Todd Hull is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. His research takes place at the intersection of EFL pedagogy and Critical Media Theory. Email: toddhull@hufs.ac.kr

 

Introduction

Content-based instruction (CBI) promotes proficiency in a foreign language by giving learners practice using the target language in authentic communication through engaging with academic topics in a way that is “context driven, so that education in a second or foreign language can be successful.” (McDougald, 2016). In CBI students do not explicitly focus on form by practicing specific language points like grammar and spelling. Instead they are presented with academic material in the target language and improve their ability in the target language by successfully negotiating meaning in the material presented without the traditional focus on form. Emblematic of the literature on the efficacy of CBI is a comprehensive study of Australian CBI programs by Simone Smala (2013) that found them decidedly beneficial.

Media literacy, being able to assess the accuracy and relevance of media stories, is an important aspect of living in society affecting decision making around issues from the environment to health to voting in elections. Defining media literacy is a crucial first step towards attaining media literacy. A group focusing on media literacy met at the Aspen Institute in 1992 and adopted a definition of media literacy as “the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information for specific outcomes.” (Aufderheide & Firestone, 1993) Subsequent scholars such as Allison Butler have given a deeper definition and drawn a distinction between media literacy and critical media literacy. Butler states that critical media literacy delves into “ownership, production, and distribution… How did that content get to us? Looking at the structures of power behind the scenes and disentangling the behind the scenes from the front of the scenes.” (Butler, 2022)

 

Critical media literacy

Critical media literacy is a productive approach to analyzing media stories. News stories cannot be knowledgably consumed without knowing two major aspects that most affect which stories appear on news media outlets and how they are presented: ownership and funding. Who owns a media outlet? And which advertisers or other sources provide its financial support? Those are two key questions that critical media literacy addresses that traditional media literacy does not. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988/2002) laid much of the foundation for critical media literacy in their seminal book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. They lay out five filters that a news story and the journalists involved in producing it go through from its inception to its final appearance in a news outlet. Due to the effect of those filters, the final product is shaped according to the influence of each one which very often results in reporting that does not reflect the most important aspects of the original events it set out to cover. This significantly affects its usefulness to news consumers. Scholars like Butler argue that media literacy should be critical media literacy.

This article will briefly describe the first two filters laid out by Herman and Chomsky and how they give a deeper insight to media stories than media literacy as defined by the Aspen Institute group and its successors. It will then look at parts of season five of HBO’s serial, The Wire, which creator, David Simon intended as a critique of the media. Students in CBI contexts can be introduced to the tenets of critical media literacy and then can assess Simon’s critique to determine if it constitutes a critical media literacy critique. This will both further learners’ acquisition of a foreign language and sharpen their skills of media analysis.

 

The filters: Media ownership and funding

The first of Herman and Chomsky’s filters that a news story has to go through on its way to its final form is media ownership. Media outlets are subject to powerful pressures to conform to the profit goals of their parent corporations. Emblematic of the power of media ownership over an outlet was the American television station, MSNBC, owned by weapons manufacturer, General Electric between 2003 and 2011. Virtually all of the guests on its news programs with segments on the 2003 American attack on Iraq advocated for continued military action against the country. When the station’s Phil Donahue gave equal time to voices questioning the invasion, he was summarily fired, for the explicit reason that he was airing views which conflicted with General Electric’s goals to maintain profits from weapons manufacturing. (Democracy Now, 2013) Individual owners like Rupert Murdoch also exercise control over news content of the outlets they own.

The second major filter is advertising, which funds most commercial media outlets. The journalist, Peter Osbourne acrimoniously parted ways with the British newspaper, The Telegraph after it refused to publish the results of his investigative reporting into money laundering by Britain’s largest bank, HSBC. He said that an editor of the paper told him directly that HSBC was “the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.” (Osborne, 2015). The newspaper’s cancellation of Osbourn’s story is direct evidence of the direct influence of advertisers over media content in outlets that rely heavily on advertising revenue. Most journalists do not have such acrimonious and public partings with their former employers. Instead, they learn to internalize what their editors will and will not allow within the confines of advertising and automatically restrict their reporting accordingly, resulting in an unseen culture of self-censorship that shapes reporting under the surface of media coverage. Reporters who have internalized what editors want don’t even pitch stories which they know their editors will reject out of hand. (MacLeod, 2019) Some journalists who cannot live in that media ecosystem move to independent outlets where they can work free from the confines of funding from corporate advertising. Some leave the field altogether. The thread that unites these interactions between journalists and major commercial media outlets is advertiser-related content restriction.

 

The Wire and the media

HBO’s television serial, The Wire set out to undertake a critique of the media in its fifth and final season with a fictional portrayal of the newsroom of the newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. The show’s creator, David Simon intends to critique the media through dramatizing various aspects of the newsroom that he sees as problematic and in need of scrutiny, “which stories get covered and which don’t.” (O’Rourke 2006). The main story of season five revolves around a reporter who fakes a story about a serial killer targeting the homeless. Another story the newspaper covers is a link between a politician and a drug dealer. The same reporter who faked the story of the serial killer also distorts the details of a traumatic incident suffered by an Iraq war veteran, painting an inaccurate portrait of the incident for dramatic effect in order to sell more papers and gain personal fame. These incidents are mixed with stories that the show portrays as worthy of reporting on since they represent what the show sees as real problems. For example, there is a story of a scholarship fund set up in honor of a deceased person. The fund is drained by a criminal posing as a sister of the deceased.

