Lesson video

Hi there, thanks for joining me, my name is Mr. Joy, and I'm going to be your citizenship teacher for today, as we start a new topic, looking at how the media affects us.

We're going to start off by looking at what is news.

For today's lesson, you're going to need a pen or a pencil, and some paper to write on.

Ideally, if you've got three highlighters, felt tips, or coloured pencils, those would be fantastic as well.

But if you don't, we can work around it.

Just give me a little bit of time to be able to pause the video here, and to find those items if you need to.

So in today's lesson, we're going to have a look at the different forms of media that exist, we're going to think about our own media consumption.

So where do we get information from.

We're going to consider the question, what is news? And then we're going to think about what makes something newsworthy.

What I want you to have to think about is the first thing that comes to your head, when I ask the question, what is the media? Now, my guess is that you might have come up with an example of a form of media, say something like TV or newspapers, you perhaps have heard of the phrase the media before, so you've got some sort of understanding, it's really important that we just stop for a minute, and make sure that you really fully understand what the media is and what the word itself means.

So breaking down the word, the word media is the plural for the word medium.

And when we're talking about a medium definition, is a method or way of expressing something.

And that definition comes from the Cambridge Dictionary.

When people talk about the media as a concept, they're generally referring to just a few forms of media.

And they tend to be the longer lasting more historic examples, like newspapers, radio, and television.

Sometimes they're also called mass media.

So hopefully, that helps in terms of breaking down what an individual medium is, what the word media means, and then what the media is and how that is different.

What I'd like you to do for the first task, is to get your pen and paper and to make a list of the examples of the forms of media that you've consumed so far today.

So think back to what you've done, since you've woken up.

Where have you got your information from already today.

There are some pictures on there on the slide, to try and help prompt you to think about different forms of media that you might have used without even thinking about it.

I'd like you to pause the video here to complete your task.

When you're done, you can continue by pressing play.

So now that you've completed that task, what we're going to do is we're going to look at the different types of media that that are.

And there are three main types of media.

And there is a print media, broadcast media, and new media.

Print media includes books, newspapers, magazines, journals, and newsletters.

It's basically anything that can be printed.

So it's not a particularly surprising name.

Broadcast media similarly, is where signals are broadcast and received.

So that includes television, and radio.

And you'll probably be able to guess the forms of new media that I'm going to list, partly because of the name, and partly because I've not mentioned them anywhere else yet.

New media includes websites, blogs, stream content, social media, and mobile apps.

What we're now going to do is we're going to go back to that first task that you completed just before.

So for task two, I'd like you to group your personal examples, of consume media by their type of media just as we went through on the previous slide.

So this is why you might want to use your highlighters, felt tips or coloured pencils.

I've done an example of show you, now my list was quite brief.

But I read news on an app on my phone this morning.

I listened to the radio during breakfast, I read a book to my children, scrolled through some posts on Instagram, and I've watched a few Oak Academy videos.

Next to those you can see that I've done some coloured dots using my felt tips.

I've used purple to show my example of print media.

I've used orange to show my broadcast media example.

And I've used green for new medium.

I'm missing something.

Bonus points if you've realised that I've not actually included a key in my work to show what each column means.

It's really important to have a key.

So you'll still understand what you've done later on when you look back at your work.

Now if you've got highlighters, you might want to highlight what you've written down.

Please also include a key for those as well.

If you haven't been able to find a highlighter or any colours never fair, you could write the letters P, B, and N in brackets.

Or you could just rewrite the list using three little subheadings, instead.

Pause the video now to group your personal examples of consumed media by their type.

We've now established what the media is, and I thought it would be useful to compare your consumption habits to those of children across the country.

This report was published in early 2020, based on research carried out during 2019.

And it was all about where children get their news from.

You can see that the results there are colour coded, red for radio, blue for examples of new media and purple for television.

If you interpret the graph, you can see that BBC is by far the most used source, and it's seen as the most important source of lots of children.

I have to say, I'm a little bit surprised myself, the data shows so many children being on Facebook, you can see the percentage of young people using Facebook has actually dropped from 34% in the previous annual report, whereas YouTube and Instagram have both increased.

Now it's all well and good looking at where young people get their news from.

