Last month, the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) introduced its annual conference by announcing, “Media literacy has many connections with social justice; in fact, many would say that media literacy is social justice.” Just how might that be the case? Through “critical media literacy,” which the NAMLE defines as a tool to understand “the relationships between media, information, and power.” Critical media literacy (CML), it turns out, plays an important role in media literacy education—and that’s not a good sign.
At the conference, critical media literacy was ubiquitous. It was referenced in the descriptions of 17 presentations. Far from an obscure organization hosting a marginal conference, NAMLE publishes its own academic journal, boasts of being the “leading nonprofit membership organization” advocating for media literacy education, and receives financial backing from TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon Studios, and the State Department.
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