Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era

Political Context: Posttruth, Social Media, and the Far Right

The 2016 U.S. presidential election is widely viewed to have ushered in a new political era, although we think it is more accurate to say it illuminated political shifts that were long in the making (Nygreen , 2017). The campaign leading up to the election was marked by more overt racist, sexist, and xenophobic language than had previously been permitted in mainstream political discourse. Far-right narratives, positions, and actors moved swiftly from the fringes to the center of national politics. The “post-truth” era arrived too, denoting a political context in which “facts” and “alternative facts” were presented as “both sides” of a political debate. As Harsin (2018) explains, “post-truth” does not imply a loss of truth, but a loss of social trust and legitimacy of the institutions and discourses previously seen as gatekeepers of truth. What is considered fact became politicized: climate change, COVID-19, the number of genders.

The term fake news, first meant to describe intentionally false stories circulated as disinformation campaigns, was co-opted by Trump to dismiss unflattering media coverage. While the right has long described the media as having a liberal bias, from Fox to Sarah Palin’s critiques of “lamestream media” (Blake, 2014), Trump made media critique a central grievance and political rallying cry, describing the entire press corps as “the enemy of the people” (Samuels, 2019). One outcome was an increase in the polarization of media (Wilson et al., 2020), which has led to greater ideological and affective polarization, and a proliferation of far-right media sources from Breitbart to America One to conspiracies like QAnon, which weaponize the idea of truth to sell reaction. Some argue this is an “infodemic,” with radical implications for the health of democratic society (Harsin, 2020).

This “post-truth” era is what Stuart Hall (2021) calls a crisis in and of ideology; it reflects the failure of dominant ideologies to win consent of the governed during a period of economic decline and social fracture. The lack of trust in media and political leaders speaks to the failures of institutions to create livable futures for us and our students, and to the ruling class’s need for new villains, and virulent far-right discourses. As the social crisis deepens, moral panics grow in intensity until they become far-right conspiracies. These far-right discourses work within the fractures and contradictions of late capitalism, the failures of the liberal center, and mainstream right. Exposing the fractures and failures of the liberal center appropriates resistance and pushes the discourse further right. Hall’s framework helps us to articulate the ways in which right-wing discourses can be both an opening and an impasse. We look to his understanding of conspiracy or “fake news” as revealing deeper social facts, and to his understanding of the challenge as far-right discourses appropriate resistance and win consent to the mainstream. Using Hall and CML methods that draw on cultural studies, we ask not only how we can stop “alternative facts” but also the broader media “infodemic” and its appeal to our students.

Auto-Ethnographic Methods

In this article, we use critical auto-ethnography (Reed-Danahay, 2009) to look back on our teaching of CML before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Critical auto-ethnography involves using personal experiences and identities to illuminate social practices, power, and inequality, through the use of anti-biography (Reed-Danahay, 2009). We generated this article by producing individual auto-ethnographic accounts of our teaching experience, sharing, and reflecting on them together. Our narratives draw on qualitative research’s use of personal identity, emotion, and interpretation of key moments or events to connect personal experience to broader social structures and social critique (Behar, 2009; Ghodsee, 2011). They relate the challenges we faced in teaching media literacy, and possibilities, and the traps, as criticality becomes part of right-wing commonsense. They offer snapshots of our classrooms and engage our ongoing conversations about teaching after Trump.

Both authors are White women on the political left, but with long familiarity with right-wing ideas. Our collaboration began when we both taught versions of the same CML-based undergraduate course at a large public university. The course, Education and Film, fulfills an institutional “diversity” requirement and uses Hollywood representations of schooling to teach about educational inequality along lines of race, class, and gender. Nygreen, an Associate Professor, designed the course and taught it twice per year between 2011 and 2021—from the Obama era to Trump’s defeat. Tebaldi served as a graduate Teaching Assistant of Education and Film for 3 years, designed and taught her own independent versions of the course from 2015 to 2017, and developed other courses applying a CML framework such as “Harry Potter and the Myth of Meritocracy.” Tebaldi also pursued a line of scholarship in media studies, digital ethnography, and the resurgence of extreme right-wing politics and right-wing media. As a scholar of the far right and the daughter of a far-right woman, she has intimate familiarity with rightist media.