But we need to now ask ourselves, what is news? So the team at the Centre for News Literacy at Stony Brook University in New York, has come up with a really simple way to identify whether or not something is news.

A piece of information is considered to be news if it follows the VIA model.

And VIA is an acronym, which stands for three really important aspects.

The first one is that it is verifiable, which means the information can be checked for accuracy, you can find out whether or not it's actually true, you can fact check the details in that piece.

The second one is that it is independent.

So the author of that piece of that article should not benefit from the information that's being shared, or they gain in any way.

It's completely independent, it's got nothing to do with them.

And the third part is that there is accountability.

And that means that there is an author's name linked to the piece of information, which means that if there's an error or a correction has to be made, then you know who you could contact so that they could change that, if needed.

We're going to come back to the VIA model in a little bit, after I take you on a little bit of a virtual school trip.

I really like travelling to new places whenever I can.

And I also love a good map.

I kind of wonder whether I love travelling because it gives me an excuse to be able to look at a map and figure out where I am.

Anyway, I promise that this is going to link back to what we're learning about.

If you think about me with my map as an example, it might help you then to think about all the information that we might encounter in any given day.

So just like when I am in a foreign city, and I use my map to check what part of the city I'm in and where I want to go, I could probably use a similar approach to identify whether or not what I'm being shown online or on television is actually news.

Now when you're consuming information, it's important to be aware of what kind of information neighbourhood you're in.

And this concept comes from the same team of people at Stony Brook University.

And they suggest that there are six information neighbourhoods, which all have different characteristics.

And these information neighbourhoods are news, which is sometimes called journalism, advertising, entertainment, propaganda, publicity, and raw information.

I'd like you to take a moment to write down the subheading, information neighbourhoods, which is at the top of the picture there.

And I then want you to write down the list of each of the six information neighbourhoods with a little bit of a space in between or next to each of them, because you're going to need that for your next task.

If you need to, pause the video here for a moment, and then I'll explain what your next task is.

Your next task is to watch the video that I'm about to play.

And to summarise one piece of key information about each the six information neighbourhoods described in the video.

Pens ready? Let's go.

Knowing where your information is coming from and why it was shared, can help you determine its reliability.

We can encounter six information neighbourhoods in total.

Journalism, advertising, entertainment, propaganda, publicity and raw information.

Wherever possible, we want to stay in the journalism neighbourhood.

This is because the information is verifiable, and journalists are accountable for their work.

Other neighbourhoods can be less reliable.

For example, the advertising neighbourhood, its goal is to sell to you.

This neighbourhood often includes claims that lacks factual evidence, and that don't always credit the poster, making it difficult to hold them accountable.

But the creators do sometimes make public corrections when asked.

Right, let's jump into another neighbourhood.

The goal of the entertainment neighbourhood is to divert or amuse us.

This means that the content in this neighbourhood is not necessarily factual.

It might exaggerate or embellish the truth to.

However, they usually make public corrections when asked.

They are also usually named, like YouTubers or celebrities.

The propaganda neighbourhood is next.

Their goal is explicitly to sway your opinion, usually on political issues, and to influence behaviour.

This is easily identifiable when it clearly supports a government or organisation, but can often include misleading or deliberately false statements to do this.

It can be argued that propaganda at times can be used by governments to get positive messages across.

The big problem is that creators often do not publicly correct errors.

Sometimes, the creators use disinformation to defend against criticism.

Now, let's quickly get out of here and see how the publicity neighbourhood is doing.

The publicity neighbourhood aims to draw attention to a person and their reputation.

Because of this, they tend to use carefully selected public statements and images that present themselves in a particular way and hide other facts and images that don't match this image.

Like other neighbourhoods, publicists and PR staff are usually unnamed, unless they are publicly correcting an error.

The final information neighbourhood is raw information.

Raw information as we define it, is inherently unverified.

It may be true, it may be false, but the accuracy of the information is not yet confirmed.

Raw information comes from little known sources, and is often shared directly to the consumer, sometimes by anonymous creators.

This means it bypasses traditional fact checkers, and makes accountability nearly impossible.

As we said before, journalism is the only neighbourhood where verification, independence and accountability are guaranteed.

So look for signs to make sure you are in the right neighbourhood.

You should expect to find reliable information in this neighbourhood.

