Are We In A Media Literacy Crisis?
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Okay, everybody, Aisha here. And the other day I went on NPR's It's Been a Minute to talk about a crisis we've been seeing in pop culture.

I won't spoil it, but basically we've all gotten really, really bad at watching movies and TV shows. Here's how It's Been a Minute's host, Brittany Luce, describes it. Like almost every other person in the country, I flocked to see Ryan Coogler's Sinners when it hit theaters in April.

And while I enjoyed the film, part of the fun was seeing all the excitement online. So when I was finally able to scroll through all the spoiler-heavy commentary, I was shocked to see some of the wildest takes I've seen on a movie in a while.

For example, there's a Chinese character in the film named Grace, played by Li Junli. And for those who haven't seen it, this is a light spoiler, but she's responsible for a pretty big moment in the film. But what I, and also the director of the film, Ryan Coogler, felt was a rash decision made by a mother in distress, some viewers thought was a representation of a lack of POC solidarity from Asian folks in Black communities.

Even stranger, some audience members thought Annie, played by actress Umi Mosaku, was one of the main characters' Smoke's mother. Now, for those who don't know, Annie is the estranged wife of Smoke, one of the two smokestack twins played by Michael B. Jordan. Just wild stuff.

But this isn't the first time the audience has been out of step with the content itself. The endless rabbit holes and theories around season two of Severance made me want to swear off the fandom entirely. It made me think about a phrase that gets thrown around a lot online. Media literacy.

According to the National Association of Media Literacy Education, media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols communicated in what we consume. And for me, most importantly, being able to critically analyze those symbols for a richer takeaway. And seeing some of this commentary has me concerned that we're struggling with the necessary tools to even critically approach some of the things we're watching for entertainment.

So I called up Pop Culture Happy Hours' Aisha Harris. For better and to some extent for worse, we come to pop culture with all of our baggage. And Code Switch's B.A. Parker. Oh, we don't have subtext anymore. Like, we have subtext, but we can't read it. To ask them, where else are they seeing this? And what does this media literacy crisis mean for the way that we engage with the world at large?

The furthest back I can go of a recent example of this is Wicked. Wasn't even coming from, you know, Randall's on the internet or Strange on the internet. I

I imagine both of you saw A Strange Loop, the really great Broadway show by Michael R. Jackson. I'm familiar with it, but I haven't seen it. So he had some very interesting opinions on Wicked. And he actually wound up writing about this around the time of the Oscars in The New York Times. He wrote an opinion piece titled, Is Wicked Really a Resistance Musical? He's kind of going after people who...

when Wicked came out, were claiming that it was very relevant to our times. And Wicked came out like maybe a couple weeks after Trump was elected. So people were, you know, tying threads together to call Wicked a musical that is representative of our times. And Michael R. Jackson basically wrote like he calls this progressive magical thinking, and that people are trying to reclaim Wicked as like this resistance musical when it's not actually. And

And to me, that's kind of inaccurate. I'm not saying that Wicked is necessarily a super radical piece of theater or as a movie, but the novel that it's based off of is incredibly political. It's very different from the musical, and it is intended to be an allegory. And I will also say, the production notes for Wicked...

They literally say that it is a show about the quiet, insidious rise of a fascist movement that seeks to demonize the intelligent-speaking animals of Oz. End quote. Well, dang. So...

Whether or not you believe that it's actually resistant is one thing, but I think it is inherently a political piece of movie and show in a way that I'm not sure Jackson is willing to give credit for. But that's a really fascinating read. It's made plain as day by the people who actually created the thing. But I'm curious, Parker, have you had this experience? I mean, I had recently, I was watching clips of an interview that Katie Couric

had with Noah Wiley, who's the star of The Pit. Oh, yes. She asked him a question that gave the feeling like she hadn't absorbed anything that was happening on the show. There's a big scene between Noah Wiley's character and Dr. Collins, who's a Black doctor. And Katie Couric says, so...

Was something going on between the two of those characters? And there's like a big... Like, that's a huge... What you're referring to is a huge emotional scene on the show that makes it very clear that they share some type of very serious, like, intimate past. Yeah. Yes. And I was like, oh.

we don't have subtext anymore. Like we have subtext, but we can't read it. Like someone has to blatantly say, Hey, remember that thing we did like five years ago. This is how it made me feel. Yeah.

