The struggle over news literacy: can we include political economic contexts in the emerging field of news literacy?

7/26/2019 The struggle over news literacy: can we include political economic contexts in the emerging field of news literacy?

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The struggle over news literacy:

can we include political economic

contexts in the emerging feld

of news literacy?

Seth Ashley, Boise State University

ABSTRACT: Surging in popularity, news literacy has tend-ed to centre on an understanding of journalistic contentand its importance for preserving democratic life. Whattypically receive less attention are the political, economicand cultural contexts in which news is produced. A focus

on content is warranted, but examination of the institu-tions and structure of news media systems also is essen-tial for developing a full appreciation of the strengthsand weaknesses of news content. Drawing on literaturein media literacy, political economy of media, and mediasociology, this paper argues for a context-centred ap-proach to the critical analysis of news content as well asits production and consumption.

Te nascent domain o news literacy has tended to centre on an understandingo journalistic content and its importance or preserving democratic lie. When

viewed in isolation, news literacy is about exporting the journalistic epistemol-ogy to ordinary citizens struggling to navigate daily lie: checking acts, evaluat-ing sources, examining evidence.

Considering the messiness o the digital media landscape, who wouldnt want to traincitizens in the ways o the journalist? Te inormation-gathering skills practiced by hard-nosed reporters are vital in the digital age and are surely in need o widespread dissemina-tion. Citizens are better poised to navigate the media landscape in general and the newslandscape in particular with these tools o thought and analysis.

But literacy means more than this. Particularly when news literacy is considered in thecontext o longstanding domains o media literacy and civic literacy, it becomes clear thatcritical analysis o the inormation environment requires a deeper understanding o thecontexts in which news is produced. Te purpose o this article is to advocate or a critical,contextual approach to news literacy that can supplement the increasingly popular con-tent-based approach. Drawing on literature in critical media literacy, political economy omedia, and media sociology, this article reviews the connections that must be made andthe contexts that must be considered in order to critically analyze news content as well asits production and consumption.

Tis is not a new question in the context o media literacy, where scholars have long de-bated the role o political, economic and social contexts in media education (see Hobbs1998; Lewis and Jhally 1998; Kellner and Share 2005). News literacy thus ar has tended tobe viewed as an isolated educational endeavour, where a ew early adopters and powerulunders have gained significant traction with their particular approach. For the field onews literacy to gain the widespread acceptance it seeks and deserves, the field must beconsidered in the context o the umbrella disciple o media literacy. It is important to situ-ate this burgeoning area in terms o existing academic literature and debate.

Tere are many open questions about how to define and teach news literacy, and thisarticle ocuses on the topic o political, economic and social contexts. Some educators andpractitioners have dismissed or neglected these connections (see Jolly 2014; Key Conceptso News Literacy 2015; Kovach and Rosenstiel 2010), but we must have an honest and openconsideration o the role o contexts i news literacy is going to legitimise itsel as an areaworthy o serious study and attention. A decision to omit these contexts rom considera-tion is just as value-laden as a decision to include them, so we need to account or thesedifferent values and consider their role in creating an inormed and engaged citizenry,which is surely our broadly shared goal.

As Lewis and Jhally wrote regarding media literacy in 1998:we are advocating a view that recognizes that the world is always made by someone,

and a decision to tolerate the status quo is as political as a more overtly radical act (Lewisand Jhally 1998, 119).

Accepting the world as it is runs contrary to the purpose o critical thought, which is toquestion and challenge and - when necessary - to change. It is a undamental problem withour depoliticized cultures i we pretend to discuss and understand news media messageswithout discussing the contexts and structures that produce them. Indeed, tolerating thestatus quo - or worse, altogether ignoring that there is a status quo - is a ailure to recognizea undamental truth about reality and a missed opportunity to engage our students in theworld they seek to know.


