NMLC-fake-news-session

Northeast Media Literacy Conference:

The Past, Present and Future of Media Literacy Education

Defining the Fake News Moment: Fiction, Fad, Fatal or Media Lit Opportunity?

Plenary "unconference" breakout: 1:00 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
With Katherine Fry, Allison Butler, Mellisa Zimdars and Bill Densmore

FAKE NEWS BREAKOUT:

Gordon teaches media literacy Tom hs teacher public hs westcester ny Teresa – ccsu graduate student Mellisa – 19 years ig scool teacer Demi – comm. Maor at ccsu Ulie freschette – WSU, corporation Bill Densmore Lindsay Grant – ccsu media production Mj moriary – adjunct at CCSu critical thinking and communication Tom Goodkind John Boyer – board ACME Sarah Taylor – Spark media proje t Frances Jensen with spark Breana, instructional library at ccsu Paul, media educator, spark media project in poughkeepskie Rob Williams Laurie Binday – ACME and Sacred Heart Bill Youseman – her husband

CONVERSATION:

Melissa: Thinking about calling news imposters with her seventh graders. Can that be done in 50 minutes? Being skeptical not cynical.

Allison: Fake News means you can be cynical. No. This is not the first president to lie or manipulate the news, although it feels more horrific and is happening faster. WE are naïve if we think it is brand new of Nov. 9 or Jan. 20. IT is super-well coordinated. Try not to be cynical or give up on it. I’m exhausted. I go home and watch the West Wing because it is pretty, they solve problems and are nice to each other and they are so articulate.

Bill Youseman: That’s really important. The task is to explain something that is complicated. On the one had what we’re seeing in both politics and the news is something new and is indeed not normal. But at the same time it is also a continuation of things that have come before. How do you do that in 15 minutes or in the elevator. That’s the issue at hand.

Branna: The problem of trying to digest to 15 minutes is a problem for librarians too. Just tell me where I shouldn’t go and whre I should go instead of let me teach you how to tell the difference.

Tom Goodkind: Are we getting lazy as human beings? Accepting one word rather than a moe length exclamation.

Julie Frechette: When we teach political economy, go back to teaching media theory and how the way our minds accept and process information has been changing. Photos can be manipulatd. We have to teach the impact of the Attention Economy.

See: Global Critical Media Literacy Project http://gcml.org/

Francis Jensen -- Two questions: What is the definition of news? Getting a simple answer to that is complicated. There are five rooms but we are all here. Why are we here? With me, I’m teaching kids in 4th and 5th grade to make films but at the end of the day what I want most is impact – ripple effect, that something will happen tomorrow. We need to be part of the people who are tacking the problem fake news.

Katherine: What do your students say news is?

Francis: Most of them say news is what you see on TV. But is that all the news? Each kids has their own idea. The what is news question is for me.

Katherine: She likes to ask people, where do you get your news.

FAKE NEWS BREAKOUT:

Gordon teaches media literacy Tom hs teacher public hs westcester ny Teresa – ccsu graduate student Mellisa – 19 years ig scool teacer Demi – comm. Maor at ccsu Ulie freschette – WSU, corporation Bill Densmore Lindsay Grant – ccsu media production Mj moriary – adjunct at CCSu critical thinking and communication Tom Goodkind John Boyer – board ACME Sarah Taylor – Spark media proje t Frances Jensen with spark Breana, instructional library at ccsu Paul, media educator, spark media project in poughkeepskie Rob Williams Laurie Binday – ACME and Sacred Heart Bill Youseman – her husband

CONVERSATION:

Melissa: Thinking about calling news imposters with her seventh graders. Can that be done in 50 minutes? Being skeptical not cynical.

Allison: Fake News means you can be cynical. No. This is not the first president to lie or manipulate the news, although it feels more horrific and is happening faster. WE are naïve if we think it is brand new of Nov. 9 or Jan. 20. IT is super-well coordinated. Try not to be cynical or give up on it. I’m exhausted. I go home and watch the West Wing because it is pretty, they solve problems and are nice to each other and they are so articulate.

Bill Youseman: That’s really important. The task is to explain something that is complicated. On the one had what we’re seeing in both politics and the news is something new and is indeed not normal. But at the same time it is also a continuation of things that have come before. How do you do that in 15 minutes or in the elevator. That’s the issue at hand.

Branna: The problem of trying to digest to 15 minutes is a problem for librarians too. Just tell me where I shouldn’t go and whre I should go instead of let me teach you how to tell the difference.

Tom Goodkind: Are we getting lazy as human beings? Accepting one word rather than a moe length exclamation.

Julie Frechette: When we teach political economy, go back to teaching media theory and how the way our minds accept and process information has been changing. Photos can be manipulatd. We have to teach the impact of the Attention Economy.

