Page 260 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Med a L teracy: Creat ng Better C t zens or Better Consumers? |

not happen automatically, however. Media are ubiquitous. In other words, there
is so much media in our lives, and media images surround us to such a great
extent, that they have become almost invisible. As the media scholar Marshall
McLuhan is quoted as saying, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re
pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” The notion that educational interventions are neces-
sary for individuals to achieve an elevated understanding of the media is at the
heart of the U.S. media literacy movement that has been developing in various
forms since the 1930s.

ThE DEvELoPmEnT oF ThE mEDia LiTEraCy movEmEnT

In the 1930s a number of English teachers in Madison, Wisconsin, became
concerned about the social impact of commercial radio and formed a small group
dedicated to studying radio programming. This group added television to their
mission in 1953 and became the American Council for Better Broadcasting. Thirty
years later they changed their name to the National Telemedia Council (NTC) and
they continue to operate under this title. The avowed mission of the group is not
to critique the media industries but to encourage appreciation of quality program-
ming. As stated on their Web site: “From the beginning, we have taken a positive,
non-judgmental attitude and embraced a philosophy that values reflective judg-
ment and cooperation rather than confrontation with the media industry.”
This cooperative approach marked the first three decades of media education
until the rise of the critical viewing movement in the late 1960s. Concerns about
the effects of television violence helped spur public and private investment in
media education efforts, which peaked during the 1970s. This critical viewing
approach was aimed at critiquing media messages and pointing out the possible
negative effects of media consumption.
Despite the spread of media education in the 1970s, the 1980s saw a conser-
vative turn in education that emphasized a focus on traditional reading, writing,
and computation skills. Few new media education programs or innovations were
introduced during this decade and media literacy fell by the wayside throughout
most of the United States. This was not true in other parts of the industrial world
however, as media education continued to develop and expand. Small pockets of
media educators continued to communicate with one another, and toward the
end of the decade two important groups were founded in California: Strategies
for Media Literacy, in San Francisco, and the Center for Media and Values (later
to be called the Center for Media Literacy) in Los Angeles.
During the 1990s a growing number of conferences and publications indicated
that the media literacy movement was again on the rise in the United States. In
1992, the Aspen Institute sponsored a conference with the goal of creating a
recognizable identity and clear mission for an increasingly disparate movement.
It was at this conference that the standard definition of media literacy was first
developed: “A media literate person can access, analyze, evaluate, and produce
both print and electronic media.”
Another key development occurred in 1997 when the Partnership for Media
Education (PME) was formed to, among other things, organize annual national