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What the content-centred approach misses

In their 2010 book Blur: How to Know Whats rue in the Age of Information Overload,journalism populists Bill Kovach and om Rosenstiel call or the introduction o civic andnews literacy into middle and high school curricula in order to improve the skills o citi-zens. Tey go out o their way to distinguish news literacy rom media literacy, dismissingan entire discipline in one ell swoop:

"And by news literacy, we mean something different rom media literacy, a curricu-lum developed mostly rom a lef-leaning perspective that teaches how the media in allits orms manipulates us on behal o commercial and establishment interests. By newsliteracy, we mean the ski lls o how to read the news - the discipline o skeptical know-

ing." (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2010, 202)Tis raming is rustrating or many reasons. First o all, this is a undamental misunder-

standing o media literacy, which seeks broadly to empower individuals to question mediacontent and institutions based on a holistic understanding o the media landscape. Medialiteracy education aims to make individuals aware o their media environments and in-crease critical thinking about medias constructions o reality. Broadly, media literacy canbe defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and communicate a variety o mediamessages (Auderheide and Firestone 1993; Hobbs 2008). More to the point, Christ andPotter (1998) note that media literacy is more than just the development o certain skills,but also the acquisition o knowledge structures, especially about the media industries,general content patterns, and a broad view o effects (8). o ignore these contexts is to seeonly part o the picture.

Kovach and Rosenstiel take a content-centred approach to news literacy as they empha-size the skills o how to read the news. In their book, they encourage a skeptical way o

knowing based on six questions:"What kind o content am I encountering?

Is the inormation complete; and i not, what is missing?

Who or what are the sources, and why should I believe them?

What evidence is presented, and how was it tested or vetted?

What might be an alternative explanation or understanding?

Am I learning what I need to?" (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2010, 32)

o be clear, these are great questions, and a great starting point. In Blur, the authors buildon their previous work in Te Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know andthe Public Should Expect(2007), which also aims to transer to the public the knowledgeand skills possessed by good journalists to aid understanding o news messages. Te pathorward or news literacy is to pair these skills and tools embodied in the content-centredapproach with the broader contexts that have long been central to media literacy educa-

tion.For most people, news media can offer a key connection to civic lie. Anyone who cares

about news literacy surely believes in the potential o news to help meet the needs o ademocratic society. But it is no secret that news media occasionally miss the mark andprovide incomplete or inaccurate portrayals. Te skeptical way o knowing is a goodstart but is not sufficient or identiying systemic weaknesses and shortcomings. Any U.S.election cycle demonstrates the need or a contextual approach to understanding the news.Election coverage is typically dominated by image-based narratives and horse-race men-tality, with a dearth o attention paid to issues or policies. When nations engage in inter-national conflict, news messages ofen take an ethnocentric flavor, ignoring conflictingpoints o view. Te U.S. invasion o Iraq in 2003 demonstrated the difficulty o challengingofficial perspectives even when conflicting evidence was available. News media offered no

warnings o the financial collapse o 2008 and have demonstrated little desire or account-ability in its afermath. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, news coverage o globalwarming has been notoriously two-sided, exempliying the alse balance that objectivityofen promotes. Te collapsing news business has opened up the search or new revenuestreams, including the increasingly popular sponsored content and paid posts. For peoplewho get news rom social media outlets, algorithms govern what news will reach them inthe first place.

Tese shortcomings related to news media are well documented in the academic litera-ture and are born rom the very structures, contexts, and institutions that create and de-liver news (See Shoemaker and Reese 2013; Shoemaker and Vos 2009). Examining contentalone does not help address or even identiy any o these structural, contextual issues.A variety o approaches to studying media contexts, including such resilient theories asgatekeeping, raming and agenda-setting, have demonstrated the need or a contextual ap-proach to understanding news media. Tereore, news literacy education must go beyondsimple skill sets in order to evaluate the context in which news appears.

The context-centred approach

In a 1998 themed issue o the Journal of Communication, Lewis & Jhally wrote in TeStruggle Over Media Literacyabout the need or a contextual approach to media literacyeducation:

"Media literacy should be about helping people to become sophisticated cit izens ratherthan sophisticated consumers. Te mass media, i n other words, should be understood asmore than a collection o texts to be deconstructed and analyzed so that we can distin-guish or choose among them. Tey should be analyzed as sets o institutions with par-ticular social and economic structures that are neither inevitable nor irreversible. Mediaeducation should certainly teach students to engage media texts, but it should also, in ourview, teach them to engage and challenge media institutions." (Lewis and Jhally 1998,109)

Applied to news literacy, this critical approach opens up opportunities to invite stu-dents to see how and why news messages are made, to gain a better understanding otheir strengths and weaknesses, and to engage as participants in the social constructiono reality. Tis does not mean students are drawn to reach a certain conclusion or that itis acceptable to preach a narrow ideological perspective. It simply means that any kind oliteracy is more meaningul i students are encouraged to see and ask questions about thebigger picture.

