Media Literacy: Panacea or Chimera?

Media literacy: 1) The ability to critically access, analyze, evaluate and create content across all forms of communication. It empowers individuals to understand how media shape our beliefs, recognize bias and misinformation, and engage thoughtfully and responsibly in today’s digital world.

Media literacy: 2) The best and perhaps only hope we have of preserving democracy in the face of all the fake news and misinformation being distributed by bad actors across social and traditional media alike.

Media literacy: 3) A capacity not quite dead but on life support as society undergoes a massive adaptation crisis. While the core skills of critical thinking and source evaluation remain essential, they are actively being challenged by algorithmic feeds, rapid information-sharing and the reductive nature of online discourse.

Like most former newspaper reporters and editors, I’m all in on the importance of media literacy.

I’d like to think political charlatans and cheats would be exposed and the world would be a better place if only — as influential 20th-century journalist Walter Lippmann once wrote — the average citizen “could be taught more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more lectures and read more reports.”

But to quote the last line of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, one of the most quietly devastating endings in literature: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Media literacy might be a panacea if it were attainable on a large scale, but what if most people lack the critical thinking skills — and either the ability or the will to develop such skills — to discern fact from fiction, cogency from fallacy?

It takes a clear head and a fair bit of effort to ask and answer the following questions about whatever purports to be news: What is the source? Who benefits from the way it’s being framed? What is being emphasized and what is being left out? Am I reacting emotionally before knowing all the facts?

Hint: Follow the money.

What if an eagerness to have one’s views affirmed and our pervasive senses of grievance, powerlessness and apathy, stoked by shameless demagoguery and social media algorithms that cater to (and profit from) our biases, overwhelm and strangle any nascent desire for truth?

What if the notion that the average person cares enough about anything beyond the bubble of his or her own tribal allegiance, religious faith and perceived self-interest to put in the time to become an informed citizen was an airy-fairy pipe dream from the get-go?

As he made clear in his book Public Opinion, one of the seminal founding texts of media studies, Lippmann himself believed this hope to be a fantasy.

No less than the aristocratic Plato in Periclean Athens, long considered the birthplace of democracy (though only for free, adult male citizens), Lippmann came to believe that the best governments were run by experts rather than those most popular with the public, which he regularly derided as the “bewildered herd.”

Similarly influential and condescending columnist H.L. Mencken — author of the aphorism “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard” — had once excoriated Lippmann for accepting the “mystical gurgle” of democracy. He now celebrated him for recognizing that “the masses are ignorant and unteachable.”

Mencken is also famous for this cynical observation:

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has any one ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.

What makes the Lippmann-Mencken position so unsettling is not that it is obviously false — it is not — but that anyone who has ever scrolled through the comments section of a news article, or attended a school board meeting, or watched a MAGA rally on TV, has come away with at least a flicker of suspicion that it might be true.

Wingnuts R us.

One cannot simply dismiss Lippmann and Mencken as elitists, however much one might wish to do so. Their diagnosis continues to possess the irritating durability of a splinter that cannot be extracted because it is embedded too close to the bone. The evidence appears to accumulate daily — and will surely pile up at an accelerated rate now that Trump allies have taken over CBS News, strangled the venerable Sixty Minutes and are moving quickly to Foxmasculate CNN.

Today’s average citizen inhabits a world saturated with information. Every historical complaint about ignorance would seem, at first glance, to have been rendered obsolete.

A person carrying a smartphone possesses immediate access to more facts than the editors of 20-century encyclopedias could have imagined assembling. Libraries have become portable. Archives have become searchable. Experts have become reachable. Knowledge itself has become frictionless.

And yet. One hesitates before that phrase because it has become a cliché of cultural criticism, but the “and yet” remains stubbornly necessary.

And yet conspiracy theories flourish.

And yet falsehoods spread with astonishing speed.

And yet millions of people appear capable of consuming vast quantities of information while becoming no more capable of distinguishing truth from fiction.

The naïve model of democratic enlightenment — which still quietly underlies many discussions of media literacy — imagines a straightforward relationship between information and understanding.

