Bill Yousman
At the 2015 Media Education Summit in Boston, a participant in a roundtable discussion questioned the use of the term “critical media literacy.” She challenged the panelists, saying that the term “critical” means many different things to many people: we may know what we think “critical” means, but others may not be interpreting the language the same way we are.
This critique hints at the instability not only of one particular word, but of language itself. Not just the term “critical,” but every word in every language is open to multiple and idiosyncratic interpretations. It was the so-called first postmodern president, Bill Clinton, who reminded us of this when he asked us to consider what the definition of the word “is” is.
This essay is an attempt to clarify how we might think about the term “critical media literacy”: what it means, how it differs from other forms of media literacy, and what the pedagogical and political implications might be of embracing critical media literacy.
At the same Boston conference, there were two other moments that suggested the title of this essay. During the discussion noted above, another participant voiced her opposition to a critical approach because, she said, she didn’t believe that educators should “tell students what they should think.” On the following day, a presenter began his talk by noting his personal reluctance about using the term “critical,” before delivering a fairly lengthy presentation that seemed, at least to me, to be located firmly in a critical framework.
All of these moments are reflective of a profound reticence, if not outright fear, of the term “critical,” even by those who are committed to media literacy education. I see parallels here to other taboo terms like “socialism” or “feminism.” The term “socialism” seems to engender dread, especially for those who can’t fully define the term or list any of its principles. And while most of my students claim to embrace gender equality, they simultaneously reject identifying themselves as “feminists” or even the notion that they might actually be in agreement with some feminist ideas.
The fear of a critical approach to media education often presents itself as a reasonable response to those who want to indoctrinate young people into their own radical political beliefs; thus, “we shouldn’t be telling students what to think.” David Buckingham has accused advocates of critical approaches of arrogance, paternalism, and self-aggrandizement, while casting them as mere relics of a bygone era.2 In a 2003 anthology of essays about new visions of media literacy, Chris Worsnop argued that media education should not be primarily focused on “[h]ealth concerns . . . social concerns . . . moral concerns . . . ideological concerns . . . [or] political concerns . . .”3 (Without being too flippant, aside from aesthetics and technical skills, I’m not sure what’s left after we remove all of the above from any sort of educational project.)
Worsnop also warns educators against “media bashing,” a term I have heard several times at media literacy conferences and even from colleagues in academic departments.
So, let’s establish from the start what critical media literacy is not, so that we can begin to explore what critical media literacy can be.
First, and most simply, critical media literacy is not an empty signifier devoid of any meaning. While it is indeed a phrase that can be interpreted in many different ways, that is true for any abstract terminology. Would it be possible to get a diverse group of people to achieve consensus about what “art” means? Or “beauty”? Or “patriotism”? Or “democracy”? All language is unstable and open to multiple decoding options, yet we still rely on words to propel discourse and create meaning.
Second, despite the fears of some educators, the use of the term “critical” does not imply that we are telling students what they must think. As communication professor Rashmi Luthra says, “The idea is not to have students mimic my analysis and conclusions but to start them on a quest for solutions to pressing problems of global inequities and the interlocking oppressions of race, class, gender, nation, ability, and heterosexuality that result from these inequities.”4 Of course framing inequity as a problem is itself an ideological position. But all cultural and educational practices are ideological. A willingness to directly confront the ideologies in media is one of the distinguishing marks of a critical approach to media education. Rather than political indoctrination, this is actually aimed at encouraging more independent thinking, as Steven Funk, Douglas Kellner, and Jeff Share point out:
By examining their ideological assumptions, students can learn to question what they consider “normal” or “common sense.” “Common sense” is only so because ideas and texts have been produced and disseminated through a dominant frame of thought expressed in powerful master-narratives, often conveyed through media, schools, government, religion, and families.5
Encouraging students to deconstruct homophobic imagery in popular culture, for example, by examining the institutional factors behind the production of those images and the influence they might have over viewers, cannot be equated with telling students exactly what they should think about the images themselves or even about the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Similarly, a student who has learned that only a small number of profit-driven corporations with close ties to elite interests control most of the commercial news outlets in the US is free to keep relying on those outlets for information, but at least they will do so with more context and from a more informed position about the institutions they rely on.
Providing just this sort of context is key to critical media analysis. Justin Lewis and Sut Jhally offer an example of a contextual, critical approach to, in this case, car commercials:
When automobile ads invariably show cars driving along empty roads, often across pristine landscapes with cloudless skies, we might ask students not only what is being left out of these images (traffic, pollution, smog), but why? In whose interest is it to see the automobile as a symbol of freedom, exploring rather than despoiling the US landscape? What role do these interests have in media production? What are the consequences of seeing the automobile in only these terms?6
This asking of critical questions cannot be equated with simply telling students what to think about those commercials. Instead it is encouraging them to view media in a more informed way and consider alternative ways of thinking about the media they use. And, it should be noted, this critical thinking is exactly the opposite of what is encouraged by the advertising industries themselves, who would much prefer that critical questions not be asked about the stories and images they employ. As Lewis and Jhally point out, “It is important to note that we are not advocating propagandizing in schools for a particular political perspective. We are advocating a view that recognizes that the world is always made by someone, and a decision to tolerate the status quo is as political as a more overtly radical act.”7
Finally, while I believe that the commercial media industries that dominate our lives certainly do need to be called out for their frequently misogynistic, homophobic, racist, imperialistic, and hyperviolent images and stories, to characterize a critical approach to media education as simply “media bashing” is an oversimplification and distortion of both the methods and goals of critical media literacy. In much the same way that the term “political correctness” is hauled out to distract, deflect, and delegitimize marginalized groups’ demands for respect and dignity, “bashing the media” distracts, deflects, and delegitimizes the mission of holding media industries accountable for their propaganda, lies, stereotypes, distortions, omissions, and myriad other ethical breaches.
A crucial figure in the development of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire, offers an eloquent example of just the sort of critical media literacy exercise that I have in mind:
For example, as men [sic] through discussion, begin to perceive the deceit in a cigarette advertisement featuring a beautiful, smiling woman in a bikini (i.e., the fact that she, her smile, her beauty, and her bikini have nothing at all to do with the cigarette), they begin to discover the difference between education and propaganda. At the same time, they are preparing themselves to discuss and perceive the same deceit in ideological or political propaganda; they are arming themselves to “disassociate ideas.” In fact, this has always seemed to me to be the way to defend democracy, not a way to subvert it.8
So, to summarize: “Critical media literacy” is not a term that is useless because it can be interpreted in many different ways. Critical media literacy is not political indoctrination of vulnerable young minds. And critical media literacy is not simply “media bashing.”
So what is it then?
One of the most frequently heard phrases in this field of inquiry—and I’ve even said this myself at times—is that critical media literacy deals with issues of power. But what does that mean? Funk, Kellner, and Share offer a little more specificity: “CML [critical media literacy] calls for examining the hierarchical power relations that are embedded in all communication and that ultimately benefit dominant social groups at the expense of subordinate ones.”9 To hone in on what is pertinent and distinctive about the term “critical,” we should start by examining the roots of critical media literacy in critical theories of society, communication, and culture.
Perhaps the best place to start is with a quote from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The German Ideology that is frequently referenced in cultural studies scholarship:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.10
This Marxist conception of ideology is at the heart of what has been called an alternative paradigm of media theory, based in a European tradition of cultural criticism most often identified with the Frankfurt School of the early twentieth century.11 Rather than looking for the “effects” of media on individual psychology and behavior, as in mainstream social scientific media research, the so-called alternative paradigm concerned itself with power inequities and the role of media in the domination and subordination of particular social groups.
Distancing themselves from approaches to media research sponsored by media industries, writers from the alternative paradigm self-identified as critical theorists because of their acknowledged goal of critiquing powerful institutions like the media rather than unreflectively adopting the agendas and values of these institutions. This distinguishes the critical approach from the more dominant “administrative” approach to media theory and research. Administrative communication research involves projects funded by corporations and governments that examine how media can be used to advance the goals of those sponsoring organizations.12 We might also think of the administrative paradigm as encompassing any research or theory that either consciously or unconsciously adopts the assumptions, values, and standards of the established and dominant institutions in a given social context.
