The Media Literacy Crisis

Recently, the discourse around “media literacy” in the United States has taken the world by storm. It’s everywhere — from the viral TikTok of high schoolers attempting to sound out the sentence, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche,” to teachers lamenting online that their students can no longer read. According to the Pew Research Center, one in five Americans regularly gets their news from TikTok rather than traditional networks like ABC News or CNN. With short-form content rising across online platforms and misinformation pouring in from different sources, the question remains: is there truly a media literacy crisis, or is it just a false alarm?

Recent research from the National Literacy Institute states that “more than 1 in 4 U.S. adults now read at the lowest literacy level, up from about 1 in 5 in 2017.” Additionally,  a study from Andrews University says “barely 38% of participants [in a study] were taught how to analyze media messaging,” and that educators’ primary concern lies with middle and high school age ranges, rather than elementary school. 

Specifically, in the state of Virginia, where literacy rates have barely increased, and even have begun to drop amongst students in secondary education, there were only modest improvements amongst the economically disadvantaged, Black, and Hispanic students. Its rigorous Standards of Learning exams, or SOLs, reveal that students developed their skills more in math than in reading or literacy. Nationwide, however, the panic is undeniable: within the past year, U.S. reading scores for fifteen-year-old Americans fell 14 points to their lowest level in a quarter century.