It is not surprising that the potential ideological implications o a critical approach aresignificant and are the subject o debate. As Renee Hobbs has suggested, there is an obvi-ous ideology that underlies even the most basic tenets o media literacy education - teach-

ing students to question textual authority and to use reasoning to reach autonomous deci-sions. Tis agenda is radical enough, without adding additional baggage associated withother explicitly ormulated political or social change objectives (1998, 23). Indeed, thereis a line to b e drawn between educating students and propagandising to them. But a con-textual approach is possible and essential, as it allows students to see the media within aramework o interests and power relations (Lewis and Jhally 1998, 117).

As a conceptual ramework, Potters cognitive model o media literacy (2004) is a helpulway to contextualize media messages and provide a holistic approach to news literacy. Pot-ter says his model requires more conscious processing o inormation and preparationor exposures (68), and identifies five basic knowledge structures that acilitate inorma-tion processing and meaning construction. Tese include media effects, media content,media industries, real world, and the sel. Equipped with Potters knowledge structures,


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people are much more aware during the inormation-processing tasks and are, thereore,more able to make better decisions about seeking out inormation, working with that in-ormation, and constructing meaning rom it that will be useul to serve their own goals(69). aken together, these areas orm a oundation or understanding the media environ-ment broadly.

ailored to news, these areas create an outline or what holistic news literacy educationmight look like. In my own research with colleagues (Maksl, Ashley and Craf 2015), Pot-ters model has been adapted to news and used to create a news media literacy scale thathelps define what a contextual approach to news literacy might look like and has provenuseul as a way to gauge high and low levels o news literacy. In addition to helping to

explicate the meaning o news literacy, this scale is a useul assessment tool that can beapplied broadly across different educational environments and can be compared to othermeasures such as those related to civic and political knowledge and engagement.

A context-centred approach also has roots in political economy, which provides a helpullens or viewing the relationship between media and power in society. Te ramework isuseul or studying media because it encourages a critical approach to examining the in-teractions o media and power with a ocus on the impact o these interactions. When welltaught, it is an open and questioning approach that aims to provide a holistic view o themedia landscape and invites students to draw their own conclusions based on their owncritical thought and analysis. Robert McChesney (2008) offers this contemporary under-standing o the political economy o media and its purpose as an analytical ramework:

It is a field that endeavors to connect how media and communication systems and con-tent are shaped by ownership, market structures, commercial support, technologies, laborpractices, and government policies. Te political economy o media then links the media

and communications systems to how both economic and political systems work, and so-cial power is exercised, in society. Specifically, in the United States and much o the world,what role do media and communication play in how capitalist economies unction, andhow do both media and capitalism together and separately influence the exercise o po-litical power? Te central question or media political economists is whether, on balance,the media system ser ves to promote or undermine democratic institutions and practices.(2008, 12)

Why is this critical approach useul and can it be taught in a way that allows students todraw their own conclusions? As Lewis and Jhally (1998) suggest, the goal o media literacyis to help people become sophisticated citizens rather than sophisticated consumers. Me-dia literacy, they say, is a way o extending democracy to the place where democracy isincreasingly scripted and defined (1998, 109). Tey continue:

"Te mass media may be producing art, but they are also producing commerce. We eel

that it is impossible to understand one ully without comprehending the other. Unlikesome o the more public service-oriented broadcasting systems in Europe and elsewhere,the goals o a loosely regulated, commercial media have no educational, cultural, or in-ormational imperatives. As much o the literature on the political economy o mediasuggests, they are there to maximize profits and to ser ve a set o corporate interests. Teseimperatives provide a ramework that helps to shape both the orm and content o mediatexts." (1998, 110)

Media literacy, thereore, is more than a matter o basic comprehension. Te skills neededto ully understand media content must also include the analysis o contexts. Lewis andJhally write:

"Media literacy, in short, is about more than the analysis o messages, it is about anawareness o why those messages are there. It is not enough to know that they are pro-

duced, or even how, in a technical sense, they are produced. o appreciate the significanceo contemporary media, we need to know why they are produced, under what constraintsand conditions, and by whom." (1998, 111)