Give citizens access to better facts and they will arrive at better conclusions. Expose them to reliable journalism and they will become reliable judges of public affairs. Expand education and public discourse will gradually become more rational.

But what if this model mistakes the nature of the problem? What if ignorance is not primarily an informational deficit?

The internet has functioned as a kind of civilization-scale experiment on this question. It has dramatically lowered the cost of acquiring information. If ignorance were principally a matter of insufficient access to facts, one might expect corresponding increases in public understanding.

Instead, what seems to have increased is not understanding but confidence that I’m right and the other fellow is not only wrong but evil. Unwarranted confidence. Parlous, maniacal confidence.

People know more facts than ever. They simply know them in disconnected fragments, detached from any framework capable of assigning significance or context. They possess statistics without systems, headlines without history, opinions without epistemology.

Anyone can recite unemployment figures while understanding little about economics. They can consume thousands of articles about international affairs while possessing no coherent model of geopolitical incentives. They can memorize scientific conclusions while remaining incapable of evaluating scientific claims.

Exhibit A: Self-assured anti-vaxxers who smugly implore others to “do your homework,” without having a clue about basic biology.

Information turns out to be a necessary condition of understanding but not a sufficient one. This distinction matters because it suggests that the contemporary crisis is not merely one of misinformation but of cognition itself.

To put the point differently: perhaps the fundamental challenge facing democratic societies is not that people believe false things. Human beings have always believed false things. The challenge is that modern media environments increasingly reward precisely those psychological tendencies that make false beliefs attractive.

You don’t have to worry about climate change if the most powerful man in the world, with his corrupt relationship to the fossil-fuel industry, tells you it’s a crock.

You can believe that the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden was rigged, and that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was orchestrated by Deep State actors and “Antifa” terrorists, and that non-white immigrants are being imported by liberal elites all over the Western world to displace white Christians, and that Donald Trump has been waging a secret war against a cabal of elite, Satan-worshipping pedophiles with senior positions in government, business and the media … provided, that is, you were shrewd enough to avoid the tracking microchips the devious elders of Zion have maliciously tucked into vaccines.

Isaac’s Asimov famous observation in “A Cult of Ignorance,” a 1980 essay in Newsweek, has never been more germane than it is almost half a century later:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Human beings, despite what Enlightenment mythology occasionally suggests, do not pursue truth exclusively or even primarily. They pursue many things. They pursue belonging. They pursue status. They pursue certainty. They pursue meaning. They pursue emotional comfort.

Truth is one value among several, and often far from the strongest.

This realization, uncomfortable as it may be, helps explain why arguments grounded solely in factual correction so often fail. Facts compete against identities. Evidence competes against loyalties. Data compete against narratives that provide existential reassurance.

The question is not simply whether a claim is true. The question is what psychological work the claim performs.

Does it tell me who my enemies are? Does it explain my frustrations? Does it confirm that my tribe is virtuous? Does it reassure me that the world remains intelligible?

A belief can survive repeated factual refutation if it continues answering these questions.

This is where Mencken’s famous observation acquires its enduring sting. His claim was not merely that people were uninformed. It was that they actively resisted ideas that threatened their comfort. Ideas destabilize. They complicate. They introduce ambiguity where certainty previously existed.

Yet one need not adopt Mencken’s patrician contempt to recognize the force of his insight. The difficulty is that the same insight applies not merely to “the masses” but to everyone. The educated are not exempt. Journalists are not exempt. Professors are not exempt. When it comes to governance, even the experts aren’t experts.

One of the more ironic developments of the 20th century is that history supplied abundant evidence simultaneously supporting and undermining Lippmann’s conclusions. He became skeptical of the public’s capacity for informed self-government and increasingly placed his faith in experts. Yet many of the century’s greatest catastrophes involved experts operating inside prestigious institutions, armed with sophisticated theories and impressive credentials.

Think Robert McNamara. Think Henry Kissinger. Think of the geniuses who brought us the opioid epidemic, the dot-com stock collapse, the early missteps in battling COVID and now the potential of artificial intelligence to end us.