In addition to direct portrayals of newsroom drama, Simon states that he has also done a “meta” critique, saying in a public talk that “the whole season of The Wire is about what didn’t happen. This is why I am the king of meta.” (Simon 2008). Here Simon points to things dramatized in the show that were not reported by the newspaper. This, he says, is the crux of his critique—what happened in the city that the paper did not cover. Some things dramatized in the show that did not appear in the paper were: gubernatorial candidates manipulating crime statistics in their favor; school test scores being misreported to take pressure off the government; drug dealing on the streets of the city; and, most importantly for Simon, the absence in the paper’s reporting of the murder of one of the city’s major drug dealers. These are the stories that Simon deemed of utmost importance, but were not covered by the paper.

 

Classroom applications

How can instructors incorporate critical medial literacy into their classrooms? Before specifically addressing The Wire or any other media output that students may analyze, learners first gain an understanding of critical medial literacy. After they understand critical media literacy, they can look at real world news stories and apply critical media literacy to understanding them. They would then apply that knowledge to an assessment of The Wire. Students would be presented with a summary of Herman and Chomsky’s filter-critique of the media and some accompanying comprehension questions to facilitate their understanding of the model. They would then be given examples of news stories and how they were actually reported in the media. Did the large, commercial, legacy media outlets report the story widely or not? Students would do exercises such as comparing two incidents from the year 2021 in the USA: 1) a small-time criminal was caught on tape brazenly stealing from a Walgreens pharmacy. It was near the top of the headlines in over 300 large media outlets; and 2) The Walgreens corporation was convicted of systematic wage theft from its employees in the amount of millions of dollars over multiple years. That story was reported by only one major media outlet. (Keehner 2021) They would be asked which of those stories would be preferred by large corporate media outlets and why. Which of those stories might appease or anger corporate owners and advertisers? Why did one story appear in a large number of major commercial media outlets and the other in almost none? Asking and answering those questions constitutes a critique of the media from a critical medial literacy perspective. An archive of stories that were unreported or underreported in the large commercial media can be found on the Project Censored website.

After analyzing stories for which ones would be favored and disfavored by corporate-owned and/or advertiser-funded media outlets, students would evaluate Simon’s critique in light of Herman and Chomsky’s first two filters: corporate ownership of media outlets affecting which stories get told and which don’t; and the effect of advertising money on which stories are and are not covered. Students would be tasked with evaluating whether or not the stories seen as important by Simon would anger the paper’s corporate owners and corporate advertisers. For example, students could compare a story about a drug dealer being killed and a story about a corporation being given tax breaks for a development project that take tax money away from schools. Which one would be favored by a corporate-owned or corporate advertising-funded media outlet? Would the story in The Wire about a smalltime criminal who swindles money from a scholarship fund be favored or disfavored by corporate owners and advertisers? How about the story of the link between a politician and the drug dealer? Students would also analyze the scenarios dramatized by Simon which he thought should have been front and center in the paper’s coverage but were not: gubernatorial candidates manipulating crime statistics; the misreporting of school test scores; drug dealing on the streets of the city; and the murder of one of the city’s major drug dealers. Students would consider whether any of those stories would reflect negatively on large corporations or corporate advertisers not only for the newspaper in The Wire, but for real world media outlets owned by large corporations and/or dependent on corporate advertising revenues by applying Herman and Chomsky’s filters.

 

Critical media literacy in the CBI classroom

Instructors can choose how to fit this analysis into their classrooms and how to integrate it into their language teaching curricula. Learners in a CBI classroom would be given material outlining media literacy and critical medial literacy accompanied by comprehension questions to focus their attention and foster comprehension of the concepts. This is the CBI component of engaging with academic topics. After students gain a basic understanding of critical media literacy, they can then analyze, using Herman and Chomsky’s filters, the stories mentioned above which Simon states were newsworthy but not covered by the newspaper in The Wire. A specific example of a classroom activity is one in which students consider the lack of coverage in the show’s newspaper of story of the murder of the major drug dealer. Simon says that failing to cover a story like that constitutes a major journalistic dereliction of duty. And by highlighting that lack of coverage, Simon says he is critiquing the media. Students could analyze Simon’s critique by assessing whether a story about a drug dealer would be favored or disfavored by corporate-owned and/or corporate advertiser-funded media. Does a story about a drug dealer say anything about corporations who own and fund a media outlet that would displease them and jeopardize future funding? According to Herman and Chomsky’s model, no. According to that model, stories about drug dealers are exactly what corporate owners and funders desire because those stories do not include anything that might reflect badly on them. And criticizing their absence in the newspaper of the show is exactly what corporate owners and funders want. Therefore under the rubric of critical media literacy, Simon’s critique of the media is not a critique but rather its opposite, a call for the coverage of stories that have no relation to corporate funders and owners, stories that would appease rather than anger those entities, stories that preserve corporate funding streams to media outlets. This type of classroom analysis gives students practical experience with critical media literacy by applying Herman and Chomsky’s filters to news stories.

