must convince the reader of the importance and urgency of the task at hand by laying out the basic aims and principles and persuading the reader that these are more valid and useful than any potential alternative. This is the focus of the bulk of the book, Chapters 2 through 8. Second, he says, a manifesto must provide a plan of action to show how these aims might be achieved, in realistic and pragmatic terms. This is set out in Chapter 9.
The first part of the book outlines the ways in which Media Studies has evolved as a discipline over several decades, largely in relation to older media such as film, television and the printed press. In particular, Chapter 2 explores the framing of debates about the benefits and risks of media, arguing that this binary focus ignores the genuine complexity and diversity of everyday practices, and pushing for a more coherent and comprehensive approach. Chapter 3 sets out why Buckingham believes media literacy approaches are superficial, fragmented and instrumental, why they fail to equip young people with the understanding they need about how media work and how to use them. Chapter 4 explains why media education needs to help young people step back from the intensely mediated world in which they are immersed (difficult though that is), and consider the bigger picture, to take into account the familiar and ‘make them strange’ in order to understand our relationship with them.
Chapter 5 deals with the ‘critical thinking’ that is so central to media education, distancing the term from its common connotations with negativity, and articulating criticality as evidence-based, logical and reflexive thinking, which leads to critical action. In Chapter 6, Buckingham outlines some common pitfalls in teaching about media, before, in Chapters 7 and 8, sharing his vision for effective media education and what this looks like in practice, particularly in relation to the emerging phenomenon of social media.
In Chapter 9, ‘Making it Happen’, Buckingham sets out his three key policy pledges. First, he proposes that media literacy is embedded across the curriculum, as part of subjects such as History, Geography, Design and Technology, Computer Science, PSHE and citizenship. Second, he argues that critical media education should also be taught as an independent subject by specialist teachers, as a basic entitlement for all, within the framework of a systematic, coherent and comprehensive media education strategy. Third, he outlines the need for effective, in-depth teacher training continuing professional development, and support for media teacher networks and associations.
By contrast, McDougall’s Media Studies vs Fake News offers a very different approach to the topic. The titular false binary is dealt with at the outset, admittedly employed as a provocative device to prompt debate about the role of Media Studies in deconstructing the concept of fake news, unpicking the various ways in which the term has been weaponised by various contemporary actors, and pointing out to everybody, endlessly, that fake news is really nothing new–that propaganda and media bias are as old as the hills.
Rather fittingly, one suspects that the title has been chosen rather more for its clickbait appeal than for its relevance. Nevertheless, the central argument of Media Studies vs Fake News is that Media Studies is the best weapon with which to arm young people if we are to achieve an effective societal response to the ills of the media.
Chapter 2 deals with contextual factors underpinning approaches to Media Studies, including capitalism, austerity, journalism, bias and post-truth, and outlines some of the ‘big questions’ for the discipline and its intrinsic relationship with power, democracy and citizenship.
Chapter 3 delves more deeply into the discipline’s relationship with democracy, through discussions of media ownership, concentration and bias. Taking as a starting point the Media Reform Coalition’s 2019 report Who Owns the UK Media? which found that three companies control over 80% of the UK newspaper market, an increase of 10% from the previous report, and a figure that goes up only to five companies when online news is included, McDougall argues that the domination of digital capitalism by a small cluster of huge corporations (the most powerful the world has ever seen, we are told) does not deliver on the hope for a democratic, citizen media that early Internet observers had seemed to promise.
McDougall explores the democracy paradox – how the fourth estate has undermined trust in key societal institutions through attacks on, for example, politics, the justice and education systems, as well as in journalism itself, through increasingly commercialised headline-grabbing strategies, paparazzi and phone hacking scandals, clickbait sensationalism and so on to such an extent that it is now struggling to be seen as trustworthy and truthful itself. Are we now too media literate, both observing a state of hypercynicism where engagement with seeing through bias gives way to a total distrust of information? Does Media Studies itself fuel mistrust and cynicism, and is our current predicament an unintended precursor to propagandistic, authoritarian rule?