The public can be irrational. So can elites. The public can be manipulated. So can experts. The public can succumb to ideology. Universities, bureaucracies, corporations and professional classes can do the same.

This complicates the apparent choice between democracy and technocracy. The debate is often framed as a contest between uninformed citizens and informed specialists. In reality it is a contest between different collections of fallible human beings. No one escapes the limitations of human cognition.

The real question is therefore institutional rather than psychological. Given that everyone is vulnerable to error, which arrangements are most capable of detecting and correcting mistakes?

Lippmann’s answer increasingly favoured expertise.

Democracy’s defenders traditionally offered a different answer. The wisdom of democracy lies not in the superior judgment of individual citizens but in the capacity of dispersed populations to identify failures that concentrated authorities overlook.

Neither answer is fully satisfying. Experts know things the public does not. The public knows things experts do not.

Both are vulnerable to blindness. Both are vulnerable to self-interest. Both are vulnerable to delusion.

The tension cannot be resolved because it emerges from permanent features of human nature rather than temporary defects of institutional design.

But either way, the trouble with “media literacy” is that the phrase itself often carries expectations it cannot possibly satisfy.

Media literacy will not transform ordinary citizens into Plato’s wise and judicious philosopher-kings. It will not eliminate tribalism. It will not abolish motivated reasoning. It will not produce universal consensus regarding contested questions.

Most important, it will not alter the fact that many people prefer narratives that make them feel righteous to realities that make them feel uncertain. Organized religions and cult leaders alike figured this one out a long time ago.

No educational initiative can entirely overcome incentives built into human psychology. Yet rejecting media literacy on these grounds would be a mistake. Its value may simply be smaller than its advocates imagine.

So perhaps the goal is not enlightenment but resistance.

Not resistance to any particular ideology, but resistance to manipulation itself. The ability to recognize when one’s outrage is being harvested. The ability to notice when certainty arrives suspiciously quickly, dropped off at your doorstep in a box with a bow. The ability to distinguish between information that informs and information that merely inflames. The ability to consider, however briefly, this simple limitation of being human: Perhaps I am mistaken.

These capacities sound modest. They are modest. But modest capacities might be all that democratic societies have ever depended upon.

The grand dream of democracy has always involved a subtle exaggeration. Citizens were imagined as rational actors carefully evaluating evidence and arriving at considered judgments about public affairs. Yet real citizens have never behaved this way. They are distracted, emotional, tribal, inconsistent, contradictory and only intermittently attentive.

Same as it ever was.

Democracy has often functioned anyway. Not because people are wise. Not because they are well informed. Not because they are immune to manipulation. But because they are sometimes capable of recognizing failure after the fact and changing course.

This is not a romantic vision of self-government. It abandons the fantasy of collective wisdom and settles instead for collective corrigibility. But it is all democracy ever was. In that great summation by Winston Churchill, it’s “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

(Not that Churchill was a blind idealist about this. A lesser known epigram often attributed to him, which Lippmann and Mencken surely appreciated: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”)

In any case, the hope behind media literacy is not that citizens will become perfectly rational. It is that they might become slightly less vulnerable to their own irrationality.

Not that they will stop making mistakes. Only that they will occasionally notice them. Not that truth will triumph. Only that falsehoods will encounter a little more friction.

If Lippmann and Mencken were correct about everything — if the masses are truly unteachable, if ignorance is ineradicable, if comfort invariably defeats truth — then democracy’s future is bleak indeed.

But if they were only mostly right, if human beings possess some limited capacity to recognize their own cognitive weaknesses and become marginally less wrong over time, then the project remains viable.

Precarious, certainly. Fragile, undoubtedly. But viable. And, for the moment at least, that narrow possibility is carrying an extraordinary amount of political weight.

“We cannot be taught wisdom,” Marcel Proust once reminded us, “we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.”

And now for some degrading eye-gouging cage matches on the south lawn of the White House. Oh dear, maybe Lippman and Mencken nailed it exactly.

Panem et circenses.