Media Literacy and Climate Change in a Post-Truth Society

Abstract

In this article we draw from ecolingusitics (Stibbe, 2015) and a civic media literacy framework (Author, in press; Masyada & Washington, 2016) to consider what happened when three pairs of preservice teachers with different academic backgrounds and climate change beliefs jointly evaluated the reliability of two media sources that make opposing arguments about climate change. An ecolinguistics perspective attends to the environmental impact of the “stories-we-live-by” (Stibbe, 2015) and a civic media literacy lens highlights the centrality of dialogue and deliberation along with critical reading when evaluating the reliability of information sources about complex socioscientific topics like climate change. Our findings highlight the ways the three pairs of preservice teachers considered three aspects of reliability: provenance, purpose, and content (Author, 2015). Findings also point to three reliability stories that the pre-service teachers drew on as they evaluated the two media sources: 1) having the “other side” represented, 2) wanting more information or evidence to support an argument, and 3) acknowledging one’s own identity and perspectives.