In the narratives that follow, we offer snapshots of our teaching and attempt to show the tensions and challenges we experienced. We recount events that occurred in our classrooms and give voice to our own internal dialogue as we negotiated the everyday tensions and dilemmas, impasses and openings, of teaching media literacy in the era of “fake news” as criticality becomes part of right-wing commonsense. Just as we use personal stories in our teaching to help students see beyond dominant ideologies, this article makes use of our own stories for the same purpose. We present our narratives in the next two sections.

Nygreen: On the Limits of Meeting Students Where They Are

In 2011, new to my institution as a pretenure assistant professor, I was assigned to teach a large undergraduate course called Education at the Movies. Since I had no experience with the topic, I tried to decline but was told it didn’t require expert knowledge because it was lower division, and moreover, it must be taught because it was a popular course that filled a lot of seats. The syllabus I inherited from a retired adjunct instructor provided minimal information about the course aims and substance. I asked around for advice and a colleague recommended a text about high school movies analyzed through a sociological lens (Bulman, 2005). It discussed how ideologies of meritocracy and individualism are infused into high school films, how these messages obscure structural inequality, and the impacts of such representation on public (mis)understanding of social issues. With a background in cultural studies and critical theory, this text made sense to me, so I adopted it and built the course from there.

In the first lecture, I introduced the premise to 120 students in a large auditorium. I said we would study inequality in schools, using analysis of films about education as an entry point. I explained that media is a socializing institution that, along with other socializing institutions (family, church, and school), shapes culture and identity. I discussed how mass media upholds ideological hegemony by manufacturing consent to unjust social structures and that media is powerful not because it tells us what to think but because it shows us what is (and isn’t) thinkable. And also, media always reflects particular perspectives and biases, which serve particular interests. I thought these were fairly straightforward points that would sufficiently frame the course before moving on to the substance of analyzing high school movies. It didn’t take long to learn that most students either didn’t understand or didn’t accept this framing. Their comments and writing revealed resistance to the idea that all media had a perspective. Viewing “bias” as inherently bad—synonymous with propaganda and disinformation—they rushed to defend the media. Not all media are biased; they would insist. Some news outlets are objective. Movies are just entertainment. No matter that their unrealistic happy endings are a middle-class fantasy that makes the system seem fair; it’s just a movie! Often, they mistook the moral of a movie as the lesson of the class. If we discussed how a movie promoted colorblind racism, they concluded we should all be colorblind because it’s wrong to judge a person by their race. Or, they interpreted movies as windows to truth: If a movie promoted the ideology of meritocracy, they concluded meritocracy was “real” because the film was “based on a true story.” When asked to reflect on their own media socialization, they denied having been influenced by media at all. I’m my own person, they would insist. I think for myself!

In subsequent semesters, I adjusted my approach. Instead of introducing the premise of the course in one preliminary lecture, I explicitly taught and retaught it throughout the semester. I made the framework of CML explicit, adding readings about CML to reinforce the importance of media literacy and illustrate the social role of media. While many students continued to deny that media shaped their own attitudes and beliefs, they seemed more receptive to the idea that it influenced young children’s attitudes and beliefs (many were aspiring teachers after all). So I incorporated readings and documentaries about the impacts of media on preschool and elementary age children. We looked at studies about cartoon characters that perpetuate gendered and racialized stereotypes, and how children as young as 3 years old had already internalized them. While original versions of the course had focused exclusively on racial and economic inequality, I gradually incorporated gender analysis and modified the syllabus so we opened with gender and sexuality. We looked at how gendered media messages, popular visual images, and unrealistic beauty standards shaped young girls’ aspirations, body image, and self-esteem, with impacts such as high rates of eating disorders and underrepresentation of girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. We also learned about harmful impacts of gendered scripts for boys, including toxic masculinity. We watched the high school movies that students requested, like Mean Girls, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while asking, “What do these movies teach? How do they do that? So what?”

