pebbles №2: what I'm learning about media literacy
tools for critical and compassionate thinking when facing overwhelming news
content note: Before I share this big ol’ juicy roundup of media literacy tools, I’m going to share a note about my feelings of grief and this moment in history. This note will acknowledge what has happened, and is happening, in Gaza and Israel. If that will be activating for your nervous system, please feel free to scroll down to the header, “what I'm learning about media literacy”, which will take you to the first resource in my pebbles roundup. ❤️
a brief love note about grief, solidarity, and this moment in history
To everyone grieving the deaths of their loved ones because of the brutality of Hamas and the Israeli government: I cannot fathom your pain, and I am deeply grieved with you.
To everyone who is afraid for the safety of their loved ones in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel: I am afraid with you.
To any person feeling misunderstood or dismissed by strangers, confusing you with the actions of your government: You are NOT your government. Governments fail us every day.
To everyone who is furious at the rampant spread of anti-semitism, islamophobia, and misinformation in international conversations on social media and the news: I am furious with you.
To everyone who is ashamed of how little they knew (or, how much privilege they leveraged to avoid having to witness) the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians over many decades of history: I am ashamed with you.
To Americans who are ashamed by our country’s long history of violence, genocide, and the making and supporting of wars: I’m ashamed with you.
What we are capable of doing to each other is horrifying.
And.
Escalating that horror—whether by passive resignation or active cosigning—is NOT inevitable. We know that traumatizing others does not heal our trauma, or relieve our deepest pain. As House Representative Rashida Tlaib succinctly put it, “War crimes cannot be answered with war crimes.”
I have so much to learn, and I’m committed to continuing that learning beyond this news cycle. For the past few weeks I’ve been soaking in resources around history and how we tell it, solidarity movements, media literacy, and fact-checking. I’ve also been calling + emailing my Reps and Senators in Congress nearly everyday, telling them to co-sponsor the Ceasefire Now Resolution put forward by Representative Cori Bush and a more than a dozen colleagues. The resolution demands the Biden administration prioritize solutions for getting humanitarian aid to the millions of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, currently being bombed and blockaded by the government of Israel, and to press for immediate de-escalation and ceasefire between Israel and Hamas for the sake of life.
If you are feeling activated by something I’ve written above, I understand; people are rightfully shocked, grieved, angry, and traumatized. Please know that I would never presume to tell you what you should do, or how you ought to feel; I am sharing these details with you because I’m committed to learning in public and to living my values in public. As Gabes Torres so beautifully put it back in 2021: May we love in ways that devastatingly disrupt organized state violence.
what I'm learning about media literacy
Like many of my peers nowadays, I tend to get my news through social media first, and traditional media second.
For me, the cycle goes like this:
An advocacy organization, plugged-in community member, or meme account I follow shares a micro-bite of breaking news on Instagram or Tiktok;
I wince, horrified at the prospect of what I just saw, read, or heard;
I swipe away in distress, hoping some slice of joy will refill the space of my timeline or fyp because I’m not ready to emotionally process this information;
As I scroll, more people I respect and care about share their responses around this news;
I feel a new kind of distress because I don’t understand what’s going on, and so decide to leave the app to get more direct information from news outlets I think I can trust;
I soak in reporting from traditional news sources and context from historical sources, experiencing more distressing emotions;
I decide what values-aligned action steps I can take in the moment, based on what I’m learning (and unlearning) about justice and care.
…But sometimes I don’t know what values-aligned action steps I can take in the moment.
Other times I don’t trust myself to know which values-aligned action steps I should take in the moment.
And often, any action steps that do come to mind seem trivial compared to the scope of the problem, pointless, or doomed to fail.
Social change advocates have taught me that each of these reactions—feeling confused and feeling helpless—are natural responses to overwhelm, and yet there IS a solution: plugging back into the collective.
When I’m not sure what to do, it’s because I’m trying to find solutions on my own.