Todd Gitlin argues that both a cozy relationship with the media industries and a narrow definition of media influence—as simply short-term, behavioral, and individual—prevents scholars in the administrative tradition from even beginning to ask the most fundamental and crucial questions about the role of media in social formations.13 These unasked questions concern the economic and political structure of media institutions, the material and ideological impact of these structures, and who benefits from the existing patterns of media control. As critical scholar Theodor Adorno wrote about his attempts to work with media researcher Paul Lazarsfeld, “it was . . . implied that the system itself, its cultural and sociological consequences and its social and economic presuppositions were not to be analyzed.”14
Intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School of Applied Social Research brought the alternative approach to analyzing and critiquing media and culture to the United States in the 1930s as they fled the Third Reich. The Frankfurt School included Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Rather than an industry-friendly administrative approach, these theorists employed Marxist concepts to focus on questions of power and ideology in the study of the institutions and products of mass communication, or what they called “the culture industries.”15
Frankfurt School scholars believed that popular forms of entertainment like film, radio, paperback novels, and magazines were nothing more than mass-produced, standardized commodities. As Horkheimer and Adorno wrote, “Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.”16
The central concerns of the early critical theorists that are most relevant to critical media literacy can be summed up with two key propositions. First, mass culture promotes conformity and adherence to fashion trends while undermining authentic individuality and intellectual thought. Second, and most importantly, there are specific ideological purposes behind the machinations of the culture industries—legitimizing capitalism, placating workers, distracting the masses from the harsh realities of their existence, and binding them to the prevailing social order:
By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture...17
Frankfurt School scholars thus broke with the behaviorist and administrative mass communication researchers of the early twentieth century primarily through their Marxist inquiry into the relationships between culture and power. As Kellner notes, “the critical focus on media culture from the perspectives of commodification, reification, ideology, and domination provides a framework useful as a corrective to more populist and uncritical approaches to media culture which tend to surrender critical standpoints.”18
Inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School’s critical paradigm, but interested in problematizing the notion of media audiences as unthinking drones of the culture industries, a critical cultural studies approach to media and power emerged in the 1960s at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Here such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie, Paul Gilroy, and many others offered highly influential analyses of the important role that popular culture plays in the daily lives of the public. British Cultural Studies drew inspiration from Louis Althusser’s important writing about media as one of several powerful ideological apparatuses that shape our relationship to everyday life,19 but also from the work of Antonio Gramsci and his notion of an eternal struggle between hegemonic and counterhegemonic forces.20 Thus, without shying away from sharp ideological critiques of media, cultural studies added “a more sophisticated understanding of the audience as active constructors of reality, not simply mirrors of an external reality.”21 The insights of the cultural studies approach are at the heart of several of the core ideas commonly accepted as key media literacy concepts, including the principle that media are ideological constructions that play a role in constructing our notions of reality, but also, importantly, that this does not amount to absolute ideological control because audiences do have the capacity to negotiate meaning in the media they use.22
Influenced by Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and British Cultural Studies, critical media literacy goes beyond more conservative approaches to media education by starting with the recognition that media perform not just as information and entertainment but even more crucially as the voice of the powerful in society. Critical media literacy also adopts the position that this voice can and should be challenged by alternative voices. Advocating for justice and social transformation is thus central to a critical media literacy approach. As Funk, Kellner, and Share summarize, “CML provides a framework that encourages people to read information critically in multiple formats, to create alternative representations that question hierarchies of power, social norms and injustices, and to become agents of change.”23
The background explored in this section, however, leaves two questions unanswered: First, why do critical media scholars, educators, artists, and activists believe we need alternative systems of representation; and second, why do we think the world itself needs to change? Answering these questions requires us to leave the surface appearance of media messages behind for a bit while we look at why those messages are there and who is actually creating them.
“YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH”: COMING TO GRIPS WITH THE “C” WORD
One essential way that critical media education differs from other forms of media literacy is in its willingness to go behind the messages and shine a light on the powerful institutions that control the media environment, as well as their practices of employing engaging visual imagery and storytelling to advance their own economic and ideological agendas. As Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe put it, “To sustain their privilege, dominant groups must control representation, they must encode the world in forms that support their own power . . . [But] language systems are always multi-accentual, which means that lodged within dominant cultural codes are the preconditions for oppositional interpretations.”24 Opposition, however, can only emerge in conditions of enhanced knowledge that allow us to interrogate the methods and motivations of the powerful. Thus, Julie Frechette, Nolan Higdon, and Rob Williams argue that the goal of critical media literacy is “to analyze how media industries reproduce sociocultural structures of power by determining who gets to tell the stories of a society, what points of view and organizational interests will shape the constructions of these stories, and who the desired target audience is.”25
Unlike more conservative approaches to media literacy education, the critical approach entails a willingness to take on what media scholar Robert McChesney has called the “elephant in the room.” This giant lumbering beast that is too large to ignore, but can’t be avoided by any honest investigation of the power of media, is the beast we are often hesitant to name: capitalism. Writing specifically about changes in media since the widespread dissemination of digital technologies, McChesney argues that both those who are suspicious of the Internet and those who embrace it “have a single, deep, and often fatal flaw that severely compromises the value of their work. That flaw, simply put, is ignorance about really existing capitalism and an underappreciation of how capitalism dominates social life. Celebrants and skeptics lack a political economic context. The work tends to take capitalism for granted as part of the background scenery...”26
McChesney’s critique of Internet pundits can easily be applied to conservative media literacy scholars and educators as well. Not just the Internet but the entire commercial media environment is dominated by just a small handful of multinational corporations whose explicit goal is to make as large a profit as possible. This is as true of so-called “new” media as it is of “old” media, as true for Facebook as it is for NBC. In fact, under the US legal system, publicly held corporations are mandated to do everything they can to increase profits in order to benefit their shareholders. Thus, in 1981, Michael Eisner, then CEO of Disney, a company that makes products aimed primarily at children and young people, reported to his investors, “We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.”27 And in 2003, the founder of the US’s largest radio chain, Clear Channel Communications, told Fortune magazine, “We’re not in the business of providing news and information. We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.”28 And, upon acquiring YouTube in 2008, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt in an interview on CNBC said, “I don’t think we’ve quite figured out the perfect solution of how to make money, and we’re working on that. That’s our highest priority this year.”29 Most recently, in 2016, the head of CBS, Les Moonves, speaking about the high ratings and the vast amounts of political advertising provoked by the Donald Trump presidential run, admitted, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”30
These perspectives from the very top of the corporate media hierarchy provide us with crucial insights about whose interests are really served by capitalist media industries, yet these are truths that many media literacy practitioners are unwilling to acknowledge. While it is true that offering a full-blown critique of capitalism might be an unwise move for public school teachers, the roots of this aversion often seem to grow from ideological dispositions rather than pragmatic career preservation strategies. Several years ago I attended a regional media literacy conference at the University of Connecticut. During a closing plenary session an audience member raised questions about media literacy organizations accepting corporate funding. In defending this practice, one of the world’s leading media literacy educators, a college professor protected by tenure, responded, “Hey, I’m a capitalist and I’m not ashamed of that.”
Moreover, the dominant media literacy organizations in the US have been partnering with media corporations like Nickelodeon, Time Warner, and Channel One for many years now. Lori Bindig and James Castonguay argue that among many debates about media education, “the issue of whether or not to accept funding from corporate interests is among the most contentious.”31 But, as Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp point out, “The most influential and pervasive media education initiatives in the country now fit well enough within the demands and logic of the commercial media industry to win its approval and funding.”32
In contrast to this, alternative groups like the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) and the Global Critical Media Literacy Project (GCMLP) refuse to accept corporate funding because they believe it is impossible to honestly and fully critique those who are paying one’s bills. In addition to advocating for critical thinking about media images and messages like the more conservative media literacy organizations, ACME and GCMLP go beyond this in their mission statements, advocating for institutional analysis, alternative media production, media reform, and media activism, four aspects of critical media literacy that corporate-funded approaches are unlikely to embrace.33
An unwillingness to critique capitalism also disenables the dominant paradigm in media literacy from fully addressing the inequality that capitalist media systems play a role in creating, naturalizing, reinforcing, and justifying. Even an apologist for capitalism, the economist Ha-Joon Chang, is forced to acknowledge many of the problems caused by the innate tendencies of capitalist systems. While he writes, “I still believe that capitalism is the best economic system that humanity has invented,”34 he then goes on to deconstruct many of the myths about capitalism that corporate media promulgate, including the wrongheaded notions that globalization aids poorer nations, policies that are good for business are also good for the public, and that the stronghold of capitalism, the US, has the highest living standard on the planet.