Students were quickly able to see gendered scripts and heteronormativity in these movies and how they connected to the message of individualism (male characters expressing individuality through achievements; female characters through romantic attention from a man). The majority of students in the course were White and female. These topics resonated for many. They also resonated for me, a White woman, and I gradually began to weave some of my own personal experiences into lectures. This was a way to model personal self-reflection and make my own media socialization transparent. I told students that “unlearning” media messages is part of media literacy and that it’s a lifelong process rather than something to complete in one semester or even 4 years of college. Opening with these themes helped students grasp the idea that media could contain harmful ideological messages with real social impacts, but were naturalized and hence hard to see. This was the foundational understanding they needed to undertake the work of the course: critical analysis of high school films with attention to ideologies of race, class, and meritocracy. Instead of one lecture, it took us 4 or 5 weeks to get here. But I felt satisfied that, overall, most students were able to get here if they put in minimal effort and showed up to class.

One day, while lecturing about heteronormativity, I went off-script and told my own coming-out story. I was trying to convey how compulsory heterosexuality is naturalized in the air we breathe, so much so that overt homophobia is not necessary to enforce it. I had read about and lectured on this before, but this time I was in the midst of coming out as queer after being married to a man with two children, well into my late 30s. As I told students, in my entire life before that, I had never consciously questioned my sexuality (although with hindsight, there were signs). I always thought of myself as a self-aware, open-minded, and progressive person. I was never part of a religious or social group that was overtly homophobic. My family was liberal, as was the college town I grew up in and the women’s liberal arts college I attended. I couldn’t understand how I got so far in life without knowing this crucial aspect about myself. I told students that wrestling with this question helped me understand the power of internalized oppression, in my case internalized homophobia and internalized sexism. Even in the absence of overt homophobia, I said, I had internalized a view of homosexuality as deviant, perverted, and disgusting. And that, even with lean-in feminism and “having it all,” I had internalized a belief that my success as a woman was tied to my ability to attract a desirable man.

After the lecture, several students approached to thank me for the story. Others sent emails or came to office hours. Some were young women who resonated with the part about gendered scripts and what it meant to be a successful woman. Some identified as LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning) and wanted to come out to me. One shared that their parent came out as gay when they were in high school. It was a turning point in the class. It felt like the lecture had opened up space for deeper, more meaningful learning. Students’ writing became more self-reflective and personal, less resistant. I felt less self-conscious and more relaxed in class. So, in the next semester, when we arrived at that part of the syllabus, I told the story again. And again, the thank-you visits and emails came rolling in. After that, the story became a staple. A couple years later, a student said they had heard about the story before enrolling and looked forward to hearing it live.

In the same time period, I revised the course title from Education and the Movies to Education and Film, increased enrollment from 120 to 180 to support more graduate TAs, applied for and received the “diversity” designation from the university, and collaborated with TAs to continuously revise and improve the course. Each semester we updated readings and incorporated new forms of media, shifted our pedagogical approaches, modified prompt questions and assignments, restructured the format and meeting times. The gradual frontloading of gender and sexuality and the suburban high school films that students requested was an attempt to “meet students where they are.” These changes seemed to help students engage with and conceptually understand principles of critical media analysis. Over time, we saw more evidence that students understood how the media embodied particular perspectives, contributed to ideological hegemony, and legitimized oppressive power relations. They weren’t resisting these ideas with quite the same force. They were producing thoughtful, rigorous analyses of films. We had found our groove.

