Can News Literacy activities develop Critical Media Deconstruction Skills?

Today’s media landscape is saturated with news and information produced by an ever-growing variety of people and institutions, leading to the broadening of the notion of "news", which can no longer be assumed to be produced only by professional journalists [2]. This overabundance of information, coupled with the rise of online misinformation and disinformation [3], highlights the need for media literacy, and more specifically news literacy (NL), providing individuals with “skills and knowledge required to navigate the complex news and information environment of the twenty-first century” [4, p. 1036]. However, there seems to be a lack of consensus on the definition of NL, or on how it should be taught [5]. A common conception of News Literacy focuses on skills required to assess the veracity and reliability of information [5], [6], and corresponds to pedagogies that seek to develop participants’ understanding of journalistic work (e.g. fact-checking) often by having them play the role of journalists and create news contents [7]. This conception may implicitly promote a vision of media as being inherently true or false, and of news literacy as a matter of distinguishing falsehoods from truth. Another conception of News Literacy focuses on critical questioning of media [2]. This conception has its roots in the Media Literacy movement, and is based on the understanding that all media are representations of a socially constructed reality [8]. Its pedagogical approach aims to develop participants' ability to deconstruct news media by using an array of perspectives rooted in different “core concepts” (e.g. production, purpose, audience, representation) [9], [10]. This paper examines whether these two approaches are, or can be, congruent. We present the design and results of a pilot evaluation of NL activities initiated by the Lille School of Journalism in French high schools. Based on a content analysis of the documents describing the general framework and pedagogy of these activities, we identified their intended learning outcomes. Following the first conception of NL mentioned above, they are essentially aimed at fostering content creation, technical skill development and an understanding of fact-checking processes that ensure the reliability of information. We then asked whether these activities could develop participants' abilities to deconstruct media according to different perspectives (second conception of NL mentioned above). We developed an evaluation protocol centered on the critical deconstruction of news media, which we implemented as a pre-test and a post-test to a one-week NL workshop with 10 participants (aged 11-17). Results show that the workshop seemed to develop participants’ abilities matching its objectives: participants made progress in the way they described the technical properties of media, their contents, their authors, and authors’ intentions. However, participants struggled to grasp the economic and social context of media production, but also to identify the target audiences, potential effects, and modes of circulation of media, as well as the representations and values they convey. Future work will aim to replicate this pilot assessment, and to experiment with alternative versions of the NL activities that would better support the development of these essential skills