An unwillingness to confront capitalism means many related “isms,” such as militarism, imperialism, nationalism, racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, neoliberalism, hyperconsumerism, antienvironmentalism, and more, may also be considered “too political,” and ensures that the crucial role that capitalist media play in advancing these ideologies and practices remains outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
bell hooks is one of many critical scholars and educators to point out the mutually reinforcing, intertwined nature of capitalism and other structures of dominance and subordination. She writes, “I often use the phrase ‘imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.”35 We can be sure that this language would be considered too inflammatory by those who advocate for a type of media education that strives to remain apolitical and neutral. Reflecting on his own experiences working with teachers, Peter McLaren notes, “When I suggest that teaching should be about transforming the injustices of the social order rather than adapting students to that order, many of them feel absolutely threatened. Teachers frequently feel that my position is a ‘biased’ one and that teachers have an obligation to be neutral and objective . . .”36
However, to call on historian Howard Zinn, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” In the documentary film named after this famous quote, Zinn says,
I don’t believe it’s possible to be neutral. The world is already moving in certain directions. And to be neutral, to be passive in a situation like that is to collaborate with whatever is going on. And I, as a teacher, do not want to be a collaborator with whatever is happening in the world. I want myself, as a teacher, and I want you as students, to intercede with whatever is happening in the world.37
Even if they don’t identify as Marxist, many critical media educators believe that when they are silent about the inequality, subordination, violence, and oppression brought on by capitalism they remain complicit with the status quo and they have already chosen a side without acknowledging that the choice has been made. Critical media literacy thus focuses not just on what is visible in media but, crucially, what is invisible. Len Masterman writes about this as media education that emphasizes ideology and the politics of representation and “challenge[s] the media’s common-sensed representations by asking whose interests they served, how they were constructed, and what alternative representations were repressed.”38 Critical literacy educator Vivian Vasquez writes about teaching even very young students how to interrogate stories by asking, “Whose voice is heard? Who is silenced? Whose reality is presented? Whose reality is ignored? Who is advantaged? Who is disadvantaged?”39 Masterman further notes,
Since the mystification of media’s images was tied up with their “naturalization,” their “evaporation” of politics and history, the task of the teacher was precisely to provide some sense of the wider political and historical contexts within which these images were produced and could be understood.40
Peter McLaren offers a concrete example: Discussing the US government’s overthrow of democratically elected leaders around the globe, our adoption of continual “low intensity warfare” as an unstated foundation of our foreign policy, and our employment of chemical weapons—all matters that the corporate media choose to ignore—McLaren asks, “Should such questions form our ongoing debates in our classrooms? Or do we continue to claim that classrooms must be ‘neutral’ spaces devoid of political debates and discussions and leave such questions to the ‘experts’ (likely certified by the Pentagon)?”41
Asking the difficult questions and encouraging self-reflection and critical dialogue are central tenets of critical pedagogy, an approach to education that has much in common with critical media literacy. In fact, critical media literacy should be understood as grounded not just in the critical theory, cultural studies, and political economic frameworks we have been exploring, but in principles of democratic education and transformative critical pedagogy as well.
“THE POINT IS TO CHANGE IT”: TRANSFORMATIVE PEDAGOGY AND CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
Drawing inspiration from Paulo Freire, communication professors Deanna Fassett and John Warren frame critical pedagogy as “[e]fforts to reflect and act upon the world in order to transform it, to make it a more just place for more people, to respond to our own collective pains and needs and desires.”42 Similarly, McLaren notes, “Our interpretation of the world is inseparable from our transformation of the world—both are linked socially and ethically.”43
The key here is the notion of ethical transformation. Marx noted, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”44 This is a crucial difference between conservative educational practices and critical pedagogy. Just as critical media literacy embraces alternative media production and media activism in addition to critical thinking about media messages, critical pedagogy argues that the goal of truly democratic education is not the mere cataloging and memorization of a series of facts (mathematical equations, historical dates and names, conjugation of verbs, etc.). As Freire argues, “Acquiring literacy does not involve memorizing sentences, words, or syllables—lifeless objects unconnected to an existential universe—but rather an attitude of creation and re-creation, a self-transformation producing a stance of intervention in one’s own context.”45 The aim is to allow students the space to explore the actual worlds they inhabit in order to critically reflect on their life conditions and ultimately work for positive change. The idea of transformation, however, is frightening to those who are heavily invested in the status quo—and thus they insist that truly transformative education is not objective, too political, too close to “telling students what to think.”
And yet, far from telling students what to think, critical pedagogy is devoted to engaging with students in the process of thinking. An anecdote from the critical educator bell hooks illustrates this point well:
Recently, I gave a lecture wherein a young white female student boldly stated during open discussion: “I am one of those evil capitalists you critique and I do not want to be changed by participation in your classroom or by reading your books.” After I called attention to the fact that the word “evil” was not used during my lecture or in any work I referred to, I was able to share that in all the classes I teach I make it clear from the start that my intent is not to create clones of myself. Boldly, I affirmed: “My primary intent as a teacher is to create an open learning community where students are able to learn how to be critical thinkers able to understand and respond to the material we are studying together.” I added that it has been my experience that as students become critical thinkers they often of their own free will change perspectives; only they know whether that is for the better.46
Critical pedagogy is thus more open to students arriving at their own conclusions than more teacher-centered approaches. Freire distinguishes between two educational paradigms: The banking model of education assumes that educators are the source of all wealth and that students are empty safe deposit boxes, waiting to be filled up with the riches provided to them by their expert instructors. In contrast to this, the problem-posing model encourages students to struggle with real issues they face in their own lives and engage in constructive dialogue in order to work for change.47 The problem-posing approach is thus based in Freire’s notion of liberatory praxis: “the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”48 This unavoidably entails dealing with the political: hunger, inequality, violence, disenfranchisement, domination and subordination, etc. Writing specifically about Brazil during the 1960s, Freire’s stance is just as relevant to current global realities:
The education our situation demanded would enable men [sic] to discuss courageously the problems of their context— and to intervene in that context; it would warn men of the dangers of the time and offer them the confidence and the strength to confront those dangers instead of surrendering their sense of self through submission to the decisions of others . . . that education could help men to assume an increasingly critical attitude toward the world and so to transform it.49
Education is always a political act, as Ira Shor notes: “Not encouraging students to question knowledge, society, and experience tacitly endorses and supports the status quo.”50 The banking model of education encourages passive thinking on the part of students who, no matter the avowed subject, are being taught the meta-lessons of obedience, compliance, and the acceptance of established structures of power. Critical pedagogy is also political, but it acknowledges its politics. Whereas the politics of banking education are the unspoken politics of passivity and conformity, the politics of critical pedagogy are the politics of freedom, liberation, and transgression of rigid boundaries.
This willingness to teach in a way that confronts systems of power is not without risk. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner point out that those at the top of the social hierarchy “would much prefer that the schools do little or nothing to encourage youth to question, doubt, or challenge any part of the society in which they live . . .”51 As noted above, even colleagues and other educators may accuse us of politically indoctrinating students (although isn’t this exactly what the business schools do?), and there are institutional challenges as well. hooks writes eloquently about the backlash that politically engaged educators face:
My commitment to engaged pedagogy is an expression of political activism. Given that our educational institutions are so deeply invested in a banking system, teachers are more rewarded when we do not teach against the grain. The choice to work against the grain, to challenge the status quo, often has negative consequences. And that is part of what makes that choice one that is not politically neutral.52
The insights of critical pedagogy make it plain that the idea of neutral education is a myth. We can teach with the grain or against the grain, as hooks notes, but either choice is a political choice. Critical pedagogy doesn’t entail telling students what political party to vote for or which ballot initiative they should support. Instead it involves engaging students in a process of critical questioning of received wisdom. The process of questioning, researching, introspection, and dialogue is the point, rather than a predetermined outcome that all students are expected to embrace.