Just as I was feeling good about that, in fall of 2018 I received this comment from a student:

I don’t appreciate how the class treats controversial subjects, such as gay relationships, as if they are not controversial at all. I think in a class of at least 70 people, it’s impossible to know everyone’s beliefs and morals, but gay relationships are different. A 2015 USA Today poll found that only 60% of Americans approve of gay marriage. Coming into class behaving like it’s no big deal, or as if it’s approved all across the board, is not helping anyone. Less than 5% of Americans identify as LGBT according to NBC News. This is why they are represented less in films. The other 95% of Americans want their film and TV characters to be people they can relate to in as many ways possible. This is why almost all characters in film are straight. It’s not homophobia, it’s relative representation of the consumer base. I feel that normalizing and advancing the LGBT agenda is unnecessary and we should instead be looking toward the actual consumers of these films rather than look to point fingers when a “diverse” film doesn’t perform well in the box office. I understand that this is a required diversity course but I am uncomfortable when everyone is taught to believe the same thing, without prior knowledge of anyone’s personal or religious beliefs. No one has spoken out because no one is brave enough to challenge the evident progressive agenda. I know there are lots of people who sit quietly and disagree with what is being taught. I have nothing against the professor for being gay and I wish no ill will onto her, but that doesn’t mean she can push her identity politics into everyone’s faces. And if you are going to push progressive politics into the class, include some conservative/Republican ideals too. After all, the Civil Rights movement (African-Americans) and the women’s suffragette movement (Women) were lead and[9] legitimized by Republicans. Just a thought[10].

My first reaction: “This is just the inevitable push-back when students are challenged to confront their own power and privilege. I’m used to this.” But something felt different. The student had used right-wing talking points coupled with homophobia. I spent the next lecture afraid. There was a White boy, or young man, sitting toward the front of the lecture hall near the center. His eyes were focused on me but he wasn’t taking notes. I hadn’t noticed him before. Was he new? Was he even in this class? I paced the lecture hall keeping him in my peripheral vision. I felt myself shaking, in a quiet panic. Could this young man be a mass shooter? I wavered between “I’m being paranoid” and “but no one would be surprised if it happened here.” Every White boy in the lecture hall that day looked like he could be the next nationally recognized school shooter. And why not? Would anyone really be surprised if it happened at [this university]?

Tebaldi: Openings, Impasses, and Incels

Discussion: Opening or Impasse?

In the time that elapsed between Nygreen’s first coming-out lecture and the first homophobic student comment or the first LaPolytechnique fan in Tebaldi’s class, the political and media landscape of the United States changed dramatically. The 2016 U.S. presidential election had occurred, emboldening and materially empowering a far-right movement based on racist, sexist, and homophobic identity politics. The era of posttruth and fake news decisively arrived. In some ways, teaching CML grew easier in that time. By 2018, our students widely understood that media is powerful, contains embedded ideologies and points of view, can shape politics, and influence culture. These claims had become un-controversial, almost self-evident. We used to struggle for the better part of the semester to achieve this level of understanding. Now, our students came in with it. This seemed to provide an opening for CML pedagogy. But was this opening actually an impasse?

We saw students who identified as right-wing become fluent in media criticism. They argued the media, and our course, had a liberal bias, to paint their own views as stigmatized. They wrote “representation matters” to show how White men, especially conservatives, Christians, southerners, the rich, and fraternity brothers are represented negatively in media, caricatured or portrayed as “backward” and stupid. They cited readings about intersectionality and institutionalized oppression to argue that political correctness was the new ideological hegemony—the new compulsory heterosexuality, as it were. This painted them, of course, as free speech warriors. At first, it seemed like an impasse. A co-optation of critique. Students across our courses showed an increased facility with the language of critique—yet this language was associated with ideas, beliefs, ideologies we found to be anathema to our vision of critical pedagogy. It was used not to question power, but to maintain status. In our students’ comments as well, leftist language was used to make the right seem like the real free thinkers, the real critical thinkers—and to paint White men as the new true oppressed.

