Page 261 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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

conferences for media practitioners and educators. This small group became the
Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA) in 2000. According to their Web
site they are “the first national membership organization dedicated to media
literacy.” Like the NTC, AMLA is concerned with not being confrontational
with the media industries. In their own words: “While media literacy does raise
critical questions about the impact of media and technology, it is not an anti-
media movement. Rather, it represents a coalition of concerned individuals and
organizations, including educators, faith-based groups, health care-providers,
and citizen and consumer groups, who seek a more enlightened way of under-
standing our media environment.”
Despite AMLA’s mission of creating a broad coalition, the organization’s ap-
proach is not without controversy. AMLA accepts funding from media corpora-
tions such as Time-Warner, which has led some in the media literacy community
to question whether this compromises their ability to promote critical thinking
about media. In 1999 Channel One was one of the sponsors of the National Media
Education Conference put on by AMLA’s predecessor, PME. Channel One is a
private for-profit enterprise that provides television equipment to schools at no
financial cost. They also produce a daily news program that includes 10 minutes
of editorial content and two minutes of advertising. Teachers in Channel One
schools are required to show the program each day and students are required to
sit through it. Critics of Channel One say that the news programming is devoid
of any substantive content and the real point of the programming is to expose a
captive audience to commercials. A 2006 study supported this criticism when it
revealed that students remembered the ads but not the news stories covered in a
given program. Because of Channel One’s involvement in the 1999 conference,
some media educators boycotted the event.
In response to these concerns over AMLA’s focus on cooperation with cor-
porate media, in 2002 a number of educators, media practitioners, and activ-
ists founded the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME). Believing
that sponsorship always affects outcomes, ACME is committed to complete
independence from the media industries and accepts no corporate funding.
ACME advocates for a three-pronged approach to media literacy that includes
media education, independent media production, and media reform activism.
At the core of the ACME philosophy is the notion that both media content and
the social context in which content is produced are important. ACME thus
supports a type of media education that concerns itself not only with analyz-
ing media messages but also with understanding media industries and their
practices and motivations. In regard to the major difference between the two
organizations, it is stated on the ACME Web site: “AMLA seeks to be a ‘big
tent’ media literacy organization and specifically rejects ‘media bashing’ which
we view as a limitation on criticism and reform.” The split between AMLA
and ACME is evocative of the disparity in media literacy advocates’ views on
the philosophies, goals, and strategies of media education. In fact, ACME ad-
vocates the use of the term media education as distinct from media literacy,
where media literacy is focused on messages while media education deals with
both messages and structures.