Chapter 4, entitled simply ‘Internet’, considers the role of social networks and social media on media literacy and trust. The Internet has impacted on media uses and spaces so significantly that it is difficult to disentangle Internet-related issues from other matters, and there is significant overlap between this chapter and those preceding and succeeding, but here, McDougall focuses on the power of digital gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook, their role in organising and providing access to online content, as well as the ways in which they monetise users, time and data in the new ‘attention economy’.
McDougall also discusses recent calls from Berners-Lee and Zuckerberg for better media education and greater regulation, describing how Internet regulation falls between, in the United Kingdom, the broadcast regulator Ofcom and press regulator IPSO, and how this pattern is repeated in broader European institutions. It is to the credit of Buckingham, McDougall and others in the field, that Ofcom (2020) is currently consulting on its forthcoming new regulatory powers regarding video-sharing platforms (VSPs), including new statutory duties ‘to ensure that VSPs have in place appropriate measures to protect young people from potentially harmful content and all users from illegal content and incitement to hatred and violence’ as well as upholding standards around advertising. Such measures will undoubtedly fall short of what is required, and much more will need to be done in both regulatory and educational terms, but they are a step in the right direction.
McDougall goes on to discuss ‘big data’ as ‘the new oil’, highlighting the need for Media Studies to develop understanding of ‘the dark art of the algorithm’. While ‘big data’ may be the new topic de jour among educational leaders, policy makers and commercial third parties, few really understand the ways in which it works and how it can be productively employed, or challenged. McDougall too is remarkably quiet on this front. Aside from a brief discussion of algorithms and sticky content, he relies on a personal anecdote about his own attempts to live without Facebook (easy) and Google (difficult). Arguably, it is this distance between critical media scholars and computational science that now needs to be bridged if the key challenges presented in these texts and practices are to be tackled.
Chapter 5 offers some interesting insights into journalistic perspectives on the relationship between ‘fake news’ and ‘real news’ primarily through an extended interview with Stephen Jukes, Professor in Journalism, and Karen Fowler-Watt, Head of Journalism at Bournemouth University. They discuss some interesting examples, such as the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square while Jukes was Head of News at Reuters, and the BBC resources devoted to fact-checking the claims of the US President, not only taking up airtime but diverting journalistic resources from elsewhere.
The second part of the chapter looks back at some of the key developments in Media Studies, from analysis of politically driven coverage of the Battle of Orgreave, the Miners’ Strike and the Hillsborough football disaster; to more contemporary media representations of class and race in cases such as Grenfell and the murder of Lee Rigby; to the Cultural Studies’ emphasis on active audiences and reception theory.
Chapter 6 explores the relationship between post-truth, fake news and Media Studies. It begins with a brief discussion of Hypernormalisation, the film by Adam Curtis, but Curtis declined an interview, so McDougall turns to Wikileaks as an example of societal self-policing in the post-truth world.
Chapter 7 concludes with a summing up of the key challenges and potential solutions to the ‘problem’ of Media Studies. McDougall draws together common themes, finding consensus among his participants that the problem is not only about an information disorder and new modes of propaganda but also a failure of education to create resilient, critical thinkers and the lack of a civil, debating culture in state education. This has led to two key issues – the persistent illusion of objectivity, and ‘a new danger . . . in the shape of “the dark art of the algorithm”’ (McDougall, 2019: 211). McDougall identifies widespread agreement for his proposed solutions – first (rather predictably – his words) the need for more critical thinking in schools, and second (perhaps less predictably) a parallel need to build resilience to a widespread hyper-cynical distrust in all information.
At times, some may find the breadth of material and conversational flow of Media Studies vs Fake News perplexing, but media educators are likely to find particular value in McDougall’s twenty ‘onward journey’ applications, including lots of useful web links, videos and other resources, and 10 ‘toolkit’ examples showing how the existing Media Studies curriculum relates to the issues covered in each chapter.
All in all, both texts do an impressive job of articulating the complexity of the challenges facing contemporary media educators, and the crucial need to reposition media education as a basic entitlement for all young people during compulsory schooling, if they are to be equipped with the skills and understanding needed for life and citizenship in the digital age.