As if the educational deck isn’t already stacked against schoolchildren with explicit sex education, transgender brainwashing, CRT indoctrination, and pornographic library books, a push to add “media literacy” standards is underway. Leftists are circling the wagons to further ensure that not a glimmer of unbiased instruction is included in the school day. An exposé by Real Clear Investigations (RCI) sheds light on this liberal offensive and the concept behind it.

For several years, Americans have been hearing the terms “disinformation” and “misinformation,” typically when used by liberals to describe anything written or spoken that is counter to the Democrat party line on COVID-19, the validity of the 2020 elections, and everything in between. According to RCI’s Ben Weingarten, the proponents of media literacy instruction claim “the goal is to teach students ‘how to consume information, not what information to consume.’” But the reality may be quite different.

In January 2023, New Jersey became the first state to officially establish K-12 Information Literacy Education, which is described on Governor Phil Murphy’s website as “a set of skills that enables an individual to recognize when information is needed and to locate, evaluate, and effectively use the needed information.” Media literacy laws exist in 10 other states, some through bipartisan legislative efforts, but New Jersey takes credit as the first to specifically establish education standards.

As Weingarten observes: “At a time when the nation’s political and thought leaders are wrestling over the meaning of facts and truth, and distinctions between disinformation, misinformation, and plain old information, the New Jersey bill is part of a growing effort to have teachers tell students how to settle these questions.”

John Sailer of the Civics Alliance and the National Associate of Scholars (NAS) also cautions against these bills, noting that in Florida, “a bill that has advanced in the state legislature targets what most people acknowledge as a problem—namely, the widespread misuse of social media. Yet,” he adds, “bills like these are worth tracking because the guise of ‘media literacy’ often functions as a trojan horse, casting certain political views as prima facie wrong and biased.”

RCI and others say the issue of media literacy ignores the elephant in most classrooms, that “children suffer from a ‘base-knowledge problem,’” meaning that students don’t have the reading literacy to comprehend or analyze media content when presented to them, particularly in urban schools. This logically opens the door for teachers, often young and liberal, to interpret for students what they cannot read or understand for themselves.

But the problem of illiteracy hasn’t stopped either the federal government or many state governments from considering such laws, often with Republican assistance, using the old reliable label of “national security” to legitimize top-down control by Big Tech and corporate media. Perhaps leftwing politicization is the real goal of “media literacy,” which jibes with John Sailer’s premise that such education offers a “false promise,” and is actually “social-justice-steeped pedagogy” that won’t help students understand the world.”

Equally frightening, the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s (EPPC) education expert, Stanley Kurtz, told RCI that media literacy “embodies the leftist view of so-called disinformation,” which treats “even the most respectable conservative bloggers and podcasters” as illicit. Kurtz likened the New Jersey law to the failure of the Biden Administration’s subtly harmful attempt in 2022 to set up a “disinformation board” within the Department of Homeland Security, which U.S. Senator James Lankford (R-OK) was key in helping defeat last August. “But,” Kurtz said, “the state of New Jersey ... has just injected something like a government disinformation board into its own schools. Other states, be warned.”

Some Republican legislators agree with Kurtz. One called the New Jersey bill a political weapon for targeting “young impressionable minds.” And RCI’s Weingarten noted that Republican legislators “in Delaware and Illinois largely opposed media literacy bills that passed in their states on similar grounds.” Kurtz noted: “[T]he education left excels at lending a bipartisan sheen to what are in fact deeply politicized programs and proposals.”

Media literacy exploited as social justice

As is often the case with progressive fads and advocacy, media literacy education has the support of activist organizations. One key purveyor is aptly named the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), and even a brief visit to the group’s website shows what they are about.

A variety of articles and videos listed under the Fighting Misinformation About Coronavirus link support the official narratives of the past few years. Included is at least one article debunking alternative treatments for COVID-19 and alternative medicine in general, and which still implies the discredited charge that President Trump recommended the use of bleach as a remedy, although Trump is not mentioned by name.

Another link on NAMLE’s website ties its media literacy education with Common Core Standards “in English Language Arts (ELA) & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, and provides several foundational connections to media literacy education with examples and discussion questions for educators ... NAMLE believes that media literacy education—the process of teaching how to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate using media in all of its forms—supports many of the most challenging goals of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).”

The Civics Alliance’s Sailer reported in City Journal in 2021 that critical media literacy “was referenced in the descriptions of 17 presentations” at NAMLE’s annual conference that year. He noted that the organization introduced its event by announcing: “Media literacy has many connections with social justice; in fact, many would say that media literacy is social justice.” Sailer explained that this happens “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.”

Sailer’s article describes media literacy education’s pedagogy by citing UCLA professors Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share’s The Critical Media Literacy Guide, which he says demonstrates their Marxist view that ‘in every epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class’ to argue that media literacy should be taught through the lens of power and identity groups.” Critical media literacy seeks to undermine what it sees as the dominant institutions of Western capitalist society—or, to use the academic jargon, to foster “counter-hegemonic alternatives.”

The bottom line is to change society. According to Sailer, media literacy embodies Kellner and Share’s pedagogy that “aims to empower teachers and students with a sense of civic responsibility to confront social problems with progressive solutions, often involving media and technology. The ultimate end is to “support social justice educators with ideas and strategies to inspire their students to action.”

So far, Republican legislators overall don’t seem to get it. While some did oppose the New Jersey law, others viewed the language as “pretty balanced and uncontroversial.” But as the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Kurtz told RCI: “many Republican legislators—particularly in blue states—are eager to work across the aisle, yet [are] poorly versed in the latest leftist education fads.”

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