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    “News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them.”1 Nearly 100 years ago, when Walter Lippmann published his accounts of the immense difficulties of reconciling “the world outside and the pictures in our heads,” most news came “from a distance” via newspapers and magazines. And yet, even with this limited range and number of news purveyors, in Liberty and the News and, later, the highly influential Public Opinion, Lippmann describes “inconceivable confusion” among the busy and tired people who had to make sense of it. Lippmann’s earlier career included a stint as a propagandist (and a very successful one) for the Creel Committee during the First World War, so he knew something about the construction of messages and the many forces along the path from sender to receiver that could shape their meaning, rendering the world outside opaque and unknowable. How was democracy going to work, Lippmann wondered, if people were incapable of being adequately in- formed about important issues?

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    Wallace - Essay

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    THEAJEUK
    283 views2 pages
    “News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them.”1 Nearly 100 years ago, when Walter Lippmann published his accounts of the immense difficulties of reconciling “the world outside and the pictures in our heads,” most news came “from a distance” via newspapers and magazines. And yet, even with this limited range and number of news purveyors, in Liberty and the News and, later, the highly influential Public Opinion, Lippmann describes “inconceivable confusion” among the busy and tired people who had to make sense of it. Lippmann’s earlier career included a stint as a propagandist (and a very successful one) for the Creel Committee during the First World War, so he knew something about the construction of messages and the many forces along the path from sender to receiver that could shape their meaning, rendering the world outside opaque and unknowable. How was democracy going to work, Lippmann wondered, if people were incapable of being adequately in- formed about important issues?

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    “News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them.”1 Nearly 100 years ago, when Walter Lippmann published his accounts of the immense difficulties of reconciling “the world outside and the pictures in our heads,” most news came “from a distance” via newspapers and magazines. And yet, even with this limited range and number of news purveyors, in Liberty and the News and, later, the highly influential Public Opinion, Lippmann describes “inconceivable confusion” among the busy and tired people who had to make sense of it. Lippmann’s earlier career included a stint as a propagandist (and a very successful one) for the Creel Committee during the First World War, so he knew something about the construction of messages and the many forces along the path from sender to receiver that could shape their meaning, rendering the world outside opaque and unknowable. How was democracy going to work, Lippmann wondered, if people were incapable of being adequately in- formed about important issues?

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    283 views2 pages

    Wallace - Essay

    Uploaded by

    THEAJEUK
    “News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people who must take what is given to them.”1 Nearly 100 years ago, when Walter Lippmann published his accounts of the immense difficulties of reconciling “the world outside and the pictures in our heads,” most news came “from a distance” via newspapers and magazines. And yet, even with this limited range and number of news purveyors, in Liberty and the News and, later, the highly influential Public Opinion, Lippmann describes “inconceivable confusion” among the busy and tired people who had to make sense of it. Lippmann’s earlier career included a stint as a propagandist (and a very successful one) for the Creel Committee during the First World War, so he knew something about the construction of messages and the many forces along the path from sender to receiver that could shape their meaning, rendering the world outside opaque and unknowable. How was democracy going to work, Lippmann wondered, if people were incapable of being adequately in- formed about important issues?

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    of 2

    Page 14

    Journalism Education

    Invited
    essays

    Volume 5 number 1

    This editions guest editors invited essays from key


    practitioners and academics on the theme of preparing
    future journalists - and citizens - for engagement in
    global digital culture.

    The very old and very new


    challenge of news literacy
    Stephanie Craft, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    News comes from a distance; it comes helter-skelter in inconceivable confusion; it
    deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy
    and tired people who must take what is given to them.1

    Nearly 100 years ago, when Walter Lippmann published his accounts of the
    immense difficulties of reconciling the world outside and the pictures in our
    heads, most news came from a distance via newspapers and magazines.