When it comes to questions of media, this means encouraging critical thinking not just about media texts, but about the contexts in which media are produced and the ways those media influence their audiences. I’ve proposed elsewhere that this may be thought of as an integrative holistic approach to media literacy:
A holistic approach to media literacy, one that encompasses both textual and contextual concerns within a critical framework, argues that to be a citizen rather than a passive consumer in media-saturated societies, one must develop an understanding of the commercial structure of the media industries and the political and ideological implications of this structure. From this perspective, in addition to being able to skillfully deconstruct media texts, the person who is truly media literate is also knowledgeable of the political economy of the media, the consequences of media consumption, and the activist and alternative media movements that seek to challenge mainstream media norms and create a more democratic system.53
By way of example, consider two classroom exercises about fast food advertising: A textual approach might ask students to examine images from a number of different print advertisements and television commercials and discuss the persuasive techniques employed. Teachers might even encourage students to compare the images of food in the ads to what the burgers and tacos actually look like when they are unwrapped. This would allow for critical thinking about the constructed nature of media images. A contextual approach might actually start with this exercise, but then it would go further by asking critical questions about the global reach of the fast food industry, the effectiveness of their advertising in changing people’s diets, their labor and environmental practices, their impact on world health and the treatment of farm animals, etc.54
In both cases students would be asked to voice their own opinions and insights and use their own research and life experiences to reflect on the questions posed by the teacher. But in the latter case students would be asked to dig a bit deeper and consider not just the words and images in the ads themselves but the context these ads appear in. This does not mean hammering students into submission with the “right” conclusions. After exploring the industrial practices and global impact of the fast food industries, some students might choose to continue patronizing fast food establishments, some might opt for healthier eating choices, and some might actually choose to get involved in activist campaigns to expose the truth about their products and policies, fight for better pay for fast food workers, or exert pressure for more responsible environmental policies, better treatment of animals, regulations on fast food advertising to children, etc. As an exercise in critical pedagogy as well as critical media literacy, all along the way the project would proceed not through forcing students to memorize others’ conclusions but by engaging them in dialogue, encouraging them to express their ideas and to do their own research and investigations.
We might contrast this holistic, dialogic approach to the banking approach to education as described by Postman and Weingartner:
Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at least pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true.55
Critical media literacy based in a philosophy of critical pedagogy seeks to challenge these patterns while encouraging critical awareness, critical investigation, and critical action around issues of media, culture, and power. Is that a political act? You bet it is. And survival under the present conditions of neoliberal capitalism necessitates just this sort of politically engaged pedagogy.
WHAT’S AT STAKE: NEOLIBERALISM AND CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY
“Survival” is admittedly a strong word with powerful implications. In this section I will clarify why I believe this is indeed a matter of survival. To fully understand what is at stake when we are discussing critical pedagogy and critical media literacy, we have to first recognize that we are living in the age of an enormously destructive ideology of global neoliberalism. Secondly, we must appreciate the role that media play in reinforcing neoliberal ideologies and how critical media literacy can serve as a response.
Neoliberalism involves both ideologies and economic and political policies that establish the free market, hyperindividualism, and unfettered global capitalism as the supreme forces in all endeavors related to human life. In an essay published shortly after his death in 2014, Stuart Hall and his coauthors noted,
For three decades, the neoliberal system has been generating vast profits for multi-nationals, investment institutions and venture capitalists, and huge accumulations of wealth for the new global super-rich, while grossly increasing the gap between rich and poor and deepening inequalities of income, health and life chances within and between countries, on a scale not seen since before the second world war.56
Wendy Brown explains that neoliberalism must be understood as much more than just a capitalist economic policy, but rather as a “normative order of reason” that “transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic.”57 Thomas Frank points to the emergence of neoliberalism in the US not in right-wing ideology but in the rise to power of Democratic technocrats in the 1980s. This represented a turning away from the traditional constituencies of the Democratic Party as the self-proclaimed neoliberals “blamed unions for the country’s industrial problems, mourned all the waste involved in the Social Security program, and called for a war on public school teachers . . . whenever Democrats lost an election it was because their leaders were too weak on crime, too soft on communism, and too sympathetic to minorities . . . it was a bluntly pro-business force— friendly with lobbyists and funded by corporate backers . . .”58
Aided and abetted by a media system that embraced the dream of a technologically enhanced free market utopia, neoliberalism became the dominant force in the US and Europe at the end of the Cold War. Today it reigns supreme. In a 2015 interview, media studies and critical pedagogy scholar Henry Giroux explained what neoliberalism does to the public interest:
We’re talking about an ideology marked by the selling off of public goods to private interests; the attack on social provisions; the rise of the corporate state organized around privatization, free trade, and deregulation; the celebration of self-interests over social needs; the claim that government is the problem if it gets in the way of profits for the megacorporations and financial services; the investing in prisons rather than schools; the modeling of education after the culture of business; the insistence that exchange values are the only values worthy of consideration; the celebration of profitmaking as the essence of democracy coupled with the utterly reductionist notion that consumption is the only applicable form of citizenship. But even more than that, neoliberal ideology upholds the notion that the market serves as a model for structuring all social relations: not just the economy, but the governing of all social life.59
From the perspectives of democratic education and critical pedagogy, the purpose of education is to empower students to be thinking citizens, capable of embracing more than just market values. John Dewey’s classic call for educational practices that prepare students to be actively engaged members of their communities should thus be a touchstone for critical media literacy.60 As Masterman argues, “the expression of democratic interests is dependent upon the existence of an educated and informed public.”61 Contrary to this, however, as bell hooks points out, “the interests of big business and corporate capitalism encourage students to see education solely as a means to achieve material success.”62
Tragically, in the era of imperial neoliberalism the success of the few is being paid for by the misery of the many. As a global society we are facing enormous challenges that have been wrought by decades of capitalism run wild. Dwindling natural resources, ethnic hatred and religious fundamentalism, and abuses by powerful despots (usually supported by the US) are resulting in devastating eruptions of violence around the world. While the wealthiest individuals on the planet continue to accumulate more and more treasure, the gap between the rich and the poor widens and the living conditions for the most desperate become increasingly cruel. The widespread dissemination of guns and violence domestically in the United States mirrors the proliferation of weaponry and state-sponsored terrorism by the American government abroad. Women are subjected to discrimination, misogyny, and sexual violence, while the mass incarceration and slaying of people of color by those who are sworn to “serve and protect” continues despite rising voices of outrage and protest. Governmental and corporate surveillance has become an accepted way of life for many who are placated by smartphones and social media feeds.
Meanwhile, the entire planet is facing the existential crisis of climate change, created by the very same capitalist forces that persist in denying the evidence that can no longer be denied by rational people. Importantly, the same corporate media institutions that provide us with pleasurable distractions play a key role in creating, reinforcing, justifying, and/or hiding most of these trends.
Countering these trends, critical pedagogy and critical media literacy should be understood as the natural enemies of neoliberalism. Critical pedagogy encourages independent thinking and action. Neoliberalism encourages conformity and passivity in the face of authority. Critical pedagogy advocates for fully participatory democracy. Neoliberalism hides behind a façade of democracy while promulgating totalitarian tendencies. Critical pedagogy is about building community and nurturing communal values. Neoliberalism celebrates hyperindividualism and glorifies self-interest. Critical pedagogy is based in an ethical commitment to justice for all. Neoliberalism is devoted to greed and rapacious accumulation whatever the cost.
Approaches to media literacy in the twenty-first century that are unwilling to challenge the neoliberal order are thus destined to be incomplete projects, because it is neoliberalism that is the driving force behind the corporations that dominate the media environment and the stories and imagery those corporations sell to global audiences.
