What exactly is media lit­er­acy? The Brit­ish gov­ern­ment takes it ter­ribly ser­i­ously. At least it charges the UK broad­cast reg­u­lator, Ofcom, with pro­mot­ing it. And they chose to pro­mote it with the BBC by put­ting on a news day — called School Report — for kids aged 12 to 13.

You could retitle the exer­cise When pub­lic sec­tor bur­eau­cra­cies col­lide…but they called it Lifeblood of demo­cracy? Learn­ing about broad­cast news. Their report puts a brave face on this exper­i­ment, but basic­ally it reveals that the pre­requis­ite of media lit­er­acy is — well — lit­er­acy.

the effects on learn­ing were lim­ited, both in the qual­ity of impact, as well as the num­ber of stu­dents dis­play­ing sig­ni­fic­ant learn­ing outcomes

58 per cent of stu­dents showed neg­li­gible levels of learn­ing, 33 per cent mod­er­ate levels, and just 9 per cent sig­ni­fic­ant levels. Among the dis­mal find­ings:

Weak out­comes gen­er­ated by the pro­ject included:
• Under­stand­ing what ‘news’ is…
• News con­cepts such as impar­ti­al­ity, bal­ance and fair­ness
• Broad­en­ing defin­i­tions of ‘news’
• The tar­get audi­ence for news
• The import­ance of watch­ing news … only one stu­dent volun­teered that she now saw it as import­ant to watch the news
• Trust and belief in the news … ‘you don’t know, because if the editor has been get­ting inform­a­tion from people or from the inter­net or some­thing, inter­net could just be totally lies like.’
• The role and skills of the editor
• Changes in listen­ing to radio news
• Changes in the view­ing of other TV pro­grammes
• Polit­ical aware­ness and informed citizenship

Surely they must have picked up some­thing about the Beeb?

• BBC val­ues – all stu­dent inter­viewees were asked the ques­tion, ‘do you think you have learnt any­thing about what the BBC believes in, what the BBC thinks is import­ant, what its val­ues are?’ – to which only two replied in the affirm­at­ive; one had clearly inter­n­al­ised the views of a BBC journ­al­ist with whom he had worked: ‘…all they do is hon­est … it has made me believe more of the BBC stor­ies I sup­pose you could say, because they have got that repu­ta­tion.’; the other had learnt that the BBC was not biased…
• Pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing – this poten­tial out­come did not appear on the radar…

So what was it the exer­cise really like, then?

Yeah every les­son we had to listen to Huw Edwards at the begin­ning and he would go on for ages.

He was like… he always said the same stuff and we went over everything he did last week.

So it ended up… at the end of it, it was like three times as long as the begin­ning one.

And then it ended up being ten minutes at the end, he made this big speech about everything that we had done and what we were going to do, so that was a bit annoying.

That was it really.

Kids, eh — at least one of them was media literate.