    And yet, even with this limited range and number of news purveyors, in Liberty and the
    News and, later, the highly influential Public Opinion, Lippmann describes inconceivable confusion among the busy and tired people who had to make sense of it. Lippmanns
    earlier career included a stint as a propagandist (and a very successful one) for the Creel
    Committee during the First World War, so he knew something about the construction
    of messages and the many forces along the path from sender to receiver that could shape
    their meaning, rendering the world outside opaque and unknowable. How was democracy going to work, Lippmann wondered, if people were incapable of being adequately informed about important issues? Indeed, Lippmanns view seemed so dire that John Dewey
    called Public Opinion perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently
    conceived ever penned.2
    Everythingand nothinghas changed since then. Certainly the world must have
    seemed a complicated, confusing place in the newly industrialised, post-war era in which
    Invited essays

    Volume 5 number 1

    Journalism Education

    page 15

    Public Opinion appeared. Our present time is no less complicated, in either perception or
    reality. Whats a bit startling, however, is how momentous change in one areanamely,
    the revolutionary expansion of mass communication capabilitiesseems to have altered
    the experience of those busy and tired people so little. Yes, people can contribute to and
    engage with the news stream in ways that were impossible before. But that doesnt change
    the fact that for issues and events happening outside their direct experience, people still
    must take what is given to them by the news media and try to make sense of it. That task
    is arguably more, not less, difficult with the proliferation of sources and platforms.
    Comparing Lippmanns words with todays realities isnt just a way of noting the old saying about how the more things change the more they stay the same (though it certainly
    does that too). Rather, I want to think more about how Lippmanns views might be useful
    as we consider where news literacy has been and is, or ought to be, going.
    My research collaborators, Seth Ashley and Adam Maksl, and I began our work in news
    literacy with what we thought would be an answerable question: What is it? If we could
    define it, then maybe we could measure it. And if we could measure it, then we would have
    done something useful for researchers interested in investigating relationships between
    news literacy and other civically important things, such as political participation, as well
    as for educators who were developing curricula and programs and wanted to evaluate their
    effectiveness. It all seemed pretty straightforward.
    Our initial theorizing regarding the what is news literacy question focused more on
    the literacy part than the news part. If literacy encompasses the ability to analyse and
    interpret news messages, then what might someone need to know about news to analyse
    and interpret it? This is a somewhat odd way to think about news, which is generally
    considered successful to the extent it doesnt require much analysing. It is designed to be
    taken at face value. Many people, especially those coming from the world of professional
    journalism, often define news literacy in terms that reflect this face value notion. In this
    view, news literacy is the ability to distinguish real news from the burgeoning numbers
    of imitators that might look like works of journalism on the surface, but are not the products of journalistic practices involving verification and so on. This definition influenced
    our thinking, and we began to consider news literacy in the context ofand as a product
    ofprofessional journalism. What does one need to know about the system that produces
    news to be able to interpret that news? In addition, we were thinking about journalism in
    terms of the roles it plays and the consequent responsibilities it has in a democracy. Those
    were, after all, the things that made news literacy important in the first place, it seemed to
    us.
    All of this led us, early on, to spin our wheels a bit. We were looking at what people knew
    about what journalism should do. (It turns out that the college students who were the participants in that early research knew, or could at least guess, the correct answers about
    that.) While thats good to know, it wasnt really helping us figure out if they knew enough
    about how professional journalism actually works to be able to analyse the news messages
    it produces. Our next steps, then, focused more on identifying the tools someone might
    bring to the task of analysing news messages, and less on whether and how someone appreciates those messages. We adapted a model of media literacy that had never been operationalised before to create the News Media Literacy scale, which combines items measuring knowledge about the news media system (among other things) with items addressing
    psychological traits and motivations relevant to interpreting the news.
    Doing this was not without controversy. The rich, if somewhat conceptually scattered,
    media literacy literature informing our work has been dismissed by some journalists as
    too ideological, too critical of journalism. For example, the idea that knowing about the
    commercial underpinnings and pressures of the media system might be important in inInvited essays

