What is critical media literacy in an age of disinformation?

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we define and provide some history of “critical media literacy” (CML) in education. We then place critical media literacy in context of our current “post‐truth” era. Next, we describe some of the consequences of adults’ addiction to two decades of expanding, omnipresent new media to explain why we, like countless scholars from myriad disciplines, are sounding the alarm about the urgent need for a paradigm shift in education that puts critical analyses of media, along with history, social issues, citizenship, democracy, capitalism, plutonomy, and the growing power of autocrats and technocrats at its center.