Understanding News and Media Literacy
Keywords: News, Media, News Literacy, Media Literacy
Introduction
Today, news literacy is becoming increasingly important with the overwhelming amount of sources and platforms available to consumers. Tully et al. (2021) define news literacy as “knowledge of the personal and social processes by which news is produced, distributed, and consumed, and skills that allow users some control over these processes” (p. 1593). They go on to say that the concept of news literacy needs more precise scholarly treatment and that there is still work to be done before it can become a distinct concept with reliable and valid measures (Tully et al., 2021). Specifically, there is much overlap with other related concepts, such as media literacy.
Media Literacy
Media literacy is a close neighboring concept of news literacy and the similarities and differences between them can be ambiguous. Fleming (2013) said that “generally speaking, to be media literate means a person has developed the ability to access, evaluate, analyze, and create media messages” (p. 148). This is a very broad definition and we can see from these two definitions that news literacy captures a much narrower scope of literacy. Fleming (2013) went on to say that within media literacy there needs to be a “specialized category” for news literacy (p. 148). Similar to news literacy, there remains ambiguity around the concept of media literacy, mainly due to the vast variety of definitions used to describe the concept in the past (Potter & Thai, 2019).
Differences
As mentioned above, one of the key differences between these concepts is the scope of each. Media literacy broadly applies to media messages, while news literacy looks specifically at news and the knowledge and skills surrounding it. According to our definitions above, news literacy would fall into a subcategory within media literacy. News literacy captures the knowledge and processes surrounding news specifically. News being a type of media, it only makes sense that news literacy would be a part of media literacy. This difference is important to highlight because further clarification behind the meanings of these concepts will help later researchers distinguish between the two.
Another difference between these concepts is the emphasis placed on each. With news literacy, emphasis is placed on distinguishing news from opinion, verifying vs asserting, and the evaluation of evidence, while media literacy often includes emphasis on the creation of media (Fleming, 2013). From our definition of news literacy, there is no emphasis placed on the actual creation of news; just the knowledge and skills surrounding it.
Similarities
Just as with the differences, the similarities of these two concepts are much easier to see when you compare them side by side. One similarity between them is that they both involve knowledge and skills. Potter and Thai (2019) looked to find the different definitions of media literacy and other related concepts and they found that from all the definitions of media literacy the two most common components were knowledge and skills. As we can see above, Tully et al. (2021) included knowledge and skills into their definition of news literacy.
Conclusion
The concepts of news literacy and media literacy are closely related. As we established above, the scope of media literacy encompasses much more than that of news literacy. Further, news literacy actually fits within the broader concept of media literacy. We have seen that media literacy often includes an emphasis on media creation, which is not present in news literacy, which focuses more on the knowledge and skills surrounding news. Precise conceptualization of these concepts is important. Inconsistency in definitions and conceptualizations has the risk of taking away the efficacy of the research that uses these concepts. Therefore, further developing these into distinct concepts remains important.
This comparison helped improve my understanding of these concepts immensely. After reviewing the literature, the similarities and differences are much more clear. Particularly, it helped in seeing that news literacy is much narrower than media literacy. Once I came to the realization that news literacy is a distinct part of media literacy, it made comparing and thinking about the two concepts much easier.
References
Fleming, J. (2013). Media literacy, news literacy, or news appreciation? A case study of the news literacy program at Stony Brook University. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 69(2), 146–165. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077695813517885
Potter, W. J., & Thai, C. L. (2019). Reviewing media literacy intervention studies for validity. Review of Communication Research, 7, 38–66. https://doi.org/10.12840/issn.2255-4165.018
Tully, M., Maksl, A., Ashley, S., Vraga, E. K., & Craft, S. (2021). Defining and Conceptualizing News literacy. Journalism, 23(8), 1589–1606. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849211005888