But even then, you should still check it in case the facts have changed, or someone has made a mistake.

Fact checking websites and checking other sources of saying the same thing is a good way to do this.

If you forget your neighbourhoods, just come back to this video.

Use lateral reading and fact checking to help you feel confident that what you are reading is trustworthy.

So, we'll take a minute here to go back over what was discussed in the video to compare with what you've got written down already.

Now you may not have exactly these points written down and that's fine.

I've just got a little summary to make sure that you're on the right track.

So first up, we're going to look at news or journalism.

So in the news and journalism information neighbourhood, the aim of that literature is going to be to inform, to get correct accurate information across the consumer.

So we would expect that they would be providing accurate information and that they correct it if they are wrong and individual journalists held accountable for what they publish.

Secondly, if we look at advertising, so in advertising, the aim, instead of informing is to sell a product.

false advertising is illegal, but they might make one sided claims. And marketing teams aren't held accountable for the claims that are made.

So they can say something and it kind of falls back onto the brand, rather than the marketing team themselves.

Then we've got entertainment.

So in entertainment, they are aiming to entertain, they're not trying to offer facts.

So it's not about factual content, is stuff that is quite likely to be fictional or made up.

Producers control the content and the narrative that is published.

And generally production teams are credited for works, there's some accountability there as well.

Then moving on to the other half here.

For propaganda, in a propaganda information neighbourhood, they are aiming to build support.

So they're trying to get lots of people to support their ideas.

The information is presented as fact, and it's not corrected.

So there'll be saying things and if something doesn't quite match that, factually, then they're just kind of going to ignore that, because otherwise, it makes them look not so good.

And the third point there, it may exaggerate or selectively present published content.

So it's not the whole picture, like you would have seen in animation, there's just little bits that are going to be shown that make them look good.

And other things may not necessarily be exposed.

For publicity, they are also trying to promote a person or a product.

And you can verify that information.

But also, similar to what we just said with propaganda, that information can be curated or selected to present a specific view to consumers.

So what is shown is truthful, but actually doesn't necessarily tell that whole picture as well.

And then finally, we've got raw information.

So raw information is aiming to speak directly to the consumers, information is unverified, it could be true, or it could be inaccurate, we just don't know.

And the author may publish anonymously.

So even though we might see someone on Twitter, or on Instagram, with a verified status, that doesn't actually necessarily mean that they are the one who is going to be publishing that content.

So just to check on how you're taking your information so far, we've just got a couple multiple choice questions.

So this one is, which of these neighbourhoods is most likely to exaggerate facts? And I'm going to give you five seconds to decide after I read out the answers, which are news and journalism, entertainment, propaganda, and raw information.

And so for that answer, I would be looking for propaganda.

Propaganda is the area where they take some facts, and they stretch them and exaggerate them to try and gain support.

One more question, which is, which of these statements about advertising are true? It tries to sell a product, it has to be labelled as an advert, it's only present on television, and false advertising is illegal.

Now, there may be more than one correct answer here.

So I'm going to give you five seconds from now.

The correct answers here are options one, and four, it does try to sell a product and false advertising is illegal.

It's illegal under the consumer protection from unfair trading regulations.

Because it's illegal to include false or deceptive messages to mislead consumers.

I'm going to go through an example of how we might be able to recognise these information neighbourhoods when we're presented with new content.

So this is a post that I've taken from Instagram, which is showing Usain Bolt with a sports drink.

So this post could fit in a number of different information neighbourhoods, and I'm actually going to place it right on the boundary of three.

Sometimes it's not just going to fit in one individual information neighbourhood.

So it's okay to see some overlap in these things.

So the first one I'm going to pick out is that it is really instantly an example of raw information because it is posted on social media.

My second example is that it's going to be an example of advertising because he's trying to sell a product.

So you can see that the sports string that's there, he's obviously trying to draw attention to it.

And because he's trying to draw attention to it, it's also publicity.

He's trying to promote the fact that he's now involved in this company that is selling a sports drink and so he's Trying to get some attention to that cause.

What I'd like you to do now is to have a look at the two sources that I've placed in the worksheet, which you can access in a moment.

And I want you to decide which information neighbourhoods you think they would be located in.

