Media education just a sticking plaster
Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Science column in The Guardian is worth the Saturday cover price alone, has directed his Twitter followers to a study on the effectiveness of educating youth on how to read health messages in the media. Fellow Twitterer Tim Ireland asks, ‘Why just health?’
This call to elevate the much maligned teaching of media studies in schools is all very well, but perhaps we should be addressing the more serious issue of why anyone should consider such education necessary. And why it should be addressed only at youth, as if all older people are health experts when they clearly are not.
Health is important and scare stories are dangerous. Earlier this month the Sunday Express ran ‘JAB “AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER”’ large on its front page. Ben Goldacre tracked down the expert who had ‘exclusively’ spoken to the Sunday Express and discovered the story was ‘fantasy’, disowned by the quoted expert who had complained to the Press Complaints Commission (the newspapers’ sham regulator).
Yet it is hard to see how media education can solve this, unless we teach the kids to assume all quotes from experts have been fabricated.
The answer is not that we should learn not believe anything the newspapers tell us. The answer is that the media must clean up its act.
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