Were they critical thinkers? They were, by most measures, more “media literate” than our students had ever been. Yet, more reactionary. Was this an opening for more critical thought? A beginning from which to teach a power analysis? Or an impasse, leaving us to watch as the students used the critical vocabulary we taught them to defend Trumpism? What solutions could be found? Were we limited to fact-checks, stuck between defending Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and endorsing Steve Bannon’s Breitbart? What seemed at first like an opening began to seem like an impasse. “Fake news” was not students becoming critically literate, but the co-opting of criticality for authority. It was a faux-rebellion just like something out of The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller. Conservatives were the new punk rock, free thinkers, the new oppressed, and now, the new critical media scholars.

Our students weren’t saying these things in a vacuum; they were voicing ideas that are widely circulated in rightist media. As CML educators, we need to become critically aware of what right-wing media is doing, and how. It might look like disinformation to us, but to consumers of it, right-wing media gives the feeling of being the real critical thinkers engaged in battle against the PC authorities. We see this most clearly in The Red Pill, a pseudo-documentary about a feminist who discovers the “truth” of male oppression—a mirror image of the kind of discovery, critical awareness, and intersectional understanding of social power we aim to teach. The film relies centrally on a series of facts that are superficially true: the greater number of male suicides, the smaller number of male shelters. Yet, they elide important factual and social context, the far greater number of suicide attempts by women, that more women need shelters as we have less economic power and are more often victims of partner violence. They are correct facts, recontextualized within a vision of male grievance, loss and loneliness, and illegitimate female power. These correct yet decontextualized facts are used to reframe the right as both the true oppressed and the true critical thinkers. As Bates (2021) describes, The Red Pill, a prominent Men’s right community, promoted a video of Trump disparaging a female reporter that opens with their definition of “misogynist”: “a person who tells a woman the truth.” Like many Trump supporters, Men’s Rights Activists deify and enact the idea of speaking your mind and countering “political correctness.”

Bates shows how the members of this misogynist group note say they are in fact the truth-tellers and fact-checkers, fighting against feminist political correctness. The whole idea of the red pill is a fact that allows people to see beyond the dominant narrative, facts that allow you to access the truth and the correct values. They see themselves not as the indoctrinated, but as the ones with the facts, the “redpills” that fight against the false consciousness of PC ideology. As the name “Men’s rights” suggests, these simply take up the language of the oppressed for the rights of the oppressor. While these groups present themselves as stigmatized by feminism and social “gynocentrism,” researchers note that Men’s Rights and Incel groups share an ideology with mainstream America (Mattheis & Waltman, 2020). There is a broad belief in male entitlement, gender difference, and roles—indeed these are the cultural norms we aim to explore in films in our courses on CML. The Red Pill reframes these dominant cultural ideologies as transgressive critique; it makes 1950’s gender roles edgy.

This stance is carefully manipulated by right-wing media (as the term edgelord implies). In this way, it echoes the John Hughes and other suburban high school films. Like Ferris in the shower with his soap mohawk talking about how he doesn’t care about European socialism, contemporary far-right media takes suburban ideologies about gender roles and consumer capitalism and makes them seem fun, rebellious, and nonconformist. This rebellious truth is constructed in opposition to the dull, censorious, boring progressive agenda of teachers (like us), just like Ferris’s rebellion is characterized in opposition to his parents’ authority, boring teachers, or idiot principals. This is the same kind of fun affective charge that animates much of right-wing transgressive, critical stance. The red-pilled truth speaker gets to “own the libs” with the same glee the breakfast club got to defeat the dull principal. In short, The Red Pill (like other rightist media) is not just “alternative fact” but a faux-critical stance undergirded by a fun, sexy, transgressive, or smarter-than-you affect. This blend of sex and smarts, rebellion and superiority, is an appealing stance for some college students, who are maturing and testing authority. This is familiar to those who have had the student who enjoys “playing devil’s advocate.” The Red Pill is affective, about identity, not merely something to be disproven—as anyone who has tried to fight with that kid in class can attest.