But let's get into the meat and potatoes of why I brought you both here today, because the online discourse around the film centers has broken my brain. They had me concerned about not just how people were misunderstanding story, as each of you have discussed, but also how people were misunderstanding pretty common racial dynamics of

And a lot of these reactions were coming from Black people. I want to talk about a specific situation. There's a character in the film named Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld. Mary is a character who actually, like the real-life actress Steinfeld, has a grandparent who is mixed race. And when she's in the movie,

One of the main characteristics of her character is that she is passing for white, but she is aware, and at least privately acknowledged, like many white passing black people, that she has black ancestry and she was raised around black people. And I have seen so many people

Saying that she actually was white, she should be considered white, people simply just not understanding how the one-drop rule worked back then, how segregation worked back in the Jim Crow South. What in the Lena horn are we doing here? Like...

It stressed me out. But my concern with this is two-pronged because, you know, this seems like people don't know, A, how to understand history and locate a story within a certain historical context, or B, that they also don't understand storytelling, or in this case, how to understand cues and clues that a movie will give you to understand what it's trying to tell you. What do you all make of this phenomenon? Aisha, we'll hear from you first. Aisha?

This is something that I've written about and thought about a lot, which is that for better and to some extent for worse, we come to pop culture with all of our baggage, all of ourselves, and especially women.

In the age of the Internet, when we are all kind of identifying amongst groups and demographics, whether it's like I'm a Trekkie or I'm a Harry Potter fan or I'm whatever, it's like everything becomes super personal. And you often think about things from your perspective and then you project your perspective onto further.

Film, TV, whatever, in ways that maybe like aren't always there. Like they don't actually exist, but you are bringing it to whatever piece of art you're consuming. And there's some good that can come out of that. Queer and people of color fans who have inserted themselves into loud culture in that way. And I think those things are not disconnected. Right.

I think about something like Joker, the first movie, which came out in 2019, and how that movie, depending on where you were on the political spectrum or how you view things, there were some people who viewed the Joaquin Phoenix character as an incel, as the worst kind of thing. And then there were other fans who were like,

What are you talking about? This movie is like, it's the greatest thing ever. And Todd Phillips, he's the one who directed the film. He had to come out several times and kind of talk about it and how he claimed like, it's not a political film. And it's like,

come on, man, of course it's a political film. You can't backtrack there. To me, that seems like straight up denial. It's straight up denial. So it's like these things can get out of hand and you have to acknowledge that and acknowledge that people are going to interpret it in different ways. First of all, everything is political in some way. It's just some are more overtly so. So I think everyone's just bringing something different to these movies. And

With social media, people are able to share that more readily than they were 30 years ago. I mean, there is like this frustrating aspect of it, like the online discourse. We've heard like the bean soup problem. No. There's a thing on TikTok. I've heard about this. Please explain it. There was like a TikTok video of a lady was like, here's how I make my bean soup. And someone in the comments was like, but I don't like beans. How do I make this soup?

And the creator was like, you just don't make the soup. Like the soup's not, you don't make other soups. And that I feel has like infiltrated our media absorption. So there's like a lot of like very selfishly, like how does this pertain to me? Or it's like, this makes me uncomfortable. Therefore, I don't like it.

Or, oh, it has all these guys that I really like. And so this, like, yeah, this movie's problematic. And like, it's not very good, but like, I love it. Therefore, it makes it a good movie. And I mean, okay, sure.

Coming up, how our digital lives may have changed the way we interpret media. There are clues, but if you are half watching on your phone, you're going to miss it. And so is it media literacy in the sense of like people are watching and just not picking up what is being put down? Or is it also just like they are literally not even seeing it half the time?

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I feel like a crucial aspect of this media illiteracy is moralizing. And Alexis, our producer, she brought this up. And I'm like, you're so right. There's almost like this entertainment moralizing process where you watch a piece of entertainment and then spend time researching or processing whether the film matches your values or the values of those around you in some cases. And then you decide how you feel about what you watched.

And whether you think it's good or bad. It kind of becomes less about, like, whether you actually think something is well done or entertaining. And, like, more about whether or not this piece of media makes you seem or feel like a good person or confirms what you already believe about the world. Mm-hmm. Okay, listen. Being a 14-year-old girl watching Todd Solon's films for the first time. Listen. That'll, like, ooh, I feel uncomfortable. This is weird. But also, I respect the crowd.

My moral compass doesn't make the whole movie bad. It's like saying, oh, Hannibal Lecter's a cannibal. How dare he? I would never be a cannibal. Therefore, Silence of the Lambs is a terrible movie, which is patently untrue. We can't use our morality to gauge the...