As mentioned earlier, critics say this type o conceptualization is too radical or ideologi-cal or media education. But Lewis and Jhally emphasize that this is not their aim. Rather,they propose only to demonstrate to students the actors that influence media content sothat students can draw their own conclusions. Failing to do so is effectively an embrace odominant norms, which could be considered just as ideological as an attempt to challengethem. As Potter (2004) notes, the goal should not be to accept or to embrace any particularideology but rather to embrace critical questioning so that individuals may be empoweredto decide or themselves:

"I argue that rejection o the ideology is not the goal; the goal, instead, should be to al-low people to appreciate parts o the ideology that are unctional or them and create newperspectives where the ideology is not unctional or them. Tat is, the choice should beup to the individual. Mindlessly rejecting the media ideology in totois not much betterthan mindlessly accepting it in toto."(2004, 57)

Understanding the ideology o mediaespecially news mediais key to interpreting anddecoding media messages; but it should be lef up to individuals to decide or themselveswhat conclusions they wish to draw. Tis is the essence o critical thinking.

Len Masterman, who is considered one o the oreathers o media literacy, suggests thatthis critical approach inevitably leads to improved citizenship and social change. In ARationale or Media Education, he writes:

"Te democratization o institutions, and the long march toward a truly participatorydemocracy, will be highly dependent upon the ability o majorities o citizens to take

control, become effective change agents, make rational decisions (ofen on the basis omedia evidence) and to communicate effectively perhaps through an active involvementwith the media." (1997, 60)

Institutions cannot be democratised without a thorough understanding o their valuesand practices. Another noted media scholar, Stuart Ewen, agrees with Mastermans con-ceptualisation o the role o media literacy in democratisation and social progress.

Media literacy cannot simply be seen as a vaccination against PR or other amiliarstrains o institutionalized guile. It must be understood as an education in techniquesthat can democratize the realm o public expression and will magniy the possibility omeaningul public interactions (Ewen 1996, 414).

o be sure, some scholars do not attempt to conceal their contempt or what they see asthe growing commercialisation and homogenisation o society. Ewen (2000) describes hisstory o his own personal awakening amid the growing hypercommercialism o the 1950s,

suggesting that advertising in particular teaches homogenisation and creates a culture thatis a comortable womb or capitalism and consumption and little else. As a result, com-mercial values oster the weak political culture that gives rise to consumption and waste,rather than citizenship and democratic participation. o scholars like Ewen, these issuesare air game or critical media literacy.

Dyson (1998) agrees that corporate media are not held accountable or their inattentionto issues o citizenship and democratic participation, and suggests that more attentionshould be drawn to dated definitions o censorship and reedom o expression and howthese are being exploited by corporate interests or the purpose o protecting unetteredreedom o enterprise, without any regard or the social and cultural allout (1998, 159).In Dysons view, the public at large must demand responsibility and better accountabilityrom corporate media giants who are now ree to use the public airwaves in whatever way


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they choose.

Consider. Tis is quite a remarkable exemption at a time when other industries areincreasingly being held accountable or destruction o the natural environment (ibid.).

Dyson demands better vigilance over the communications industry rom already existingregulatory bodies established to unction on behal o the public interest. At the same time,she says, media literacy educators must be prepared to address both content and context:

one without the other will leave us all endlessly spinning our wheels in quicksand whilewe continue to be seduced by economic imperatives (1998, 165).

Many educators will be uncomortable with some o these positions, and that is just fine.A variety o perspectives help to make a field vibrant, strong and ever growing. But dec-ades o scholarship in media and communicationrom cultural and critical studies androm social scientific approachescan tell us a great deal about the news media landscapeand our role in it as consumers and citizens. Let us not shy away rom the large and grow-ing body o work that can help individuals gain a clearer view o their world. Also, none othis is meant to suggest that, to understand media, one must have a graduate-level educa-tion in the political economy o media or in media theory and criticism. But a contextualapproach to understanding media - especially news media - is vital to an open, inquiry-based, questioning perspective that is the essence o literacy.

