Media is everywhere—selling products, presenting ideas, and appealing to our emotions. With messages all around us, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between how media describe us and who we really are.
When young people think critically about media messages, they can make informed decisions and by creating their own media they can learn to use one of the world’s most powerful tools.
Media Literacy programs can teach children and young people to:
- Develop critical thinking skills.
- Understand how media messages shape our culture and society.
- Identify target marketing strategies.
- Recognize what the media maker wants us to believe or do.
- Name the techniques of persuasion used.
- Recognize bias, spin, misinformation, and lies.
- Discover the parts of the story that are not being told.
- Evaluate media messages based on our own experiences, skills, beliefs, and values.
- Create and distribute our own media messages.
- Advocate for a changed media system.