If, instead, I reach out to friends, revisit the resource hubs of advocacy orgs, and spend time with the work of people I respect, I’ll eventually be introduced to creative solutions that have been decades in the making. And even if I decide that the action steps I’m ready to take are different than action steps they’re taking, the process of connecting-before-acting always helps to pull my brain out of individualism-freeze.1
→ But how do you get to the values-aligned action-steps stage if you aren’t even sure which news sources are telling the unbiased truth?
→ And what do you do when people you respect are telling you to take opposite action steps in response to the same information?
For me, both questions are a compass arrow, pointing toward media literacy.
When I started seeking out media literacy training in 2022, I was overwhelmed by the grief and suffering all around us. (I still am.) I wanted communication-savvy people to sharpen my senses: to teach me how to know which publishers, news sites, and content creators were trustworthy and which were biased; to teach me how to outsmart the misinformation running rampant in news articles and viral social media posts.
Racial justice and disability justice advocates had taught me how essential it is that I don’t tune out, look away, and go numb—but I was struggling with the perpetual internal values-clash (i.e. cognitive dissonance) that comes with looking directly at injustice, staying sensitized to this world, and carrying on with my day-to-day life. It felt impossible to manage.
Looking back, I realize I wasn’t interested in media literacy at that time—I was interested in media relief.
Thanks to the generous expertise, effort, and sharing of others, I don’t crave media relief so much anymore.
I’m learning that:
Refusing to tune out and go numb is, and will continue to be, extremely activating for my nervous system. Rather than try not to get activated, I can rely on somatic, self-soothing practices to help me de-activate my nervous system whenever it happens.
Media is never neutral or unbiased, because it cannot be. It is constructed by humans, who cannot exist outside of our contexts—place, time, lived experiences, power structures, and so on.
If I want to collaborate in building a world that prioritizes care and reduces harm (and I do), then I need to look through a deeply critical lens at the stories we tell each other and ourselves about our current one.
Media literacy isn’t about knowing who I can trust to have the answers; it’s about knowing which critical questions I need to be asking so I can integrate whatever I’ve just found out about the world without swallowing propaganda in the process.
And I’ve learned this is going to take a lot of practice.
In case you want to practice, too:
[Note: none of these recommendations are sponsored or affiliate or anything; I just find them helpful!]
free / donation-based class series:
Exploring Media Literacy w/ Imani Barbarin
I can’t recommend these free online classes enough!!! This ongoing Media Literacy series is hosted on Imani’s Patreon. There’s an amazing curriculum queued up, with three episodes posted already.
If you aren’t already learning from Imani Barbarin, then I’m honored to introduce you to her work. Imani is a Black writer, content creator, speaker, actor, communications expert, who, in her own words, is “making media that centers disability.” I’ve learned (and unlearned) so much from following her on Tiktok and Instagram, and these Media Literacy classes have only deepened that learning.
In the three episodes I’ve watched so far, I’ve learned about the difference between signs, symbols, icons and signifiers; what questions to ask about the way a piece of media was constructed, and so much more. All classes are free, but please consider supporting Imani on Patreon if you have the capacity!
take the class and support Imani, here
free / donation-based class:
Critical Media Literacy w/ Dr. Maytha Alhassen
I first watched / took this Critical Media Literacy class led by Maytha Alhassen and hosted by Slow Factory back in 2022, and then rewatched it earlier this month for deeper learning. It’s both an introduction and deep-dive class, so if you’re new to the topic like I was, I’d suggest starting with Imani Barbarin’s Media Literacy class (linked above) and then take this one, next.
So far I’ve learned about the importance of ‘framing’ and its potential to manipulate a narrative (for example: saying “don’t think of an elephant” immediately makes you think of an elephant); the use of active and passive voice in a piece of media (for example: choosing the words “have died” instead of “were killed”); that each one of us is a Publisher when we post something on social media, so citations are essential, and so much more.
I was introduced to Maytha’s work through this class in 2022, and have been following her on IG since then. She is a Syrian-American writer/producer, journalist, historian, professor, social justice artist and mending practitioner who has worked in an incredible number multiple disciplines and industries.
