Transcript for Media Literacy

My name is Wendy Harris and I’m a high school social studies teacher at Metro Deaf School here in St. Paul, and this summer I’ve been working as the teacher-in-residence here at the History Center, gathering collections of primary sources from the Library of Congress and using them to create activities and ideas that we can use in our classrooms. 

This set is about media literacy. “Fake news” is sort of a buzzword right now, but journalism has always shown the perspectives of the people producing the information–perspectives or bias, either way you want to talk about it, they’re very evident in most things that we see and most things that students encounter online in social media and elsewhere. This is a very important skill, and this set uses three different historical events that allow students to analyze this in the past. 

It starts out with two World War II era sources explaining how to look at propaganda and how to look at opinion pieces that students can use as models as they look at the other sources. 

Then we have some news articles about the Eliza Winston emancipation in 1860 here in Minnesota. 

We have 1898 USS Maine sinking, and one of the sources in this is in Spanish.

And then we also have articles about the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. 

With all of these, students can look at a direct comparison of looking at the different articles about the same event, and looking at what they say are the facts, listing facts from each article. And then looking at the words and how words are used, the connotation of words that are used. Maybe the facts are the same, how they are presented is different. Maybe they have different facts. 

Another way they can look at it is within the context of the paper. What else is on the page? Where is that story located–is it at the bottom, is it top center, is it on the front page? What other topics are on that page? How is that news categorized by the people who produced that newspaper? That can tell you something about the author’s perspective or the editor’s perspective on that news story.

An extension activity could be finding multiple articles about the same current event today, and conducting a similar analysis to see if students notice the same types of use of words, connotation, different aspects of the facts being shown, how they are presented on social media, and within what context.

All of these sources are available on the History Center website, and you can look at them and zoom in, read all the words yourself, and have your students look at them as well.