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America's Ruling Class has stoked a moral panic over mis-, dis-, and mal-information (collectively, "MDM"), claiming the consumption of such content fuels threats to public health and safety among its political foes, and using the fear over such threats to justify a whole-of-society War on Wrongthink targeting said foes.
An essential component of the Ruling Class's War on Wrongthink is the mass public-private censorship regime that Americans have had imposed upon us primarily by a Disinformation-Industrial Complex running from the Deep State to Big Tech to often government-tied MDM monitors.
Now, it would appear the already sprawling Disinformation-Industrial Complex may be creeping into and coming to encompass your local elementary school—targeting your children.
As I report at RealClearInvestigations, states Red and Blue are considering and adopting legislation to incorporate so-called "media literacy education" into their classrooms. Some 13 states have passed media literacy-related bills since 2016, and such bills are currently pending in seven states this legislative session.
Champions of media literacy education present the discipline in apolitical and neutral terms—notwithstanding that it has been buoyed by, and treated as, responsive to a clearly political MDM panic fueled by claims of Trump-Russia collusion that proved false, as well as myriad Chinese coronavirus claims cast as false that ultimately proved true. Such champions claim the pedagogy aims to inculcate in students the skills to determine the veracity of news and information, as well as the credibility of sources.
Yet the rhetoric and associated political orientation of its boosters, and the activities and materials touted by the groups behind the media literacy education push itself, suggest the discipline is not only ripe for left-wing politicization, but that the entire edifice of "media literacy education" itself is a not-even-thinly-veiled leftist project.
New Jersey's media literacy bill, passed earlier this year, is archetypal.
The Garden State law, arguably the most expansive in the country, mandates instruction in media literacy from kindergarten through 12th grade.
The law tasks the state's education department with developing relevant standards that superficially seem unobjectionable and nonpartisan, aiming to: Ensure that students develop skills in "critical thinking"; differentiate "between facts, points of view, and opinions"; and, slightly less innocuously, understand "the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information."
Despite overwhelming support in the state's legislature, based in part on a Republican sponsor's representation that the bill aims to mold students into "skeptical, questioning, independent thinkers" rather than promoting any specific worldview, Democratic Governor Phil Murphy—to whom the Garden State's education department ultimately answers—framed the bill in overtly political terms.
In a January 6, 2023 statement, Murphy said that in response to the "violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol" two years prior, New Jersey had "taken decisive legislative action to strengthen our democracy," including becoming "the first state to ensure that our kids...possess the skills needed to discern fact from fiction and reject disinformation"—an allusion to the bill.
Murphy's fellow New Jersey Democrats, as well as the head of the state's powerful progressive teachers' union, the New Jersey Education Association—a key champion of the bill, alongside the state's left-leaning librarian associations—echoed this rhetoric in their own statements praising the governor's signing of the bill.
Another key advocate noted for playing an "instrumental" role in passing the bill was Rowan University professor Olga Polites, the state's chapter leader of Media Literacy Now—the preeminent group pushing such legislation nationally.
Polites wrote an op-ed in February 2021 that directly linked a lack of media literacy education to the January 6 riot, and called for mandatory media literacy education as the antidote.
In the piece, Polites chastised "bad actors in the conservative media" for promoting a "disinformation campaign regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election," specifically calling out Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin. By contrast, she lauded the likes of The Washington Post, a key purveyor alongside The New York Times of the pernicious Trump-Russia collusion disinformation operation, as "trusted." Curious, that.
When asked why New Jerseyans—and presumably citizens of other states who pass such bills—should be confident that progressive politics won't pervade media literacy education, Polites said, "The standards will be developed by the state education agency under the usual process for developing standards."
Other media literacy education advocates who I interviewed generally conveyed that we should simply trust educators to check their bias at the door.
Yet even if one were to trust and not verify, bias may be baked into media literacy education itself, as I discovered in looking into the leading organizations behind it, including the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) and Polites' own Media Literacy Now.
NAMLE, an umbrella group comprising 6,500 members and 82 organizational partners, and backed by the censorious Big Tech companies and progressive groups like the Tides Foundation, defines media literacy in the same anodyne terms New Jersey does. It suggests media literacy education compels students to ask basic questions about the nature and intent of the content they encounter, and the motives of its producers.
Yet the events it convenes each year have a distinctly progressive favor. NAMLE devoted its 2021 annual conference to media literacy and social justice. "Critical media literacy," a pedagogy with Marxist roots akin to critical race theory, was a part of 17 presentations during the conference, and NAMLE counts among its partners the leading institutional proponent of such pedagogy, the Critical Media Project.
Other conferences have similarly promoted critical media literacy, linked media literacy to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and indicated that media literacy is meant to inspire progressive activism.
A sampling of NAMLE's suggested references on "Race, Equity, and Social Justice" include: Education Week's "Teaching Math Through a Social Justice Lens"; "Teach the History of Policing," a resource from the Howard Zinn-linked Zinn Education Project; and PBS's "Three Ways to Teach the Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol."
NAMLE's partner Media Literacy Now has helped pass 20 bills across 10 states relating to media literacy. Like NAMLE, it recommends resources on "Race & Social Justice"—including the Critical Media Project—as well as those covering "Gender."
One of its backers, whose resources it recommends, provides an "Interactive Media Bias Chart" suggesting a cluster of major media sources characterized as skewing leftward, including The New York Times, CNN, and NBC News, are among the most reliable when measured by a "mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting." Other sources deemed reliable that the rater characterizes as "middle"-biased include NPR, Axios, and CBS News. Among major publications characterized as "middle"-biased, but to the right of total political neutrality on the chart, The Wall Street Journal stands alone in terms of comparable reliability. Sources like Reason, Fox News, and the New York Post all rank significantly lower than these sources by reliability, and below Vox, HuffPost, and Vice—but on par with Slate, MSNBC, and the Daily Beast. The Washington Post stands as a notable outlier in rating less reliably than Vox, HuffPost, and Vice.
A cursory review of media literacy materials promoted by states that have adopted such education shows work from the Critical Media Project, and literature suggesting students ought to critique media through a distinctly left-wing prism.
While there are many references pointing students toward left-wing sources and exhortations to filter information with a leftist lens throughout the media literacy canon, one is hard-pressed to find any material pointing in the opposite direction.
That the Deep State has embedded media literacy in national security policy, making combating Wrongthink an imperative under the view that disinformation threatens the homeland, should only draw further scrutiny about its incorporation in our nation's schools.
Children ought to have a healthy skepticism about the content they consume.
But it seems that instantiation in media literacy is far more likely to prove a recipe for indoctrination than a tool for such education.
Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He also contributes to The Federalist, the New York Post, The Epoch Times, and other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Correction: The columnist originally misinterpreted aspects of Ad Fontes Media's "Interactive Media Bias Chart," leading to mischaracterizations about where certain sources were ranked by reliability and bias. The text has been revised accordingly.