A closing quote from Maytha that really summarizes the heart of this particular class:
“We have a collective duty; we have a civic duty; we have a collective responsibility as agents, as folks operating in public life together, to create and share media that is responsibly sourced, cared for, decolonized, and grounded in truth telling.”
Also—I’m OBSESSED with the high quality, always-expanding curriculum that Slow Factory offers on their public education platform, OpenEdu. Classes are always open to the public and focus on human rights, climate justice and collective liberation. I highly, highly recommend taking some when you get the chance. All classes are free, but the online school is funded by community contributions—so please consider donating to OpenEdu if you have the capacity!
take Maytha’s class and support OpenEdu here
questions to help me think critically:
Project LookSharp’s Media Decoding Handout
This PDF was one of the resources Imani shared in her Media Literacy classes, and I bookmarked it immediately. It was created by Project LookSharp, a non-profit arm of Ithaca College focused on teaching media literacy to the public, both adults and kids, in partnership with Insighters Education.
There are TONS of questions to reflect on in this handout, but a handful are now regulars in my brain:
Who made this? What do they want me to do, think or feel?
Who paid for this? Who might make money from this and how?
Whose voices are included and whose are left out?
Who might this message benefit? Who might it harm?
Was this crafted to trigger emotions, if so, how and why?
What aspects of historical or cultural context are relevant to consider?
How might I confirm this information using reliable sources?
What is my evidence?
Why do I think that?
download Project LookSharp’s Media Decoding PDF here
art to help me think critically:
Alexandra Bell’s ‘Counternarratives’ Series
In the ‘Counternarratives’ series, artist Alexandra Bell makes notes, markups, edits, and redactions on existing news stories to highlight the biases, power imbalances, and racism hiding in plain sight.
In her own words, she “deconstructs language and imagery to explore the tension between marginal experiences and dominant histories.”
In a 2017 Artnet profile of Alexandra, writer Terrence Trouillot describes the effect of this deconstruction of language and imagery in one of her most viral pieces, A Teenager With Promise (2017):
“Her “Michael Brown” work, A Teenager With Promise (2017), comprises two poster-size prints of the infamous New York Times articles that surfaced at the time of Brown’s funeral. The first is a profile of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed the unarmed teenager, the second story about Michael Brown himself, the headline reading “A Teenager Grappling with Problems and Promise.”
Bell’s transformation of these two articles is similar to that of an editor (or graphic designer): She sifts out words, phrases, images, and entire sentences that are either superfluous or loaded with racial prejudice. The end result is a complete revision of the previous piece. Thus, Bell changed the headline to read “A Teenager With Promise” and placed an enlarged photograph of Brown in his high school cap and gown. As for the Darren Wilson text, it was almost completely redacted so that it only reads: “Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.”
Clear-cut examples of biased framing in news stories like those examined in Alexandra Bell’s work have helped connect new dots in my brain; it’s as though I needed a visual aid for all this new media literacy knowledge to click into place.
Her work, plus the critical questions I’ve learned from Imani’s and Maytha’s classes, have completely changed how I interpret every piece of news.
check out Alexandra Bell’s Counternarratives series here
(very imperfect) tools that help me with fact-checking news claims and viral images:
→ AP (Associated Press) Fact Check page
→ FactCheck.org’s Debunking Viral Claims page
→ TinEye’s Reverse Image Search page
If you have resources that have helped you with media literacy, please feel free to share them with me!
I’d love to crowdsource more tools for helping us practice critical and compassionate thinking in this overwhelming news landscape.
Here’s to practice,
—Alexis ❤️
Mariame Kaba’s four questions, “What resources exist so I can better educate myself? Who's already doing work around this injustice? Do I have the capacity to offer concrete support and help to those people? And how can I actually be constructive in this moment?” have been burned into my brain since I heard her share them in a podcast interview, back in 2020.
Such useful resources!