SUMMARY
- Media and digital literacy lessons in schools emerged as one of the top priorities of the censorship industry under the previous administration, promoted by the US federal government as a means to combat disinformation both domestically and around the world.
- A labyrinth of nonprofits and private ed-tech companies continue to push media and digital literacy K12 curricula at the state level.
- The curricula are designed to achieve the censorship industry’s goal of “prebunking” or “psychologically inoculating” the public against disfavored narratives, while also serving as a conduit for educators to reintroduce partisan ideas such as critical race theory back into schools.
- An researcher working for Media Literacy Now, the largest grassroots nonprofit campaigning in states, has proposed an intersection “between critical race theory and news literacy.”
- Other academics have called for “critical race media literacy” to address “visual microaggressions” and to contest “white supremacist project across generations.”
The promotion of media and digital literacy lessons in schools has emerged as one of the key priorities of the censorship industry as it seeks to maintain its influence following the loss of US federal support for online censorship. Alongside foreign censorship regimes like the EU’s Digital Services Act, media and digital literacy lessons in schools, which aim to “psychologically inoculate” children against so-called misinformation and disinformation, allow the censorship industry to continue to deploy and refine its information-control techniques.
The “psychological inoculation” or “pre-bunking” technique (see previous FFO reports on the subject) refers to the goal of priming the public to reject disfavored narratives and disfavored information by deliberately exposing them to “weakened” versions of the narrative(s) in question. Institutes ranging from Cambridge University in the UK to Latin American focused “digital democracy” NGOs tout the success of pre-bunking in moving public opinion against disfavored narratives.
Media and digital literacy lessons in schools have been presented by counter-disinformation outfits like BBC Media Action and Microsoft’s (now-shuttered) Defending Democracy program as critical measures in the fight against disfavored online narratives.
FFO research has found that media literacy educators also hope to use the field to reintroduce critical race theory into schools, a highly partisan and ideological field that has been banned in classrooms in several states.
- Newsela, an ed-tech startup, has marketed itself as a teaching resource to help kids discern what they should trust on the internet. Undercover journalists from Accuracy in Media found that teachers were hoping to use Newsela to inject partisan material such as the 1619 Project into classrooms and teaching assignments.
- The American Library Association (ALA) promotes “media literacy for justice” for educators and librarians as one of its books.
- The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization known for its left-wing race politics, promotes a “digital literacy” curriculum” for K-12 schools that is recommended by California’s department of education.
- The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) has curated race, equity, and social justice collections for educators, students, and parents.
The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)
NAMLE merits special attention – as previous FFO reports revealed, it is one of the most influential organizations promoting media literacy curricula in multiple states, and was promoted at the international level by the US Department of State under the previous administration.
NAMLE’s 2024 summit also featured former DHS disinformation governance board head Nina Jankowicz, and presented media literacy as a “psychological inoculation” technique:
NAMLE’s 2024 summit with Arizona State University featured Nina Jankowicz, former head of DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board. Her presence is a signal: the NAMLE network is not merely educational—it is structurally tied to the federal disinformation-governance apparatus.
At the summit, ASU’s Alan Arkatov urged participants to “take off the gloves” and “vaccinate the public” against disinformation—public-health metaphors repurposed for information control. They echo the language of “psychological inoculation,” used by other digital literacy advocates such as Google Jigsaw, Microsoft, and BBC Media Action.
The nonprofit’s website reveals that promoting media literacy and critical race theory go hand-in-hand. NAMLE’s website includes a page listing “Race, Equity, and Social Justice Resources” for educators.
Among the resources is an article on “teaching in the midst of mass protests for Black Lives,” under a section titled “Black Lives Matter.”
NAMLE also recommends the far-left Zinn Education Project’s lessons on the history of policing in the US, which argues that American policing arose from the need to “control the labor of poor and enslaved people,” and describes the deadly summer 2020 riots as “Black resistance” against “white supremacy.”
Another resource recommends material to “support transgender and non-binary children.”
Media Literacy Now
Media Literacy Now is another nationwide organization campaigning for media and digital literacy lessons in schools, one that received funding from the Biden administration. As FFO previously revealed, MLN is also aligned with the effort to bring critical race theory back to schools.
A Pennsylvania-based MLN state researcher, R. Alan Berry, explicitly linked media-literacy advocacy with the fight to protect critical race theory (CRT) in school curricula. Berry contributed a chapter to an academic book from Routledge published in 2022, titled Critical Race Media Literacy: Themes and Strategies for Media Education.
Fake news has become a hot topic in both the literature and the classroom. What scholars and educators have failed to acknowledge to date, however, is the extent to which fake news is a part of the contemporary news landscape already. One especially relevant and egregious case is how race has been consistently misrepresented in the news media with the news conveying stereotypical representations and narratives for decades, if not centuries. However, with the recent focus on misinformation and fake news, most contemporary news literacy programs do not cover issues of race in the mainstream news media. Instead, they teach textual analysis and evaluation skills to detect fake news and situate fake news outside the realm of mainstream media, failing to connect news media and race. This chapter proposes the creation of a media education program that will create an intersection between critical race theory, news literacy, and fake news. We will first provide a working conceptualization of fake news that acknowledges the issues surrounding racial representation. Then, we will introduce some pedagogical strategies educators can implement to use fake news to teach about race and media.
MLN’s ties to race-radicals on the progressive left don’t end there. It also has ties to the Southern Poverty Law Center, known for routinely denouncing mainstream conservatives as racists and purveyors of hate speech. MLN’s founder gave comments to the magazine of Learning for Justice, SPLC’s education initiative, in October 2021.
SPLC, which quoted the founder favorably, filed the story under the tag “dismantling white supremacy.”
As FFO has previously highlighted, the SPLC’s Learning for Justice initiative itself provides a media literacy curriculum for use in K12 schools — one officially recommended by California’s department of education.
Media Literacy And Critical Race Theory – a Longstanding Alliance
Scholars have long argued that media literacy serves as a method to address intersections of race, gender, and class for social justice.
Tara Yosso, has pioneered the idea of “critical race media literacy in her 2002 work, in which she connected critical literacy to challenge discourses about Chicanas/os in entertainment media.
One of Yosso’s papers, “Critical Race Media Literacy for These Urgent Times,” identified a need to address “visual microaggressions” and to have sustained attention for “contestations of the White supremacist project across generations.”
In 2019, Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share wrote the Critical Media Literacy Guide, which provides a theoretical framework and practical applications for educators and educational programs to put “critical media literacy” into action.
Brill Publishing said of the book, “The Critical Media Literacy Guide is a powerful resource to analyze and challenge representations and narratives of multiple forms of identity, privilege, and oppression. Since the struggle for social justice and democracy require new theories and pedagogies to maneuver the constantly changing terrain, this book is essential for all educators.”
Jayne edited a 2022 volume, Critical Race Media Literacy: Themes and Strategies for Media Education. The book’s topics include news literacy, children’s literature, Black political movements, media protests, and ethnic rock—Critical Race Media Literacy addresses these topics within existing media literacy contexts to enhance media literacy scholarship and educational pedagogy.
Darnel Degand, a professor at the University of California Davis, has written about the need for “critical race media literacy,” which discusses how this can be taught in college classes.
What this shows is that the use of media and digital literacy curricula as a vehicle for “counter-disinformation” efforts and “pre-bunking” is relatively recent development. Its history as a vector for critical race theory stretches back much longer.