News literacy and critical apathy: a warning

Te critical, political economic perspective espoused by some o the scholars mentionedabove is likely what Kovach and Rosenstiel were thinking o when they described medialiteracy as arising rom a lef-leaning perspective that teaches how the media in all itsorms manipulates us on behal o commercial and establishment interests (2010, 202).But media literacy is much larger than this narrow interpretation, and the breadth o per-spectives included under the media literacy umbrella is the reason or the fields success todate. Furthermore, there are reasons to believe that the skeptical way o knowing and thecontent-centred approach to news literacy espoused by Kovach and Rosenstiel is actuallya potentially damaging attempt to engage citizens in news and civic lie.

A growing number o scholars have asked the question, why have new media and thedigital revolution not led to an increase in democracy? One possible answer is that evenwhen we are armed with critical consumption habits, we are still undamentally consum-ers, powerless to affect change. When we bring our savviness to media content alone, weengage only on a superficial level and ail to see or address the larger political or socialcontexts that preer some types o content over others. Jan eurlings, reerencing MarkAndrejevics work on reality television, writes that the savvy viewer is not duped but in-stead analyses and understands - ofen endlessly so - but sees no way in which thingscould be different (eurlings 2010, 368). It is one thing to possess the skills necessary toanalyse content, to veriy claims, to evaluate sources, but all too ofen this can leave theconsumer in a powerless position where nothing can be done except continued consump-tion. eurlings calls this a viewing position o critical apathy, which engages our criticalaculties, yet does so by directing us away rom political action instead o towards it. It is,so to speak, the televisual equivalent o conspiracy theories: nothing is what it seems, eve-rything is being manipulated, thus let us abolish politics (368).

Tis is a valuable warning or proponents o a content-centred approach to news literacythat might leave us drowning in a sea o words and images with no critical aculties thatmight help us address the larger questions o how and why. Kovach and Rosenstiel writethat they see news literacy as a subset o civic literacy, which helps us unction in society:

Civic literacy, in our minds, is a curriculum that would teach what we need to know

to unction as citizens o a community. It is something beyond civics, something moreengaged, more Socratic and more personal. News literacy is a subset o it (2010, 209).

Indeed, reading the news is a key part o our ability to unction as citizens, but thatincludes our ability to comprehend the structures and contexts that help shape and influ-ence civic lie. Kovach and Rosenstiel also write: the real inormation gap in the twenty-first century is not who has access to the Internet and who does not. It is the gap betweenpeople who have the skills to create knowledge and those who are simply in a process oaffirming preconceptions without ever growing and learning. It is the new gap betweenreason and superstition (2010, 201). What better case could there be or examining thestructures and contexts that shape our preconceptions and allow us to grow and learn?

And finally, it is arguably a more political approach to target content anyway, particu-larly in todays polarised and highly-charged landscape. eachers today are ofen scared obringing media content into their classrooms at all or ear o being charged with politicalbias. As Renee Hobbs has said, Its likely that [teachers] have some anxiety, because thenews climate right now is so polarized. Its polarized in a way that youre damned i youbring in CNN and youre damned i you bring in Fox (Jolly 2014). One way around this isto take a holistic approach to considering media systems and contexts. It is potentially lesspolitical to consider the system as a whole and the structure and arrangements o institu-tions within that whole. At least that way a teacher can avoid being branded with a certainpolitical perspective rom the moment they begin to speak.

Where to go from here

In 1998s media literacy-themed issue o the Journal of Communication, Renee Hobbswrote about the seven great debates in the then rapidly expanding field o media literacyand asked i the different approaches to the movement would help it succeed or lead to itsdownall: Does the wide diversity o perspectives among educators serve as a source ostrength or the emerging media literacy movement, or does it suggest the essentially prob-lematic nature o recent attempts to define and implement such an expansive and unstableconcept as media literacy? (Hobbs 1998, 16). oday media literacy is a well-establishedfield, taught around the world in one orm or another. It is even part o the new CommonCore standards that have been widely embraced throughout the U.S. But debates aboutwhat to teach and how to teach it are ongoing even in the now well-established field omedia literacy (see Potter 2010; Hobbs 2011; Ashley 2015). For a subject area as broad asmedia education, it is no surprise that there is no one-size-fits-all approach and that thefield has been successul by being broadly inclusive o a variety o perspectives.