So one is a newspaper article from the Guardian, and other is a Twitter post from President Trump.

If you find it particularly challenging to find some answers for one, that's fine, just focus on the other.

And remember, it's not necessarily just going to be one information neighbourhood that we might identify this source is coming from.

I've also included in the worksheets some tables to help to break down the neighbourhoods based on the VIA model that we looked at, before the video.

And that is about whether the content is verifiable, independent, or accountable.

And remember that news or journalism is the only information neighbourhood in which we'll find all three of those features.

And some neighbourhoods won't include any of that at all.

So pause the video here, and then click on next to go to the worksheet with the full sources to read through.

And then you can come back when you're ready to go through some answers.

Source one is the article from the Guardian.

And it's entitled, rare Nike running shoes fetch more than $400,000 at an auction.

There's some overlap in this article.

Now, it's fundamentally reporting on an event.

So it is predominantly news and journalism.

It's an accurate report of the story.

So that is the primary information neighbourhood that would be coming from.

You may have also suggested that it might have been publicity, because it's a positive story about Nike, so it could be drawing more attention to the brand.

And so that is a perfectly valid points to be making as well.

And then thirdly, you could have been making a connection to it being from the entertainment neighbourhood, because it's a feel good story of interest rather than kind of an essential, really vital news story.

And that's actually something that we can come back to in a little bit when we start to think of what makes something newsworthy.

Just on that point, though, about it becoming from the entertainment area, just because it's about a form of entertainment, so that it came from a movie, doesn't then necessarily mean that article itself is actually entertainment.

And that's an important distinction to make.

It can talk about something that is from entertainment, without actually being from the entertainment information neighbourhood.

I'm now going to have a look at this tweet from President Trump, you can see that it was posted in July 2019.

And it was when there were campaigns to try and get him impeached.

So to get him kicked out of office in the USA, he was talking about the percentage that were in favour of starting that which was very small, and then using that post to then talk about all the things has happened in his time in office as well.

So the first information neighbourhood that we're going to see here is the fact that it is raw information because it's a social media post, it's on Twitter.

Secondly, we can see that it's propaganda, because he's taking things that could be factually true, but might be distorting some of that information, it might not be solely down to his work, that these things have happened.

I'm sure that he has played a part in many of those things.

But to attribute it just to him is possibly a little bit of a stretch.

And then finally, because this post was posted at the very start of the next election cycle, to be reelected as President, it also falls in under the remit of publicity, because he's trying to beat himself up and make himself look good, so that he will be reelected.

We're now going to think about what makes something newsworthy.

So there's lots of things that could be published on newspaper or shown on the evening news, but they're not.

So why is that? Editors and producers have to decide on which story is the best to publish or to transmit.

And news values are the factors which may help those editors and producers decide what to include.

This helps them to then also figure out what not to include as well.

So we're going to go through seven news values, and I'm going to go through some brief explanations of each of them.

You're going to need to pay attention because I'm going to check how well you've listened a little bit later on.

So first up, timeliness.

Now timeliness, as the name suggests, refers to current information and also recent events.

We talk about news, it's called news because it's new.

and timeliness also could relate to stories that include major anniversaries.

So when talking about things like the 70th anniversary of the E Day or the 50th anniversary of British coins being decimalized, those sorts of things.

The second area is oddity.

And again, sounding rather obvious.

It's about weird or interesting stories which can catch the attention of the consumer.

So it's those things about not that a dog bites man, but maybe that and then bites dog, that's something that you're not going to see or hear about every day.

Thirdly, we've got impact.

Now, impact is about when there are stories or events which have affected a large number of people, or that are going to have really significant consequences in the future.

And those might be things that involve parliament, or it could be bigger things like global issues.

The fourth one that we're going to look at is proximity.

Now, proximity is talking about local information and local events.

So if you're watching a local news broadcast, then those sorts of stories are going to probably be featured more than the national stories.

So it's about what's going on near you.

But proximity can also relate to stories which relate to other groups of people who we might associate with.

So it could be that we start to see stories about other countries that we feel like we're similar with, so the United States or Australia.

So proximity isn't just physical, geographical proximity, but it's also kind of that relationship as well.

Celebrity is all about where we see information about famous people.

And this could include stories which wouldn't be published if they were about other people.