Validity of art. I mean, it kind of feels like there's like a newer self-awareness for many people around, whether it's around feeling like a good person or at least having your choices confirmed, that like kind of gets, I feel like audiences further away from actually sitting with you.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

and directing their attention to what they need to be focused on, how might they understand or misunderstand complex news stories with huge real-life implications? In the same way, right? Like, I think about that story about Katie Couric and the pit, right? It's like...

There are clues, but if you are half watching on your phone, you're going to miss it. And so is it media literacy in the sense of like people are watching and just not picking up what is being put down? Or is it also just like they are literally not even seeing it half the time? And The Pit is the type of show that you like kind of need to give all your attention to because –

it's not giving you everything. It's not, it's not Grey's Anatomy. It's not broad. It's not, but that's also like very direct of like, choose me, love me. Yeah, exactly. You don't, you do not, you do not have these big grand pronouncements of love or lust or whatever. It's all taking place in a single day. So like only so much can happen. Yeah. Even the way it duels out information is a way that like, I think a lot of modern audiences are perhaps not,

attuned to or used to getting information, which is usually like those big grand pronouncements. And instead it's like, it comes out in the way it would if you were actually there on that first day. Like you wouldn't learn everything about this one doctor in two seconds. Like that's not how it works. Also, I would not want people working in the hospital that I'm being served at, like giving a speech an hour. No, thank you. I don't need to speak. I'm like, please pay attention to me. But that's a really good point. People's attention is very split and

And I see those things pop up in the way that people consume news. I see that pop up in the way that people are engaging with our rapidly changing political landscape. And also, I think that makes me think about algorithms. Like people's individual worldviews are now also deeply affected by their algorithms. I wonder, like...

Where does that take us as a society? Like, where does that leave us? Where are we going, y'all? Yeah, I think we're already in the abyss. It's just like, how long are we going to wait here? And when are we going to pull ourselves out? I mean, I even just think about sort of this same idea of how we all project our different ideas and beliefs onto our pop culture. I think about Luigi Mangione and how there have been such differing perspectives

to what he is accused of having done. He's currently on trial for the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, and how, depending on your algorithm, you might be fed a bunch of stuff that's very pro-Luigi and in support of him or, like, gushing over how hot you think he might be. And you could be on the other end of things. And I think that, like,

It's the same side of the same coin, right? The same thing allegedly happened. And everyone has a different opinion to it and ascribes a different meaning to it. And I do think that this is – it's not that dissimilar from the way we consume our pop culture, which is that, like, you know, deciding whether or not a character was right or wrong to do what they did. Even something like The Last of Us, like –

all the sort of like hand-wringing over Joel and played by Pedro Pascal and like what he did, there are two sides to every story. And I'm all for debate, but also sometimes what's right in front of us is what's right in front of us. Right? Yeah.

I like that. That's how I feel. I'm loving this analysis. The best I can compare it to is, you ever watch, like, The Traitors? It's, like, a group of people who are using their behavioral skills to figure out if someone is, like, a traitor. Yeah. And everyone all of a sudden thinks they're Dr. Phil. And, like, even... And they're, like... Or...

Or they'll be like, oh, he twitched. That means he's lying. Or like, oh, they went into this hallway. Clearly they are a traitor.

But that's all of us. That is the level of like kind of like literacy we're on right now. Remember Spitgate? Remember Spitgate? Oh, my God. When they when people were like, oh, Harry Styles might have spit on Chris Pine. And it's like, I just don't think that happened. I saw that. I was like, no, I don't think he did that. Someone made that up on Twitter and people just ran with it. What?

We're at the point where I have to, like, explain to a relative, like, no, this is AI. Rihanna is not showing her sonogram to her grandmother and posting it on Facebook. Like, that's, like, a legit thing. No. I had to be like, that's not real. No.

I'm glad I was able to come and commiserate with the two of you because I have been trying to make sense of this. And you all actually at least gave me some good ways to think about and understand what's going on. So Parker, Aisha, thank you both so much. You're welcome. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. That was Pop Culture Happy Hours, Aisha Harris and Code Switch's B.A. Parker.

And I'm going to put on my influencer hat for a second and ask you to please subscribe to this show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you're listening. Click follow so you know the latest in culture while it's still hot.

This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Alexis Williams. This episode was edited by Nina Potok. Our supervising producer is Barton Girdwood. Our executive producer is Veralyn Williams. Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini. All right. That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.

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