Abstract
Calls to teach media literacy to counter misinformation have grown worldwide since the political upheavals in the United Kingdom and United States in 2016. Programmes teaching elements of media and information literacy, news literacy and digital literacy have expanded in many countries and calls for their introduction have been widespread around the world. While existing literature does show that teaching of broad media literacy can provide “positive effects” for students, current research provides limited evidence that traditional media literacy substantially reduces susceptibility to misinformation. Based on an examination of misinformation and a theorisation of news literacy put forward in 2020, I propose a theory of misinformation literacy grounded in knowledge and skills of six key aspects of mis/disinformation: context, content, creation, circulation, consumption and consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
Dr Sahite Gaye, Wallace Gichunge, Dr Chido Onumah, Cornia Pretorius and Dr Anya Schiffrin
- 2.
Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda
- 3.
Interviews with my colleague Dr Sahite Gaye May 2020
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Cunliffe-Jones, P. (2023). Re-thinking Media Literacy to Counter Misinformation. In: Fowler-Watt, K., McDougall, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Media Misinformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11976-7_14
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