By Alexandra Blaney

With #FakeNews trending and the current investigations into Russian propaganda revealing that an estimated third of Americans saw Russian ads during the 2016 election, media literacy has become an essential skill.

Think back to the last interesting thing you read on social media.  Do you remember the source of that post?  Did you click through to read the actual article or did you only look at it in your news feed (perhaps click share) and then move on?  With the amount of time we all spend consuming a cornucopia of media via words, images, and sounds carefully composed and targeted based on data – we need to expand our literacy skills to be able to think critically about the messages we receive – and also that we create and share. If we can develop into informed and reflective media consumers, we will be able to be better donors and activists and wiser voters.

For us, we came face to face with the issue of how media and storytelling is used to play to our own biases and interests in the making of The Wrong Light (2016).  We decided to make that film because we were drawn to (an ultimately false) story of the sex trade in Thailand and how desperate parents had to consider selling their children while one heroic activist worked to stop them.  It had all the elements of a great narrative arc and we had incredible access to the story through the purported activist Mickey Choothesa.  But as our directors Josie Swantek Heitz and Dave Adams uncovered over the course of filming, his story was completely fabricated.  He had been relying on people’s attraction to these types of stories to raise funds and gain media attention – it didn’t matter that these stories were made up by him and didn’t represent the lives of the girls at the COSA shelter at all.  It is what people wanted to hear and what they responded to and so that’s what he used.

And we were not the only ones attracted to this story: VICE published a glowing portrait of Mickey; PRI used him as one of their main sources in a multi-part piece on sex-trafficking; donors and volunteers around the world gave money and time to his organization.  This widespread support of a fraudulent organization made us reexamine our own role in creating narratives as filmmakers and also our role as donors and activists. We felt that we all – creators and activists alike – needed to be more aware of the ethics of humanitarian storytelling and how representations of other people, especially the most disenfranchised, can affect their everyday lives.  We hoped that audiences would see our film The Wrong Light and be inspired to consider the public’s desire for exaggerated and/or untrue narratives and move towards a greater demand for transparency, informed consent from subjects of stories, and due diligence in storytelling.  We faced the obstacle of trying to convince people that representation and narrative transparency actually mattered and had real world consequences. And then the 2016 presidential election happened and the topic of media transparency and media literacy has been at center stage.

A recent Stanford study showed that students at almost every grade level cannot distinguish fake news from real news and while they consume media for as many as 10-11 hours a day, they do not have the critical media literacy skills they need to judge it. To develop future citizens, future activists, future media consumers and creators, we need to ensure they have the critical media literacy skills they’ll need to navigate a minefield of content coming at them from every side.

We’ve compiled a list of resources teachers and parents can use:

• The Lamp is a NYC-based organization that offers curricula, professional development courses, and parent resources to teach media literacy: http://thelamp.org/
• NPR published 5 different teacher’s techniques for fighting Fake News in the Classroom: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/02/16/514364210/5-ways-teachers-are-fighting-fake-news
• Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University in Vancouver has published a free online textbook on web literacy for students.  While it’s aimed at college students, it can be a good resource for anyone.  https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/web-strategies-for-student-fact-checkers/
  
• The New York Times published a series of lesson plans for combatting fake news – while these were specifically for ELL classes, they can be adapted for a lot of audiences:
  Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News
  ‘Chocolate Found to Stave Off Death!’ Analyzing the Scientific Evidence Behind Health Headlines
  Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources
• Shine Global’s IGNITE program offers free film screenings accompanied by discussion guides and in some cases art workshops
• The Wrong Light (also a film in the IGNITE program) – Book a screening of our film for your school or community.  Shine has developed discussion guides and a standards-based curriculum to accompany the film.

[1] https://namle.net/publications/media-literacy-definitions/
[2] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/11/17/remarks-president-obama-and-chancellor-merkel-germany-joint-press
[3] https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-trouble-judging-credibility-information-online
[4] Rideout, Victoria J., et al. “Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds.” Kaiser Family Foundation, January 2010.