See: Global Critical Media Literacy Project http://gcml.org/

Francis Jensen -- Two questions: What is the definition of news? Getting a simple answer to that is complicated. There are five rooms but we are all here. Why are we here? With me, I’m teaching kids in 4th and 5th grade to make films but at the end of the day what I want most is impact – ripple effect, that something will happen tomorrow. We need to be part of the people who are tacking the problem fake news.

Katherine: What do your students say news is?

Francis: Most of them say news is what you see on TV. But is that all the news? Each kids has their own idea. The what is news question is for me.

Katherine: She likes to ask people, where do you get your news.

Rob Williams: He teaches news – information that is recent, relevant, reliable. Fake news is also information that is recent and relevant but it is unreliable for a number of reasons – state sponsored or corporate or public relations or junk, or news-abuse. Stories that deliver audiences to advertisers and preserves the status quo.

Allison: I would question relevance. She teaches college students who think Kim Kardashian is totally relevant.

Rob: Good investigative journalism puts news in historical context.

Mick: WFCS -- You need to take in the complete fabrications in order to stand against them.

Melissa: Likes what dana boyd wrote about maybe media literacy education has backfired. A student brought her a picture which the student said illustrated media bias. The alt Newseek cover of Clinton winning.

Bill Youseman: danah boyd piece is provocative. His take is how do you know if something has backfired if it hasn’t happened. WE haven’t had broadbased media literacy education in the US. OTOH, past semester he taught a ML class for college undergraduates; he ahd to make the whole last class of the semester about the difference between skepticism and cynicism. They are becoming nihilistic – nobody can be trusted, why are we doing this anyway?

Katherine: For me I counter it by putting a lot of emphasis on the activist part of it. In web social media we are all active and we need to take all that activism and make something happen. There is no reason for us to be cynical. We have all the tools, we just have to use them.

Sarah: What’s growing and different about news culture of today – it predates FB, it started with your dad emailing you that recipe that was relevant to you. It was about us curating what we encourage others to look at. You don’t clip it and tack it on your fridge; now you just share it out. It has changed they way we operate and consume and is a vehicle for news to be distributed among the public.

I asked one of my students what news was.

It was information that was being provided because it was important that we heard it. To let us know that stuff was happening in Vietnam. And reporters felt they had an obligation to do that. Those of us participating in the news system don’t feel that the same. There is a lack of recognition that we realize we are part of the dissemination of information, we don’t think we have to have that same journalistic integrity, that we assume it has already been done.

Librarian: We don’t have a language for describing what are the parameters of quality of news such as practiced by the New York Times. And that makes it time to defend it.

We discuss the question of political bias.

Katherine: We just have to accept that there is no such thing as a lack of bias. I think ti is our duty to be training the people whoa re going to be the newsmakers. That’s our job, if we’re doing our job, all these issues will resolve themselves. This is the moment where we understand the issue and start making the change.

Theresa: Cable news, the idea of 24 hour news is not going to be a thing soon if they don’t clean up their act. People are becoming smart and bloggers and youtube are become their own news.

Allison: The more cynical we are, the less self confidence, commuity confidence and collaboration, that serves those organizations. It is in their best interests for them to not see behind the curtain, because we are more fearful. Hegemony always wants to create that fear.

Julie: Part of ML is activism and engagement. But I’ve seen in my own circles at a conference on the West Coast wehre I ihad completely different frameworks for how to understand the election. People dead set against Trump couldn’t make the shift to supporting Hillary Clinton after Bernie lost out. They could not do it. If corporate says we’ll tell you want is news, and we focus on our communities instead; what hapepsn when those two approaches are so differentiated.

Katherine: To not be active is worse than to be active.

Rob Williams: A skeptic gets off the coach with some cause larger than herself. A cynic refuses to believe they have the power to do anything.

Consensus: We teach the inherent biases and that’s OK. Celebrate the subjectivities of the moment rather the pretending there is an ojective reality out there.

Demi, Librarian: Is taking Corsera University of Hong Kong, making sense of the news. Kennedy speech on politics and the media when he was teaching at Harvard College. This is not new. Asks them to form a truth-checking squad – only share vetted, call each other out and or post stuff that is vetted.

Rob: Why should I have my students produce stuff in the first place. What do you think of WikiLeaks, the only pan-national journalism organization?

Thomas: I worry about tribalism. Whre do we get to the point where each one of us only believe our own echo chamber.

Melissa: The term echo chamber has a lot of bullshit in it.

Allison: It is now sewn into our reading the potential that we are being lied to. That is contributing to the growth of cynicism. …. We might be at a point in time, I’m almost at a point where we might not be concerned with ansewers but more in terms of putting out responsible questions. … I don’t think I can find THE answer but I do think I can contribute questions.