    Page 16

    Journalism Education

    Volume 5 number 1

    terpreting news rankled some of those closely aligned with the journalism industry. In addition, including psychological measures seemed too far afield. In some ways, this reflects
    a desire to focus on NEWS literacy more than news LITERACY. Which brings us back to
    Lippmann.
    We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we
    experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely
    aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.3

    Lippmann, applying insights from the then-relatively new field of social psychology, described how stereotypes and blind spots work to filter and skew our interpretation of mass
    media messages. Remember, this is at a time when there were fewer news sources and it
    was far easier to make some sort of determination about any sources credibility than it
    is today. So the problem Lippmann is identifying has almost nothing to do with message
    sources and everything to do with limits on our interpretive abilities. To me, that suggests
    that the focus of news literacy ought to be less on distinguishing among news sources and
    more on how the ways we get newsmediated by technologies, a host of institutional and
    organisational forces and our own psychological toolsshapes our understanding. And if
    we adjust our focus in that way, news literacy research and practice also need to make sure
    the scope is broader than professional journalism and the definitions of news more inclusive. In the end, that might mean news literacy is perhaps less distinct from media literacy
    than some might desire. But I think it could be better positioned to help citizens handle the
    challenges to democratic decision-making Lippmann identified all those years ago.
    References
    1
    Lippmann, W. (1920). Liberty and the News. New York: The Free Press, p. 5.
    2
    Dewey, J. (1922). Public Opinion, The New Republic 30 (May 3), p. 286.
    3
    Lippmann, W. (1922/1965). Public Opinion. New York: The Free Press, p. 59.

    Invited essays

    Volume 5 number 1

    Journalism Education

    Why - and how - news publishers


    worldwide help with news literacy

    page 17

    By Aralynn Abare McMane, PhD, Executive director for youth


    engagement and news literacy, The World Association of
    Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), Paris
    When 34 journalists were killed while covering a Philippine election, Raia and
    Ruel Landicho, publishers of two small weeklies in the region of the deadly attack, organized a day of free workshops at their Sinag printing plant to help local youth understand the role of a free press. Ruel said at the time, We believe
    that in a time when press freedom is being attacked in our country... it is important to teach our youth that journalism is a noble profession. They expected
    perhaps one hundred participants. One thousand attended.

    Such publisher commitment to news literacy is essential, deserves to be honoured and


    should be copied. So it was that the Landicos initiative won a World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) World Young Reader Prize in 2011.
    A unique strength of news literacy comes from its origins in journalism and journalists,
    with the natural emphasis on informed questioning of all information. That said, an understanding of how journalism works, the dangers to some of those who do it, and its purpose in encouraging democracy all need to be at the start of any news literacy (or media
    literacy) activity, well before the classic deconstruction of media messages.
    That philosophy was reinforced for WAN-IFRA after inviting Paul Mihailidis, director
    of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change and an editor of this volume, to
    report to WAN-IFRA in 2008 about the results of an experiment involving a University of
    Maryland media literacy course. He found that while the course did a good job of training
    students to be critical thinkers about media messages, it also left them become highly cynical about and media and about the role of journalism in a democracy (Mihailidis 2008).
    That course has been repaired, but there remains a challenge elsewhere that in the name
    of media literacy quality journalism becomes demonized if we are not very, very careful.
    Or, the central watchdog role of news media can be ignored, which is the case in one stateof-the-art media lab in Central Europe where the only mention of this role by nongovernment news media is that the fines imposed on them contribute to facilitys operating costs.
    WAN-IFRA encourages its constituency of online and print news publishers around the
    world to concentrate on helping local educators with some crucial, platform-agnostic elements of news literacy:
    > An understanding of the relationship between freedom of expression and freedom of
    the press and the importance and fragility of both.
    > A chance to come face-to-face with the work of journalism through interaction with
    the people who do it.
    > An opportunity to sample doing journalism, even for a few hours, to practice some
    reporter skills that will also serve in strengthening news participation, consumption and
    sharing.
    This work recognizes and publicizes excellence in these areas and others by news pubInvited essays

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