Media literacy
The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media of every kind, and to recognize how messages are built and for whom. The educational response to propaganda, and the subject that several American states now require schools to teach.
The phrase dates from the 1970s and the field from the 1930s, when the Institute for Propaganda Analysis sent its bulletins into American classrooms. The 1992 Aspen Institute leadership conference produced the definition most programs still use, the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce communication in a variety of forms, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education later added "act" to the list.
Media literacy is broader than propaganda analysis. It covers how news is made, how advertising works, how platforms rank and recommend, how images are edited, and how to make media as well as read it. But propaganda analysis is its oldest component and still its spine: the questions a media-literate reader asks (who made this, who paid, what is left out, how does it want me to feel, who benefits if I believe it) are the questions on every technique page here.
Several states have put the subject into law. Delaware, New Jersey, Texas, and California require media or information literacy instruction across the grades, and Illinois requires a unit in every high school. The educators section maps the materials on this site to those standards.
Compare counter-propaganda and prebunking.
Sources
- Aufderheide, Patricia. Media Literacy: A Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy. Washington: Aspen Institute, 1993.
- Hobbs, Renee. Media Literacy in Action: Questioning the Media. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. ISBN 978-1538115282
- Sproule, J. Michael. Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.