Yet, we did find some openings toward real critical thought. We must be very aware of the ways in which right-wing discourse is manipulative and propagandistic, not taking their claims to criticality on face value. Still, not everything right-wing media says is an alternative fact; some must correspond to people’s own interpretation of the social crisis as Hall (2021) points out about previous iterations of right-wing propaganda. Perhaps once we see the limits, it is possible to begin with this language and push for more egalitarian values. For example, rightist media constructs the Right as edgy, transgressive truth-tellers in opposition to a PC liberal elite with a “progressive agenda,” as Nygreen’s student evaluation put it. While this PC elite is as fictive as Joe Biden’s socialism, the construction is emboldened by neoliberal education practices and policies. When we have only a semester of “diversity requirements,” the language of critique is easily learned without its deeper lessons, enabling it to be co-opted by the right. When the neoliberal university superficially engages with diversity while charging thousands per course, it gives a grain of truth to the right’s claims about a PC elite. When liberal politics deal with representation and not redistribution, from rainbow capitalism to new nontoxic masculinity sponsored by Gillette, the right’s critiques of woke capitalism aren’t all wrong. If only we could get them to be mad at the capitalism part instead of the woke part.

Rightist discussions of the PC elite reframe economic critiques of the elite in terms of social identities and the “liberal” “cultural elites” are constructed as the power elite. This could be a jumping off point to talk about class, how we understand social power and inequality, and how the media we consume help us to do this. Perhaps a critical media approach to right-wing propaganda could look like attacking these discourses and showing how they are manipulative, but also engaging with the grains of truth or feeling that make them effective—instead of merely fact-checking and falling into the role of the dull PC police the right assigned for us, and also looking more deeply into both the experiences our students are having of the social crisis, and the media that is shaping this interpretation.

We are far from resolving this problem. But with patience and reflexive examination of our own struggles as educators, we have found small openings for critical pedagogy. Two areas in which we have been effective as educators in doing this is through a greater discussion of “deep stories” (Hochschild, 2018), especially those informed by class politics, and the use of affect. We worked as educators to go beyond a media literacy class to a CML class, one that went beyond representation and stereotypes, to one that used films to explore dominant narratives or deep stories, stories which are culturally, emotionally, and intellectually important. These in particular invoked ideas of meritocracy, individualism, self-expression, and rebellion, which are deeply connected to right-wing narratives. Tebaldi in particular struggled to do this with gender, moving from critiquing beauty standards to engaging with individualism. Nygreen’s course design also connected these to class and a deeper political economy. By discussing economic inequality and middle-class normativity, we were also better able to address some of the ways class was used against claims of White privilege and how the “white working class” was used to create this false criticality or fairy tales of White oppression.

Finally, affect and personal relationships had long been central to our research and understanding of critical pedagogy, but as we began teaching “post-trump” or “post-truth,” we saw that building connection and sharing who we were became even more important. Tebaldi found that being disingenuous about love and feminism made it harder to teach, whereas Nygreen found that honesty and personal narrative brought deep meaning to the same content. By being more honest with our own experiences and feelings, we can ask our students to do the same and counter the faux-criticality of the right.

Conclusion: Impasses and Openings

We have found that our students’ uptake of critical language about media seems like an opening but is often an impasse, like one of those old cartoons where they paint a doorway on a brick wall. We felt stuck between teaching fact-checking or accepting right-wing criticality at face value, both of these ignoring the social facts of student experiences. We needed to better understand our students and the ways in which their use, or misuse, of the language of criticality reflected at once the populist discourses of Trump and their own beliefs and needs. We also needed to examine the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism, of courses in “diversity” that do not address students’ ideologies or help them articulate their own needs.