After completing their analyses of specific stories from the show, learners could then write a short paragraph stating whether or not Simon’s critique of the media was substantive and relevant according to the definition of critical media literacy, which requires looking behind the scenes to which entities own a media outlet and which entities fund it. This is the writing practice component of the lesson, and instructors can choose writing formats that fit best with the course they are teaching. After students have written their paragraphs, they discuss their ideas with classmates. This constitutes the all-important speaking component that gives oral practice in the target language. The student who is listening to the ideas of their partner takes notes, which gives communicative listening practice by requiring that they understand the ideas of their partner, and also writing practice as they write notes on their interlocutor’s ideas. After both partners have presented their ideas and taken notes on each other’s ideas, they can discuss and debate their respective positions, which gives further speaking practice following the communicative approach by having learners engage in authentic, meaning-focused communication. It is exercises like this that engage with academic through authentic communication that comprise a CBI classroom.

 

Critical media literacy in other learning contexts

In addition to the CBI classroom, language practice and critical media literacy can be combined in a range of learning environments with a variety of formats, goals, and objectives. In writing classes, learners can do writing assignments focusing on critical media literacy according to the types of writing that the goals of the course set out to practice. Courses focusing on reading can present passages that analyze news stories from the perspective of critical media literacy. Learners can practice skills such as skimming, scanning, and close reading of those passages. Courses that have specific listening components can use critical media literacy related material as their listening passages. Where appropriate, learners could listen to news stories and then after having done the listening-related practice assigned by the instructor, they would address the stories from a critical media literacy perspective. Dictogloss, where learners listen to a passage and try to reconstruct it, would be particularly useful in learning environments that include listening components. Discussions of the passages reconstructed through Dictogloss would add speaking practice to the listening practice. In presentation classes, learners could base presentations around actual examples of published news stories from a critical media literacy perspective. Debate classes could include components which center around critical media literacy. Even in courses where instructors are constrained by a grammar-focused curriculum, teachers can adapt or craft passages analyzing news stories through the lens of critical media literacy that practice the grammar structures required to be covered in the course.

 

Conclusion

Content-based instruction, where learners practice the target language by engaging with material that is not explicitly designed to focus on specific language points such as grammar practice, is a useful and research-backed method of improving language skills in classrooms using the communicative approach to language teaching. Fostering media literacy through acquiring critical media literacy in the CBI classroom not only gives learners practice using the target language in authentic, real-world communication but also equips them with the real-world skill of analyzing media stories they are exposed to in their daily lives that can give them a perspective on world events and inform their lives and decisions. Critical media literacy is particularly suited to the CBI classroom but can be combined in a variety of learning environments from courses that focus on reading, listening, writing, and speaking to more specialized classes such as debate and presentation, and can even be used in courses that focus on practicing specific grammar points. Teaching and learning about critical media literacy is something that most all teachers and students in most all learning environments can profit from.

 

References

Aufderheide, P. & Firestone, A. (1993). Media Literacy. A Report of the National Leadership Conference on Media Literacy. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED365294

Butler, A. (2022, November 10). Why Critical Media Literacy Matters: Dr. Allison Butler Talks Digital Tech and News Consumption in Higher Education. The Inquirer. https://www.dvcinquirer.com/af/2022/11/10/why-critical-media-literacy-matters-dr-alison-butler-talks-digital-tech-and-news-consumption-in-higher-education/

Democracy Now (2013, March 21). Phil Donahue on His 2003 Firing From MSNBC, When Liberal Network Couldn't Tolerate Antiwar Voices. https://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/21/phil_donahue_on_his_2003_firing

Herman, E.S., & Chomsky, N. 1988 (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Keehner, S. (2021, July 21). Shoplifting Is Big News; Stealing Millions From Workers Is Not. https://fair.org/home/shoplifting-is-big-news-stealing-millions-from-workers-is-not/

MacLeod, A. (2019). Introduction: Propaganda in the Information Age. In A. MacLeod (Ed.) Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, 1-11. New York, NY: Routledge.

McDougald, J.S. (2016). CLIL Approaches in Education: Opportunities, Challenges, or Threats? Latin American Journal of Content and Language Integrated Learning, 9 (2), 253-266.

O’Rourke, M. (2006, December 1). Behind The Wire: David Simon on where the show goes next. Slate. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/12/interviewing-the-man-behind-the-wire.html

Osborne, P. (2015, February 17). Why I have resigned from the Telegraph. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph/

Simon, D. (2008, March 21). The Wire creator David Simon: Journalists & the Public Square. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8E8xBXFLKE&t=1654s

Smala, S. (2013). Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) pedagogies in Queensland. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, 8 (3), 194–205.

 

Please check the Pilgrims f2f courses at Pilgrims website.

Please check the Pilgrims online courses at Pilgrims website.