News media and the classroom

“The content and layout of newspapers inform us about the ways society organizes and structures itself and how different social groups are allocated specific roles, spaces, and positions from which they are heard, marginalized, or silenced. Critically reading a newspaper requires an examination of how its content and layout maintain social relations and power structures that advantage some and disadvantage others” (Segall and Schmidt, Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text, p. 96).

In this passage, the authors make the argument that newspapers and the people behind them act as “gatekeepers” of information. In other words, it is they who control what is being discussed in the political arena and who decide what the most important issues are. Whether overtly or not (some media are more explicit about it than others), newspapers will often take a stance on the issues being debated. As someone who has been trained extensively in journalistic theory and practice, I know firsthand the importance journalists place on objectivity in their writing and production. This notwithstanding, however, human beings always view matters through a subjective lens. Even if a reporter is completely objective, the editor will make a decision about certain words or facts to use, and a superior will make more decisions regarding placement and publication. It is for this very subjectivity that there are different sources of information, with different opinions and information in the first place. If journalists and their superiors were truly as objective as they wished they were, every newspaper would no doubt look the same. Because the public reads newspapers to become informed and acquire information, they often subconsciously acquire the agenda promoted by the publication of choice, hence the importance of acquiring multiple sources of information. The subjective lens discussed here, however, does not exclusively refer to content. The placement of stories on the front page or further back indicates its priorities, as those which are most accessible will be the most consumed by the public.

From an instructional point of view, this article was fascinating. To be sure, most “current events” instruction that I have observed in classrooms was mostly tangential, to be added on to the content that was being taught at the moment. While many teachers encourage the use of newspapers as a means of relating or teaching content, they seldom view newspapers as a source of content in their own right. The passage above illuminates some key understandings that students should acquire about newspapers, namely this idea about how information is presented, both visually and in writing. Most high school students have at least some exposure to news media, and the classroom can be an excellent place to explore how the different news media present ostensibly the same information, but in very different ways. Students, for instance, could be asked to separate into groups, looking at different newspapers and analyzing their characteristics. While most would be encouraged to look for a bias or angle, it would be interesting to compare the work of all the different groups. This would give rise to one of the key questions of the chapter, and indeed of the social sciences as a whole: Whose truth do we listen to? It is a question that no one has the answer to (although many think they do), but one that is vital to our democratic society. Students will be able to critically analyze different sources, and realize that there are a multitude of truths, through which we make our own.