Those stories are extremely influential because media culture performs as a form of public pedagogy that teaches us lessons about power, relationships, ethics, and values. As Carlos Cortés notes, “The mass media teach whether or not media makers intend to or realize it. And users learn from the media whether or not they try or are even aware of it . . . media serve as informal yet omnipresent nonschool textbooks.”63
It is neoliberal values that are currently being taught across a range of media, from corporate cable news channels and websites; to “reality” television programs that celebrate the police while vilifying communities of color; to the glorification of war, greed, and materialism in Hollywood films; to the spectacles of violent misogyny and hypermasculinity in the best-selling video games; to the hyperindividualistic and consumerist messages that saturate advertising and the content that surrounds it; to the online pornography that teaches dangerous and degrading lessons about gender and sexuality; to the constant allure and intrusive surveillance of social media. Donald Macedo argues, “Because the media represent a mechanism for ideological control, educators need to understand that the popular press and mass media educate more people about issues related to our society and the world than all other sources of education.”64 Thomas Frank offers a mind-boggling example of the corporate media’s embrace of neoliberal values and policies:
The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has gone so far as to claim that free trade treaties are so good that supporting them doesn’t require knowledge of their actual content. “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean [sic] Free Trade Initiative,” he told Tim Russert in 2006. “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”65
The hyperindividualistic ideological values behind neoliberalism are also nakedly displayed in a recent commercial for a financial services company that features a well-known psychology professor (an expert in “happiness”) encouraging us to get involved in a cause: “Today people are coming out to the nation’s capitol to support an important cause that could change the way you live for years to come.” What is that cause? Fighting climate change? Seeking social justice for people of color? Protesting corporate abuses of power? What can we do, Professor Gilbert?
The ad quickly answers those questions for us: “How can you help? By giving a little more . . . to yourself.” We pause. Sorry, what was that? What cause are we talking about? Professor Gilbert answers, “The cause is retirement and today thousands of people came to the race for retirement and pledged to save an additional 1 percent of their income. If we all do that, we can all win.”66
This, the ad tells us, is what is behind all of our problems: we don’t give enough . . . to ourselves. We don’t need beneficent government policies or assistance to ensure our safety and security in old age. If we would all just reach into our deep reserves of disposable income, “we can all win.” Never mind that most of us owe much more than we have in assets or savings; that increasing numbers of even middleclass Americans are finding it impossible to fund their children’s college education; that poverty, homelessness, and hunger are epidemic in the richest nation on the planet. A 2016 survey revealed that only 37 percent of Americans could rely on their savings to pay for an unexpected bill of $500–$1,000. At least 15 percent of Americans live in poverty, and that figure is based on the ridiculously stringent federal poverty standards, which state that in 2016 a family of four that earns $24,300 a year is not impoverished.67 But in a seamless integration of education and media, a professor on my screen is telling me we can all win if we just practice fiscal restraint and sacrifice a bit in order to be secure in our old age. Wendy Brown identifies the notion of individual sacrifice to the larger economic order as a central aspect of life under neoliberalism: “Human capital for itself bears the responsibility of enhancing and securing its future; it is expected to self-invest wisely and is condemned for dependency.”68
While this is a particularly blatant example, the ideology behind neoliberalism pervades the entire commercial media system, even down to the time-consuming video game apps on our mobile devices that seduce us into spending hour after hour crushing virtual candy or using exploding birds to kill those elusive pigs, instead of working on community projects, volunteering for schools or nonprofit organizations, getting involved in political campaigns or initiatives, or simply spending time connecting to our neighbors or reading and discussing literature or history, science, current affairs, etc. Giroux argues,
This retreat into private silos has resulted in the inability of individuals to connect their personal suffering with larger public issues. Thus detached from any concept of the common good or viable vestige of the public realm, they are left to face alone a world of increasing precarity and uncertainty in which it becomes difficult to imagine anything other than how to survive. Under such circumstances, there is little room for thinking critically and acting collectively in ways that are imaginative and courageous.69
Faced with the anxiety that Giroux highlights, but bereft of a media system that encourages critical analysis or alternatives to the institutions and forces that have led us to the brink of public collapse, we are overcome by apprehension and fear and tempted to turn to authoritarian solutions that provide an unexamined sort of comfort.
DECONSTRUCTING FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA: CONCRETE EXAMPLES
As the work of the late media scholar George Gerbner demonstrated, for decades the promotion of fear by the media industries has been both a savvy marketing strategy and one of the most profound ways that news and popular culture have made an impact on society. Writing about how to understand the impact of mediated violence, Gerbner explained in his research findings that those who watch the most television
develop a greater sense of apprehension, mistrust, and alienation, what we call the “mean world syndrome.” Insecure, angry people may be prone to violence but are even more likely to be dependent on authority and susceptible to deceptively simple, strong hard-line postures. They may accept and even welcome repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences—measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes—if that promises to relieve their anxieties.70
During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Donald Trump defied expectations and rose to the top of the Republican slate of candidates by relying on a rhetoric of fear, ethnocentrism, violence, and misogyny. While many corporate media commentators found Trump’s appeal baffling, they also tracked his every word and public appearance with avid, if not rabid, enthusiasm as he quickly became the most covered political candidate, the one granted the most airtime, the one discussed the most on social media, and, as noted above, the one guaranteed to raise the ratings for televised debates and political talk shows. A critical media literacy approach is necessary to developing an understanding of the Trump candidacy as a media spectacle.
Drawing on the work of Guy Debord, Douglas Kellner describes media spectacles as
[t]hose phenomena of media culture that embody contemporary society’s basic values, serve to initiate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sporting events, political happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call news—a phenomenon that itself has been subjected to the logic of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of media sensationalism, political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War.71
Kellner points out that the US presidency itself has become a media spectacle, and just as Hollywood movies can either triumph and fail, so too can presidencies and political campaigns. While Trump’s presentation of himself as the great white savior, coming to “Make America Great Again,” enthralled many angry Republican voters, at times his persona faltered with the wider public because of the naked rage that it seemed carefully designed to exploit. The most successful neoliberal projects are generally those that can masquerade as benign: the Obama/Clinton softness that disguises the hardcore corporate imperialism behind the curtain. While Trump blustered like a WWE cartoon, the face of neoliberalism in media culture is often more Tom Hanks than Clint Eastwood. And, indeed, a rich example of a Hollywood-produced neoliberal spectacle designed to turn Western global fears into profit is Hanks’s 2013 film Captain Phillips.
Ostensibly a true story of the hijacking of an American cargo ship by Somali pirates, Captain Phillips depicts a world where good-hearted American businessmen find themselves at the mercy of dark-skinned marauders. Depicted as a loving family man, concerned about his children’s future, Captain Phillips is just trying to earn a living when pirates take over his ship and hold him hostage. Physically inferior to the athletic, violent invaders, Phillips must summon all his courage and superior wits to protect his crew and cargo, and, metaphorically, save American white masculinity from the dark forces that threaten its global hegemony. Though constantly met by violence, Hanks portrays Phillips as a kind man, willing to provide medical assistance even to those who threaten and abuse him. Right up until the final moments of the film, he displays compassion and empathy as he tries to reason with the hijackers in order to save their lives. When he believes he might die, he touchingly proclaims his love for his wife. When the US Navy arrives in all its technological glory, with giant ships and helicopters, the audience is reassured. The cavalry is here. All will be set right in the world.
Despite a few throwaway lines about the desperation of life in Somalia, the film mostly ignores the forces of imperialism and global exploitation that brought the real Captain Phillips into contact with Africa. A quintessential neoliberal text, distributed globally by huge media conglomerates Disney, Sony, and Columbia and Universal Pictures working in collaboration with each other, Captain Phillips cost $55 million to make and has grossed over $200 million since its 2013 release. By comparison, the United Nations in 2012 estimated Somalia’s per capita GDP to be $284. More than 40 percent of the nation’s population lives on less than one US dollar per day. Tom Hanks was reportedly paid $15 million to play Captain Phillips. For many who saw the film in the US and Europe, this Hollywood tale of American good threatened by African evil is one of their few referents for any information about Somalia, a nation that is largely ignored by the corporate news media.