So when you see those celebrities walking down the streets, and there's no makeup on them.

And those photos get published all over the internet and magazines, that doesn't tend to happen to most people when they walk down the street.

That is purely because of them being a celebrity.

Our second last one is about conflict.

The conflict is where there are stories involving people or groups who disagree about an issue.

And there's a really big motivator when it comes to publishing these sorts of stories.

Because the greater the drama, the greater the emotional link.

Now, if you think about the kind of entertainment as a whole, conflict is at the core of lots of aspects of entertainment.

If you think about a movie, or a book or a soap opera, it's all really dependent on conflict to keep the story going.

Otherwise, everyone just kind of lives a really happy life, and it's a little bit dull, and it wouldn't be that interesting to read about or to watch.

That then leads us perfectly onto our final value.

And our final value is negativity.

Studies have shown that we have a greater physical reaction to negative stories than we do to positive stories.

And there was a study by Soroka, Fournier and Nir, and it studied how people physically react to positive and negative news.

And they measured how much people sweat when they saw different types of news.

And the researchers found that people have a greater response to negative news.

And that's because humans have something called an unconscious bias, or we're at least likely to have that not everyone does.

And that means that it's a deliberate decision to choose bad news or good news.

It's just something that is kind of built into us.

That then also explains why so many front pages of newspapers tend to be negative or dramatic, because they're playing to that idea that we will respond more rapidly to those negative headlines.

For task five, I'd like you to match up each of the news values on the left with the appropriate definition on the right, and then write them down on your piece of paper.

So you've got all the seven news values in the blue and purple column, and then all the definitions in the green column.

They all match up, you just have to find the right combination.

You can pause the video here and then rewind just a little bit, so you can see each of those columns and then match them up.

And when you're ready to check through your answers, click again to continue.

So let's go through the answers.

All of them are here.

Celebrity are stories about famous people.

Conflict involves arguing or fighting.

Impact describes a significant event.

Negativity includes sad or upsetting content.

Oddity is involving weird or unusual stories.

Proximity generally tends to be more so about local issues, and timeliness is about recent or ongoing events.

For task six and the last task that I'm going to get you to do before we finish today.

I'd like you to have a look at the source that is shown and to identify which of the news values are demonstrated in the story, where you have to think about why this article was published.

In the worksheet, I've included a passage which I've taken from the article.

So you've got an excerpt, a couple paragraphs to read through.

And that's going to help you to make up your mind about which news values might be relevant.

So what I want you to do is to pause your video here, I then want you to click next, to read through that part of the article.

And so you'll use your list of news values on your piece of paper to help you decide on your answers.

That could be more than one.

When you're ready, come back for the very last part of the lesson.

Now you might have different answers to what I come up with.

As long as you can justify them, that's the most important part of this.

So the first reason that I've picked out as a news value is the fact that Marcus Rashford is a celebrity.

He is a high profile football player.

And so that probably played a large part about why this was picked up in the press.

I don't think if I wrote a letter or if my children wrote a letter, that he would probably get picked up in the same way.

So is his high profile that got a lot of attention in this case.

Secondly, it was a really timely issue.

When this came out, it was a couple of weeks before the summer holidays, just coming out or starting to come out of lockdown from COVID.

And Marcus Rashford had sent this letter to Boris Johnson to try to get something to happen in the few weeks that we had until it became summer holidays, at which point it would have been too late for these children to be given free school meals at home.

In addition, I've also picked out the impact because if you think of the number of children across the country who were going to benefit from these meals, it was quite a substantial number.

And that was potentially a massive impact, not only for what ended up happening, but the fact that Marcus Rashford wanted this to happen, which is also why the press picked up on it in the first place.

So let's just recap what we've done today.

We started off the lesson looking at the forms of media.

And then we apply that to our own personal examples of media consumption.

We watched the video in information neighbourhoods, and then we were able to identify those neighbourhoods, in some example sources.

And we've just finished discussing the concept of news values and how they contribute to deciding upon whether an article is worthy of being published or not.

If you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnwithOak.

I'd really love to see the work you've come up with today and to see how you perhaps justified some different ideas and also about what forms of media you're consuming.

Thank you so much for all of your hard work today.

I really hope to see you soon as we continue to look at how the media affects us.