News literacy worldwide
By Steven Reiner Posted Sep 30 2009
On the campus of Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, more than 100 media educators and journalists gathered this March for the country’s first national conference on news literacy. The founding dean of Stony Brook’s School of Journalism, Howie Schneider, a man with a decidedly evangelical commitment to the topic, exhorted one and all to consider the necessity to “train the next generation of news consumers” in the critical thinking skills that will be “crucial to the future of our democracy.” The attendees, not surprisingly, were wholeheartedly, enthusiastically on board. In this time of the incredible disappearing newspaper, the explosion of the blogosphere and endless hand-wringing about the state of the business, the idea of news literacy was welcomed as a fresh breeze of purpose. If teaching news literacy could ignite in news consumers an appreciation and understanding of the tenets and practices of journalism, well, then good and bold journalism itself might survive.
Just as encouraging for the beleaguered denizens of newsrooms and journalism schools in attendance was the excitement that news literacy was also bringing to the handful of representatives from overseas. None was more passionate about the subject than Siok Sian Pek, a diminutive but forceful woman from the remote Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan. Pek is the director and founder of Bhutan’s Centre for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit organization devoted to “building a culture for democracy through promoting quality media, building critical thinking skills among media users and strengthening discourse, research and educational activities on media and democracy.” I knew the words “Buddhist Kingdom” and “media” and “culture of democracy” could only exist side-by-side in Pek’s homeland, a remarkable country I visited more than a decade ago on assignment for the CBS newsmagazine program 60 Minutes. Back in 1999, when my colleague Morley Safer and I undertook the arduous journey through Bangkok, Bangladesh and over Everest before plummeting into the bull’s-eye of Bhutan’s airport, we knew that Bhutan eschewed the Western notion of democracy, having chosen instead an official government policy called, believe it or not, “Gross National Happiness.”
What brought us to Bhutan was not an investigation of this curious government initiative for the 600,000 mostly subsistence farmers who lived throughout the kingdom’s steep mountain valleys. Instead, it was word of an imminent threat from a foreign entity with the potential to shatter Bhutan’s centuries-old cultural isolation and sovereignty. The threat was not coming, at least directly, from Bhutan’s mammoth neighbors to the north and to the south, China and India.
It was coming invisibly, from the sky. It was television.
Faced with an inevitable onslaught of bootlegged satellite dishes, mostly from India, Bhutan’s enlightened monarchy had grudgingly agreed to legalize and regulate a modest amount of commercial cable television. But as a hedge, it had also authorized the creation of the Bhutan Broadcasting System, which would be charged with creating and delivering programs of cultural importance and educational value to the still relatively small number of Bhutanese who owned a television set.
As for journalism, the “news” in Bhutan was almost always positive. The country had but one newspaper, which offered word of the comings and goings of the royal family. (The king was married to seven sisters, each of whom was given a formal portfolio to shepherd good public works in the land.) There were announcements of arrivals of public dignitaries and international development officials, reports on commerce. Though King Jigme Singye Wangchuck was far more than a figurehead, he had recently left day-to-day management of his country to a council of more than a dozen ministers, many of the kingdom’s best and brightest who had been sent off to Europe and the United States when they were younger for graduate degrees in economics and political science.
This mostly American-trained cadre of talented technocrats managed Bhutan with stunning effectiveness and efficiency. In short order, the country had made enormous strides in public health, water delivery and electrification and, most impressively, literacy. But by 2006, King Wangchuck had turned his throne over to his Oxford-educated 26-year-old son, Jigme Kesar, and the following year the young king began the transition from absolute to constitutional monarchy.
Which brings me back to Pek, who told me that many things in Bhutan have changed since those first, halting steps at modernization that I had witnessed years before. There are now four Bhutanese newspapers, not one, all finding their way in a strange new democratic world. Each has an online presence, though in general Internet access remains spotty and slow. Yes, the BBS still diligently broadcasts news of Bhutan, but suddenly everything about the government doesn’t seem so rosy or quite so efficient. Yes, the ranks of young, green journalists are growing, but the rules of engagement between journalist and public and journalist and government are largely unwritten. But the incoming noise and blather, the reliable and the erroneous information from the four corners of the global village, has become a tidal wave, overwhelming a population still peeking through the doors of modernity. If anything, “television” and what it brings is potentially a greater threat to Bhutan’s sense of identity than it was a decade ago. The Bhutanese just don’t know what to make of it all. And news literacy, she is convinced, is what the country needs.
To a large degree, Bhutan is representative of a growing awareness worldwide that democratic institutions and an unfettered press will not thrive without a third component: a population’s ability to understand, evaluate and intelligently make decisions based upon the information it receives. That is why the leaders of Bhutan know that their young democracy and free press will not survive if the population is not media literate, information literate and, finally, news literate.
If Bhutan knows this, just starting down democracy’s road, just a few years removed from an almost-medieval isolation, what about the rest of the world?
The Stony Brook conference included Dr. Úrsula Freundt-Thurne from the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas in Lima, Peru, who expressed her belief that there was an urgent need to start a similar initiative in her country. Freundt-Thurne was part of a panel, along with Bhutan’s Pek and with representatives from throughout Latin America charged with developing a framework for “exporting” the news literacy idea worldwide. The panel was chaired by the University of Maryland’s Dr. Susan Moeller, whose own work with the Salzburg Academy and the Salzburg Global Seminar has resulted in the development of “teaching tools, lesson plans, case studies and curricula.”
Says Moeller: “Students in both the developed and the developing world need to understand the different ways media shape our world—and the essential roles media can play in fostering civil society and ensuring transparency and accountability.”
Moeller calls her endeavor “media literacy,” but it is a first cousin of what Schneider has now taught to upwards of 4,000 students on campus.
Why does news matter? Why do we need the news? What constitutes reliable information? How do you evaluate evidence and sources? How can you recognize your own biases and those of others? How do you know what information to trust? In many countries around the world, we know these questions are incendiary. Indeed the concept of news literacy will be anathema.
Nonetheless, the Stony Brook panel was able to reach broad agreement on guidelines for a global approach to news or “media” literacy. Among them:
- A focus on basic skills and standards that are global common denominators – An attention to different audiences, social classes, ethnicities and cultures and their respective relationships with purveyors of information – A recognition that the vocabulary of news literacy is not always easily translatable, i.e. concepts such as reliability and trust may vary greatly
Indeed, the rigorous semester-long Stony Brook news literacy curriculum is rooted in the history and traditions of the American press and the relationship of the Fourth Estate with both government and citizenry. Much of that model will not travel well in its specifics, but it can, sometimes with great difficulty, be adapted country by country.
UNESCO, of course, has been involved in international media education for nearly two decades through a variety of initiatives and coalitions from the African continent to Eastern Europe. Unlike some of UNESCO’s efforts and the work of the Salzburg Global Seminar, the Stony Brook model of news literacy education specifically targets the unique characteristics of journalism and news reporting, what Schneider likes to call “the news neighborhood.”
There is relatively little time devoted to analyses of how the media shape issues on a broad scale. Despite the broad scope of the course, its intent is to focus on the individual news consumer, to explore his or her own biases, to sharpen one’s own critical thinking skills.
It is the individual consumer of news who must survive that “tsunami of information” racing toward them, from Google to Facebook, from upstart Web sites to countless lone reporters. In places with rich traditions of democracy and press freedom as well as those with no such traditions at all, news literacy, the literacy for the information age, is a potent way for citizens to both build and protect democracy. The ever-enlightened leaders of Bhutan seem to know that.