Writing about racial ideologies in media and popular culture, Stuart Hall noted that in contrast to the early days of film, racism is now much more likely to be inferential than overt. He describes inferential racism as “apparently naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional,’ which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions.”72 Hall’s analysis of how contemporary media contain the traces of past moments of overt racism could not be a more apt description of the binary conflict of Captain Phillips :
Popular culture is still full today of countless savage and restless “natives,” . . . They are likely to appear at any moment out of the darkness to . . . eat the innocent explorer or colonial administrator . . . against them is always counterposed the isolated white figure, alone “out there,” confronting his Destiny and shouldering his Burden in the “heart of darkness,” displaying coolness under fire and an unshakeable authority...73
And while this example is powerful, it is not just fictionalized tales of the US encountering Africa that commercial media use to represent the stark contrast between black and white.
Let’s consider media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement that first emerged after the slaying of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, in 2012. The Black Lives Matter movement embodies the spirit of critical media literacy in its attention to both communication and social justice:
When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity . . . #BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. We affirm our contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. We have put our sweat equity and love for Black people into creating a political project—taking the hashtag off of social media and into the streets.74
While #BlackLivesMatter is a peaceful protest movement, many voices on the political right and in the corporate media have framed it as a violent, even terrorist, organization. A critical media literacy lens can provide a useful corrective to the mediated discourse surrounding this movement, while placing it in a historical context related to previous social movements that have also been misrepresented, ridiculed, and demeaned by commercial media institutions.
In a new preface to a reissue of his classic study of media coverage of the Vietnam-era protests that he had taken part in, Todd Gitlin noted,
I wrote The Whole World is Watching [1980] out of a wrenching sense of discrepancy—a shock of misrecognition. It was the shock you feel when you discover that what others think they know about you is not what you know, or think you know, about yourself—indeed that what others presume to know is the opposite of what you know. For people in the public eye, this feeling of misrecognition has become one of the common experiences of a media-saturated age.75
Activists in the Black Lives Matter movement might also feel this “shock of misrecognition” when they see themselves dissected and distorted by largely white commentators on white-owned, white-run, white-funded cable news outlets. Commercial news media in 2015 blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for encouraging violence against the police, claiming that attacks on police were increasing when in fact they have been decreasing for decades.76 Some featured commentators have labeled the movement a hate group and a terrorist organization, compared them to the Ku Klux Klan and Nazis, and used the terms “garbage” and “sub-human creeps” when referring to activists.77
Gitlin’s original study revealed how the commercial news media had framed war protestors in the 1960s as a threat to national security and an affront to patriotic Americans. In the reissue of his book, he notes that news media still seek out isolated moments of violence during otherwise peaceful protests. This violent frame is coupled with what Gitlin calls news “blackouts and deprecations of dissent”78 to first ignore, then ridicule, and finally demonize protest movements like those that shook Ferguson, Missouri, and other communities around the US as the Black Lives Matter message began to spread throughout the nation.
The public relies on media to provide them with information about issues and events they don’t experience directly. However, Frechette, Higdon, and Williams report the results of multiple surveys providing evidence that the corporate media system has led to a public that is largely uninformed or misinformed about key public affairs issues.79 Miller points out that corporate media have largely abandoned investigative journalism, international coverage, and serious public affairs programming in favor of crime, celebrity, and consumer “news.”80 Even more than this lack of information, commercial media institutions also promote disinformation campaigns such as the one being waged against the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Disinformation is a form of propaganda disseminated by world leaders and media outlets, with an aim to plant false ideas in the public discourse to fulfill an ulterior motive.”81 Critical media literacy is required to combat disinformation, and the Black Lives Matter movement exemplifies this approach through not only deconstructing the distorted messaging of the corporate media, but also by utilizing digital and social media to create their own alternatives to the stories told by the commercial press, while simultaneously working to confront and transform oppressive institutions. Along the way, the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrates the necessary connections between media education and social justice.
CRITICAL MEDIA LITERACY, TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
A key distinguishing mark of the critical media literacy paradigm is a concern for social justice that inspires and underscores the work of critical media educators, scholars, artists, and activists. Lawrence Frey et al. understand social justice work as being devoted to “the engagement with and advocacy for those in our society who are economically, socially, politically, and/or culturally underresourced.”82 Resistance to the current economic, social, political, and cultural conditions that severely privilege small numbers of the fortunate few while relegating others to lives of diminished resources and possibilities is a necessary component of a critical approach that rejects idealistic notions of pluralistic opportunity and mythic notions of hyperindividualism that portray every human as equally free to prosper and thrive in a libertarian dreamscape of absolute agency and free will. In contrast to these fictions pulled from the twisted mind of Ayn Rand, real human beings inhabit political environments dominated by wealth and corporate power, where those on the outside find their interests and concerns ignored, ridiculed, and/or disparaged by the commercial media system and establishment politics. Frey et al. also argue for more than just critical analysis of injustice, stating that a “social justice sensibility entails a moral imperative to act as effectively as we can to do something about structurally sustained inequalities.”83 A social justice approach thus challenges race, class, and gender inequities while working to transform conditions that marginalize, oppress, and attack people of color, women, sexual minorities, the elderly and/ or disabled, and the poor and working classes.
Critical media literacy draws inspiration from feminism, critical race theory, and Marxism, among other radical frameworks, and it applies the lessons of activists, educators, artists, and scholars in those traditions to the analysis of media and popular culture texts and institutions that justify, legitimize, and reinforce cultural, social, political, and economic inequalities. More than just analysis, however, all of these perspectives emphasize the need for action as well as interpretation. For example, writing about feminist media studies, Liesbet van Zoonen notes,
It is the reciprocal relation between theory, politics and activism, the commitment of feminist academics to have their work contribute to a larger feminist goal (however defined), the blurred line between the feminist as academic and the feminist as activist, that distinguishes feminist perspectives on the media from other possible perspectives.84
Inspired by the insights of feminism, critical media literacy practitioners thus challenge media institutions, images, and narratives and the part they play in promoting patriarchal social norms and misogyny. From deconstructing images of homogenized beauty in advertising, to blogging about issues of gender identity and social media, to questioning the equation of violence and masculinity in video games, to organizing protests about discriminatory hiring and compensation practices in the news and entertainment industries, to creating alternative media that treat LGBTQ individuals and communities with dignity and respect, to fighting against porn culture, feminist approaches to critical media literacy shine a spotlight on myriad issues of gender and sexuality in media and popular culture, in order to advance more equitable gender relations.
More broadly, a feminist approach to media education highlights how some voices are dominant in media while others are marginalized or excluded, and that what is considered neutral cultural knowledge is in fact wrapped up in issues of power. Thus, feminist standpoint theory shows that those who live in conditions of oppression are more likely to critically understand unjust hierarchal structures but are less likely to have their insights acknowledged and respected by the dominant forces in society.85
By way of example, feminist critical media literacy addresses the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and militarism, and offers a critical analysis of the many ways that media and popular culture equate masculinity with domination, domination with violence, and violence with heroism. Thus, Hollywood films are more likely to celebrate than critique warfare,86 and candidates for the most powerful political office in the world perform masculinity by suggesting that terrorists should be shot with bullets dipped in the blood of pigs (Donald Trump),87 or threaten to “carpet-bomb them into oblivion” until Middle Eastern sands “glow in the dark” (Ted Cruz). 88 During the 2015–16 primary season, political rhetoric descended to new lows of hypermasculine posturing, with one candidate egging on an audience member who shouted out that his opponent was a “pussy” (Donald Trump),89 another making a thinly veiled reference to his rival’s small penis (Marco Rubio),90 and a third bragging (lying?) about spending his teenage years throwing rocks and bricks at people and claiming that he once stabbed someone with a knife (Ben Carson).91;92 While violent episodes targeting primarily women and people of color were erupting at Trump rallies, the commercial media at first treated this all as a sideshow, a fun-filled entertainment spectacle. This tabloid coverage persisted until elite groups began to fret and their concerns eventually resulted in too-little, too-late “soul searching” by the same corporate media that continued to offer nonstop coverage of Trump, even while lamenting nonstop coverage of Trump.