News literacy must now undergo this same process o considering a variety o perspec-tives rom the many diverse interests who have a stake in how citizens understand andengage with news. Even the very notion o news is contested today by younger genera-

tions such as millennials, who have whole worlds o inormation at their fingertips unlikeanything their parents have known. What constitutes news to young people looks differentrom what we might expect, and it remains to be seen how the concept o news will evolvein the coming years and decades. Young people today ofen maintain that i some piece oinormation is important, it will find them. I ever a mindset called or a contextual under-standing o how news is made and disseminated, this is it.

For now, here are a ew ideas or getting students to think contextually about how andwhy news is produced and disseminated:

Horse race coverage o elections. Any election is a good opportunity to look past politi-cal bias and ocus on structural biases in the news: goo d narratives, good pictures, conflictrames, keeping the viewers attention (see Patterson 2013).

Filter bubbles. How do the online algorithms that disseminate inormation affect the con-


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Patterson, . 2013. Informing the News: Te Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism. NewYork: Vintage.

Potter, W. J. 2004. Teory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach. Tousand Oaks, Cali.:Sage Publications.

. 2010 Te State o Media Literacy. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media54 (4): 675-696.

Scannell, P., and Cardiff, D. 1991.A Social History of British Broadcasting: 1922-1939 Serv-ing the Nation, Volume 1. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Shoemaker, P. J., and . P. Vos. 2009. Gatekeeping Teory. New York: Routledge.

Shoemaker, P. J., and S. D. Reese. 2013.Mediating the Message in the 21st Century: A MediaSociology Perspective, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

Stiegler, Z. (ed.) 2014. Regulating the Web: Network Neutrality and the Fate of the OpenInternet. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

eurlings, J. 2010. Media Literacy and the Challenges o Contemporary Media Culture:On Savvy Viewers and Critical Apathy. European Journal of Cultural Studies13: 359-373.

Re-thinking news, re-thinking

news literacy: a user-centred

perspective on information

Katherine G. Fry, PhD, Brooklyn College of the City University

of New York

Te story about the March, 2015 Lufhansa jet crash in France at the hands oco-pilot Andreas Lubitz unolded as I was preparing this article.

Tree days afer the crash I was tied to the Internet, everishly accessing online news-papers, BBC radio news, and social media sites or inormation I could gather, speculateabout and comment on. My preerred internet and radio sources, Te Guardian, Te NewYork imes, the BBC, and German newspapers Bildand Berliner Zeitung, among others,were updating as ast as they could, as were witter, Facebook, Yahoo, and Youtube, toname only a ew. Te tragedy and its mysterious nature cried out or explanation and moreinormation. Te always-on news cycle demanded it, and news organisations and partici-pants in the social media stream churned it out as ast as they could.

Social media sites figured heavily in the inormation circulation about this crash, in thegeneral social media whirl and in more traditionally prepared journalistic reports, botho which ed each other. Journalists embedded witter and Facebook postings rom manydifferent sources into their reports which were, in turn, re-posted on a host o other sites.Lubitzs Facebook page was repeatedly reerenced, and by day three, as i on news cyclecue, Facebook was circulating links to posts rom at least one blog about Lubitzs possibleties to Muslim extremism, though such inormation had not been included in the moremainstream news sites. I personally did not access Instagram or Youtube around thisevent, though doubtless they were included in the media mix or others.

As with most news and inormation circulation today - or events and issues tragic, ba-nal, and somewhere in between - participation is the key driving concept. Around thistragedy I ound mysel participating in a routine o checking various sources, researchingclaims, using Facebook to write about and de-bunk what I considered un-credible sourceso inormation, and commiserating about the tragedy while questioning the overall sense

o it with my riends online. It was part o my own quest to sort through and add to theinormation mix in order to dispel rumor and champion some sort o truth. Troughmy participation I was clearly in a relationship with the entire stream o inormation aboutthis tragedy.

Te inormation swirl around this plane crash could be a good case study or under-standing and examining news rom the traditional academic theoretical perspectives onews values (Galander 2012), agenda-setting (Lee 2015), or news raming (Bruce 2014),perhaps within the current zeitgeist o terror threat or mental health issues in conjunctionwith previous major tragedies. But this event as circulated in the digital media sphere isalso a prime example o how news is no longer a product o the traditional processes ojournalism across legacy print and broadcast sources, and can no longer be examined inthat way. Perhaps it should not be examined as its own separate genre at all.

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The struggle over news literacy: can we include political economic contexts in the emerging field of news literacy?