Making a difference: SIUE and GMLP Spring 2009 - By Marty Jenkins
Media literacy is the process of assessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating messages in a wide variety of media forms. It encourages people to frequently question what they hear, see or read from the media. It involves media consumers critically analyzing media so they can detect misrepresentation and bias in the media.
Gateway Media Literacy Partners’ mission is to promote media literacy in the St. Louis region.
Jessica Brown is the president, founder and driving force behind Gateway Media Literacy Partners. Brown teaches at SIUE, but was a journalist and previously worked at KSDK in St. Louis as head of production.
Gateway may not be here today if it were not for Brown’s experience as a board member for the National Academy of Television and Arts and Sciences in the early ‘90s.
“Back in that time, I got a group started, and we all knew that it was
important that the community knew about media literacy,” Brown said. “We all need to embrace the media and be healthy skeptics.
“Everything is so fast and furious; it behooves us to be educated news consumers,” she urged.
Gateway has 17 people on its board of directors and seven different committees. Two of the board members have ties to SIUE. Mass Communications Department Chairman Patrick Murphy has been teaching here since 1994. He has been a board member of GMLP since the organization started. A gradual process led him to Gateway.
“Working in media and video, and through your education and reading, you start to put things together over time,” he said.
Murphy also said that young people need instruction about how to digest media messages.
“Some schools teach about that topic and some don’t, and, when I became a parent I looked at the media through my kids’ eyes. I gauged it more critically,” Murphy explained.
SIUE Professor Tom Atwood has been a board member of Gateway since 2007. During Media Literacy Week on campus in October 2008, Atwood presented the documentary “Selling Children: How Media Affects
Kids.” It was produced in 2006 for a network he worked for in Atlanta.
The documentary was shown to middle school and high school students, and it was nominated for an Emmy Award in May 2008 in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Public Affairs Programming.
Atwood said his experience with Gateway has been positive.
“The people on this board believe in the cause of media literacy, and helping people understand media and its influence,” Atwood said.
“Media messages are everywhere and coming at us fast. We don’t have time to analyze them, we just respond. Kids especially are susceptible to suggestions about being consumers, identifying who they are as individuals through the things they have,” Atwood said. “Only by understanding how media and marketers operate, can we deflect their influence or choose to be influenced by them with our eyes open at least.”
SIUE’s Gary Hicks, associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Mass Communications Department presented “Mediated Madness: Stigma, Media and Mental Illness” during the Fall 2008 Media Literacy Week.
“The overall project combines an examination of how the media portrays mental illness with discussion from mental health advocates and members of the media who cover the mental health beat,” Hicks said.
Hicks is not directly a part of Gateway, but he has served on an advisory board for the organization and is also active in promoting SIUE’s post-baccalaureate certificate program in media literacy. He said media coverage of mental illness has improved during the past decade, but it is far from where it needs to be,
“We need an engaged and educated media worker with the resources to conduct the kind of reporting that leads not to stigma, but rather to understanding,” Hicks said.
You can learn more about Gateway Media Literacy Partners at www.gatewaymedialiteracypartners.org.