In addition to highlighting the valorization of patriarchy and vio-lence in media culture, because feminism emphasizes an ethics of care that stresses compassion, connection, community, and our responsibilities to others,93 bringing a feminist sensibility to media education may also aid in what Antonio López has called the necessary “greening of media education,” by heightening our awareness of the relationship between the commercial media system that promotes consumerism and disposability and the environmental destruction humans are wreaking on the planet. López notes: “Ultimately the goal of ecomedia literacy is to encourage mindfulness for how everyday media practice impacts our ability to live sustainably within earth’s ecological parameters for the present and future.”94
Adding another dimension to the social justice emphasis of critical media literacy, critical race theory encourages educators to confront the many ways that media reinforce ethnocentrism, white privilege, and white supremacy. Emerging in the 1970s in the work of legal scholars like Derrick Bell,
The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group-and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious . . . Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it...95
Thus, a dialogue with students in a critical media literacy class might ask them to undertake a comparative analysis of media coverage of the 2016 attacks in Brussels and Lahore. Both seem to have been carried out by extremist fundamentalists, both resulted in multiple deaths and misery, but one occurred in Europe and the other in Asia. Why did the attack in Belgium, which resulted in the death of thirtyfive people, warrant days of nonstop coverage and mournful special reports while the attack in Pakistan just days later, where over twice as many people were killed, was just another news item reported by US media in March? As media critics have pointed out, this discrepancy was not a one-off occurrence but a pattern in Western media.96
Critical race scholars have argued that ethnocentrism, stereotyping, racism, and white privilege are endemic in the US and Europe and must be recognized as normal and indeed functional for those groups that benefit from white supremacy.97 Funk, Kellner, and Share note: “Discrimination against people of color in the US is also accompanied by underrepresentation and misrepresentations of them in media. While the statistics of incarceration and school suspension among Blacks could be used to highlight the shameful state of race relations in America today, they are instead often exploited by media to attract audiences and increase profit.”98
Applying critical race theory to media provides a useful way of addressing, and seeking to transform, the ways corporate media promote white supremacy while simultaneously trying to convince the public that it no longer exists. The two examples offered earlier in this chapter, Captain Phillips and news coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement, both demonstrate how seeing media through the lens of critical race theory can help illuminate the oft-overlooked white supremacist tendencies in corporate media.
Critical race theory can also play an important role in analysis of the digital technologies that are providing both corporations and governments new and unparalleled avenues for surveillance and domination. People of color have long been aware that they are more closely watched by the police and other representatives of what Althusser called the “Repressive State Apparatus,” and that this surveillance has been used to attack and reign in dissenters.99 Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltrated the civil rights and peace movements, waged a smear campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., attempted to destroy the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party from within, and spied on and ultimately bombed the Philadelphia-based black liberation group, MOVE. A technologically enhanced surveillance campaign is now being used against the Black Lives Matter movement.100 These examples illustrate the panoptic conditions citizens of supposedly free societies live in, and this has never been more the case than in the era of social media, mobile technologies, and the “always connected” online lifestyle.
Finally, drawing on the Marxist tradition I described earlier in this chapter allows critical media literacy scholars, educators, activists, and artists to further engage with issues of poverty, economic inequality, disempowerment, and class as they play out in the media environment. Scholars have pointed out, for example, how US television has consistently framed the working class as idiotic, lazy, tasteless, and violent for decades,101 even as the television industry itself has experienced both economic and technological changes on a grand scale: “On the whole, dominant media such as film and television often celebrate the rich and powerful while presenting negative representations of poor and working people. Traditionally, US television focused on middle and upper class families, and professionals like doctors, lawyers, or corporate executives, while tending to ignore working class life and poor people.”102
These omissions and distortions offer the viewing public an implicit rationale for why inequality will always persist, why social programs meant to combat poverty are doomed to failure, and why those on the lower end of the economic spectrum are responsible for their own misery. A critical media literacy lens informed by Marxist insights into the machinations of modern-day capitalism thus advances the understanding that amusing forms of popular culture like television comedies, dramas, and “reality” programs are in fact much more than “just entertainment,” but actually function as popular pedagogy that instructs us about our proper places in the social hierarchy.
Moreover, as Marxist media scholars like Dallas Smythe and Sut Jhally have argued, while we are consuming media we are actually working for the entertainment industries.103 The time we spend watching television, for example, is that industry’s primary source of profit, as our attention is sold to advertisers and converted into revenue for the corporations that own the television networks. In the era of digital media, as the critical social media scholar Christian Fuchs has pointed out, the same economic strategy is employed even more intensely by companies like Facebook, who rely on users to not only consume the advertising that accompanies the content but to actually create the content itself when they post status updates, comments, photos, and videos.104 What really counts is the private data we share and the time we spend interacting with targeted commercial messaging, which is increasingly integrated throughout the entire corporate media environment.
A side benefit for corporate interests is that the glorification of consumerism and material wealth on display not just in the advertising but in the content that surrounds, and is increasingly thoroughly integrated with, all the ads, provides an implicit promotion of capitalism while situating the interests of the wealthy as primary and framing the concerns of the less fortunate, including the poor, the elderly, and the disabled, as irrelevant, if not invisible. A form of critical media literacy informed by socialist and feminist principles of sharing, communalism, and equity thus offers insights into why, for example, the New York Times has a “Wealth” section but not a “Poverty” section or even a “Labor” section.
Despite these bleak realities, a critical approach to media, education, and social justice can find a sense of purpose in Antonio Gramsci’s call for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”105 Sut Jhally explains this as a dialectic approach to critical work:
“Pessimism of the intellect” means recognizing the reality of our present circumstances, analyzing the vast forces arrayed against us, but insisting on the possibilities and the moral desirability of social change that is “the optimism of the will,” believing in human values that will be the inspiration for us to struggle for our survival.106
When we utilize all of the critical frameworks discussed above and incorporate an intersectionalist approach into critical media literacy education by engaging simultaneously with issues of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, age, ability, and more, we position media literacy as not just another subject to be taught in schools but as a social movement, one that is aimed at empowering socially aware and engaged communities, not just better consumers. The goal is, admittedly, big. Truly critical media literacy aims not just to analyze media content but to transform media . . . and the world.
THE CITIZEN/CONSUMER QUESTION: HOLISTIC, CONTEXTUAL, AND TRANSFORMATIVE MEDIA EDUCATION
“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection— not an invitation for hypnosis.”
—Umberto Eco107
According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, while 97 percent of the published research on climate change supports the conclusion that the planet is warming due to human activities, in 2015 only 52 percent of registered voters believe that climate change is caused primarily by humans, and one in three don’t believe that it is happening at all.108 A recent documentary film, Merchants of Doubt, based on a book by the same name, presents evidence that this gap between scientific understanding and public opinion is mostly due to a carefully engineered and well-funded communications strategy, sponsored by conservative think tanks and the fossil fuel industries, to plant disinformation in the media and thus seed doubt in the public mind.109 The commercial news media have largely capitulated to this systematic distortion of the truth by presenting “both sides of the story” in the name of objective reporting.
One version of media literacy might approach this issue by focusing on media content through an examination of the words and images that are used in news reports, advertising and public relations materials, and both documentary and dramatic films that deal with climate change and its consequences. This would, in fact, be a useful place to start. Contrary to what bastardized versions of Marshall McLuhan’s theories about media technology would suggest—yes, the medium is the message, but the message is also the message. In other words, while the medium of delivery (television or social media, print or film, etc.) is important, the content of media does indeed matter. Words matter, images matter, stories matter.
The approach critical media literacy scholars and educators advocate for does not preclude textual analysis of media content and the deconstruction of messaging as part of a larger critical process of media education. Paying careful attention to media stories and images is not the problem. The problem is that too much of what is called “media literacy” stops at that point. Lewis and Jhally believe that this is a relatively straightforward issue:
To return to the example above, a critical media literacy approach to the discrepancy between what climate scientists and the general public know about climate change might start with an analysis of the public relations messages of the fossil fuel industries and their political allies, but it would also move beyond this to a political economic analysis of the institutions behind this messaging, and a cultural analysis of the impact that decades of disinformation have had on public opinion and public policy. An assignment might focus on the creation of alternative media that allows students to present their own take on the relationship between media and climate change. Some students might create culture-jamming projects that expose the deceitfulness of the fossil fuel industries and their strategic communication campaigns. Others might choose to get involved in green activism or local environmental organizations. The introduction of these last few elements is where many in the field of media literacy bail out.
