Media literacy and news bias

This week, our reading task involved us reading two opinion pieces and an academic paper. 


The first opinion piece was “Digital Media Companies Found Lacking in Helping Users Understand the Online Environment” by Dr. Niam Kirk. She explains that the EC has a code of practice on disinformation, and each country has a commissioned code check to make sure that media companies such as Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are adhering to the code.  


What I found really shocking about the piece was that all these companies had insufficient information for any real analysis to be done on how much support Irish consumers were getting. Google’s lack of effort was extremely telling by its failure to launch media literacy campaigns in Ireland, when they already had such campaigns running in the UK and Europe. 


Kirk also brings up the interesting point that while Facebook and Google do fact check their content, it’s unclear on whether the publishing of these “fact checks” are done by the companies themselves or the many independent fact checkers credited on their services, few of which are IFCN approved fact checkers. I found this piece interesting as consumer transparency and honesty means a lot to me. 


Our second opinion piece was “Ofcom research: Nearly half of people across the UK nations have come across false or misleading information about Covid-19" by Rebecca Lennon, who works at Ofcom. Lennon explains that they carried out weekly surveys during the UK lockdown to see how and where people were accessing news and information about Covid-19. The results showed that Northern Irish people accessed news about Covid-19 more often than those in England, Scottland or Wales. This could be accredited to the more varied news sources readily available to them, such as BBC, ITV, UTV and RTE. However, Northern Irish people still found it hard to know what information about Covid-19 was real or fake.  


In response to this, Ofcom released a list of resources to help people tell the difference between information and disinformation regarding the pandemic. Those resources help people to improve their media literacy, which is especially important now more than ever. At the end of the piece, Lennon calls out for readers to contact Ofcoms “Making Sense of Media” email address to learn more about their campaign, which even further promotes media literacy. 


Our final piece of reading was an academic journal, “News media literacy, perceptions of bias, and interpretation of news” by Melissa Tully, Emily K Vraga and Anne-Bennett Smithson. In the journal, they ask to what extent people understand their own personal biases when picking a news source and how people find bias in news. They carried out their research by interviewing 22 participants. While the sample size was small, it was also very diverse, with a large range in age, race and political beliefs.  


During the interview, the participants were given two articles about the same topic from two different publishers. One news source leaned more to the left, while the other leaned more to the right. After reading the two articles, the participants were asked about media literacy and bias in their day to day lives. 


They found that their participants were very aware of their own biases, some admitting that even though they’ve been educated on media literacy, they’ll tend to stick to the news sources that confirm their beliefs. When it came to detecting bias in the news, some participants spoke about little signs, like an article about women being written by a man. 


I found the journal very interesting considering the participants knew what effect their own biases had on their choice of news sources, but continued using their biases anyways. 


the word "news" spelled out with copies of the word "fake"
Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay


Reference list: 

“Digital Media Companies Found Lacking in Helping Users Understand The Online Environment” by Dr. Niamh Kirk, Media Literacy Ireland: https://www.medialiteracyireland.ie/news/digital-media-companies-found-lacking-in-helping-users-understand-the-online-environment 

“Ofcom research: Nearly half of people across the UK nations have come across false or misleading information about Covid-19" by Rebecca Lennon: https://www.medialiteracyireland.ie/news/ofcom-research-nearly-half-of-people-across-the-uk-nations-have-come-across-false-or-misleading-information-about-covid-19 

“News media literacy, perceptions of bias, and interpretation of news” by Melissa Tully, Emily K Vraga and Anne-Bennett Smithson, Journalism 2020, Vol. 21(2) 209 –226 

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