As we near two decades since the publication of the piece Lewis and Jhally called “The Struggle for Media Literacy,” it appears that the argument is not as simple as they had hoped. What they proposed at the end of the twentieth century is still derided by many, even those involved in national media literacy organizations, as “too political . . . not the job of teachers . . . bashing the media.” Some have even argued that media literacy should not be focused on media at all because it should really only be about the technical skills of literacy more broadly imagined: learning to read an advertisement to see what techniques are used to construct it, just as one would learn to dissect the rhythms and symbolism of a poem in a traditional classroom exercise.111
There is nothing wrong with a textual approach to media literacy in and of itself. Arriving at a sophisticated understanding of media texts is a crucial part of critical media literacy. But to go further we also have to understand the context of media messages. Just as Freire and Macedo refer to literacy as both “reading the word and the world,”112 Lewis and Jhally insist that
[m]edia literacy, in short, is about more than the analysis of messages, it is about an awareness of why those messages are there. It is not enough to know that they are produced— or even how, in a technical sense, they are produced. To appreciate the significance of contemporary media, we need to know why they are produced, under what constraints and conditions they are produced, and by whom they are produced.113
If media educators stop at the level of the text, they may successfully encourage students to become better consumers of media, but critical media literacy is about more than consumption. Some versions of media literacy treat media education as a type of “media appreciation” curriculum, where students are taught to get more out of their media use and to learn how to amplify the pleasures that media produce. While pleasure is indeed important—in fact it is the key to why popular culture is so compelling and is such a powerful force in our lives—pleasurable sensations are not the only thing that media produce. As Postman pointed out, entertainment in the media age has subsumed all other possible ways of relating to the social worlds we inhabit.114
Drawing on Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh’s work, McLaren distinguishes between a pedagogy of desire and a pedagogy of critique, noting, “The pedagogy of desire is about the thrill of corporeal pleasure; it mirrors the conditions of alienated capitalism, because, in reality, the pedagogy of desire is about teaching adjustment to existing social relations . . . not about a commitment to build a more just society.”115 While critical media educators should acknowledge the pleasures that media can provide, if we fall into the seductive trap of a celebratory relationship to the products of the commercial media industries, we run the risk of abandoning the critical edge that makes media education important in the first place. We should consciously ask ourselves: Why do we engage in media literacy education and projects at all? What is the point? Who and what is media literacy for?
Writing specifically about Europe at the end of the twentieth century, Masterman’s powerful warning and challenge is applicable globally, and perhaps even more relevant in the age of digital media than it was when he first penned these words:
One of the greatest areas of inequality across Europe lies in the gap which exists between those who have access to the media and those who do not, between those who have the power to define and those who are always defined, between those who are allowed to speak about the world as they know and understand it and those whose experiences are inevitably framed for them by others. The development of a widespread critical consciousness in relation to media issues must, we believe, be one of the starting points for challenging these inequalities and raising questions about the democratic structures and responsibilities of broadcasting, and questions of human rights in relation to communication issues.116
A critical approach to media education is thus focused on equality, democracy, community, and citizenship rather than material accumulation, hyperindividualism, and consumerism. Fully engaged citizens have an interest in the world that extends beyond the marketplace and into the commons that we all must inhabit. Citizens know that being an active member of a functioning society means more than just showing up to vote every few years. Citizens recognize that we are all interconnected and that the communities we live in will only be as democratic, healthy, and just as we make them. Sophisticated media consumers might do a better job of seeing through the deceptions of advertising and making better choices as individuals, but engaged citizens will work to improve the environmental and social conditions that affect us all.117 Furthermore, Peter McLaren and Rhonda Hammer insist that we must “understand the dangers in considering literacy to be a private or individual competency . . . rather than a complex circulation of economic, political, and ideological practices that inform daily life; that invite or solicit students to acquiesce in their social and gendered positions within a highly stratified society . . .”118
The work of media and pedagogy scholar Henry Giroux exemplifies what it means to recognize the connections between citizenship and literacy, pedagogy and media, and social justice and true democracy, and why transformative education is a necessity in the age of neoliberalism. Seeing education as a form of activism, Giroux recognizes both the enormity of the struggles and the limitations on what can be accomplished, as well as the hope and possibilities for achieving real change. He writes,
While it is true that critical thinking will not in and of itself change the nature of existing society, engaging in an intellectual struggle with the death-driven rationality that now fuels neoliberal capitalism will set the foundation for producing generations of young people who might launch a larger social movement. Such a movement will enable new forms of struggle and, it can be hoped, a new future in which questions of justice, dignity, equality, and compassion matter.119
Contrary to being political indoctrination, the approach I have argued for in this chapter should be recognized as unavoidable for any who advocate for forms of literacy that enable free thinking even when we are confronted by tidal waves of governmental and corporate propaganda. Macedo explicitly challenges “educators who falsely believe that education is neutral and is limited to the confines of the classroom.”120 He distinguishes critical education from faux notions of literacy when he writes that “[e]ducators need to courageously reject forms of literacy based on a web of lies . . . Educators need to forcefully expose forms of literacy designed to infuse people with permanent fear under the cover of security . . . Educators not only need to understand the government-media-education nexus in the ‘manufacture of consent,’ but they must also create pedagogical structures that produce individuals with conviction, ethical posture, courage to speak to power, and willingness to change...”121
The world of media is not the same as it was when the public had to rely on the daily newspaper, a couple of magazines, the local movie theater, a little bit of radio, and the three major television networks for the majority of their news and entertainment, and the only way to talk back to media was to write a letter to an editor or television producer who would probably never read it. Although really not long ago, this world now seems like the distant past, and it is never coming back. Funk, Kellner, and Share note that “[t]echnology’s exponential growth, as well as the convergence of media corporations and new media platforms, are changing society and students to be more mediated and networked than ever.”122
Young people today grow up in a digital media environment that allows for more choices and more participation, but youth are also more targeted by media, and they still can only participate within the constraints of what the government and the big media and technology giants will ultimately allow. As Kellner and Share point out, “The new technologies of communication are powerful tools that can liberate or dominate, manipulate or enlighten, and it is imperative that educators teach their students how to critically analyze and use these media.”123
Contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that “there is no alternative” to the capitalist world order, critical media literacy insists on exploring a wide range of alternatives: alternative readings of media content, alternative relationships to corporate media industries, the creation and distribution of alternative media, alternative understandings of the cultural, economic, political, and social conditions we live in, alternative ways of relating to one another as full human beings worthy of dignity and equitable treatment. If we look closely we can find an undercurrent of alternative thought and practices running through the digital and social media that consumes young people’s lives in the twenty-first century. Kellner and Share correctly suggest that latter day techno-capitalism has inadvertently placed the digital tools that may be used to challenge its deepest ideologies in the hands of youth around the globe.124
But tools can only do so much. More than just tools, a truly democratic society that is committed to social justice needs a critical understanding of both the pitfalls and potential of the new media environment. Wendy Brown contends that “puncturing common neoliberal sense and . . . developing a viable and compelling alternative to capitalist globalization . . . bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success. Yet, what, apart from this work, could afford the slightest hope for a just, sustainable, and habitable future?”125
In the current media-saturated era of neoliberalism and hyperconsumerism; ravaging inequality; capitalism run amok; devastating religious-, ethnic-, and gender-based violence; and an ecological environment on the verge of collapse, rather than being afraid of truly critical media literacy, we should embrace it as truly necessary . . . now more than ever.
BILL YOUSMAN, phd, earned his doctorate in Communication and Media Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the former managing director of the Media Education Foundation and the current director of the graduate program in Media Literacy and Digital Culture at Sacred Heart University. His first book, Prime Time Prisons on U.S. TV: Representation of Incarceration, was published in 2008. His most recent book is The Spike Lee Enigma: Challenge and Incorporation in Media Culture.
Special thanks to Project Censored intern Brandy Miceli for additional editing and citations.
Notes