Quo vadis, media literacy? Notes from Latvia, Bulgaria and the USA

Introduction

Media literacy, especially in new-European spaces like Latvia and Bulgaria, often maintains a focus upon detecting and providing skills for refuting propaganda messages sent through pro-Putin sources.  In instances of teaching, from high school classrooms to university and adult educational settings, the focus is on “arming” the public with a set of practices associated with the defense of the home-nation. In universities, especially those wherein budgets are limited, the need for funding shapes course offerings and project proposals regarding formulating media literacy, propaganda resistance, and interpretative “resilience” in these ways. The skills of media literacy are seen, in these countries, as companions to the interests of National Defense and nationhood. Local governments, along with global donors and NGOs, have stressed media literacy as a vital enterprise, and EU-supported grants to several of the post-Communist states and Russian-bordered nations (perceived as vulnerable) are directed at forming partnerships for exploring ways in which propaganda can be studied, resisted, or countered. The USA has a contrasting focus in many of the initiatives associated with media literacy. National security is a relevant but secondary interest, with Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and other information sources only occasionally being framed as “destabilizing actors” in their activities influencing domestic-level political discord. Rather, a significant concern in the USA is instead the social vulnerability arising from political partisanship–with ML training attending to identifying left-leaning versus right-leaning types of arguments, evidence, and epistemologies, which may then shape the realities/alternative-realities discerned in the public mind. 

This study aims to investigate and compare the state of Media Literacy (ML) education and the texts of media-presented messages across three countries– Latvia, Bulgaria, and the Unites States of America. With a comparative light, we answer the following research questions: (1) what is the current state of discourse about ML in respective countries?; and (2) in what ways are ML related to national security, defense against propaganda, and the national or social practices associated with “integration”? 

We acknowledge, from our examination of the ways the media discuss and the public focuses upon media-message resistance and resilience, the exploration of concepts related to individual agency and personalized interpretations are not particularly valued or well-established as “public-truths.” In the instances we observe in this study, the stress on the “correct” media messages and preferred interpretations are not disclosed, but nonetheless the most read/viewed media have embedded biases promoting official, governmental “readings” which support hegemonic values. 

Thus, in this article, we argue that the status of ML education across the respective countries is different, albeit still somewhat “political”. The use of popular terms associated with ML, such as “propaganda” and “integration” provide a rich focal point for accessing local realities that this study attempts to decipher.The examined media discourses on ML also reflect culturally specific local understandings of media, its potential influence on the vulnerable groups that authorities see as needing “protection from evil contents”, and ideas authorities have about “national enemies” and their role in spreading harmful media messages. 

Method

Oftentimes, ML as a concern of national security is measured quantitatively, with an emphasis on assessing particular levels of self-reported (not always defined) ML in various populations locally, nation-wide, and/or from comparative national perspectives (e.g., among neighboring countries). This numerical information is summarized, shared, and distributed as graphics and tables for reports that may then influence policies and funding decisions for additional data collection and more reporting about “the public”. We instead take a qualitative approach. We are thinking about ML concerns as communication, media, and journalism scholars, and are interested in the instances and ways in which the respective members of the Latvian, Bulgarian, and USA societies may access, interpret, understand, and use the messages they receive. This is a study about media content from 2022 to mid-summer 2024 which makes inferences about meanings and their social functions. This is also a study that firmly acknowledges that we are at a particular historical moment and in specific places; but, nonetheless, we suggest our model of analysis and our particular findings may offer broader insights and recommendations.

The arguments of Hall (1977), Fiske (1993), Morley (2013), and others, aligning cultural studies with power relations, highlight a relationship which we also seek to identify through our deep reading of the messages of “mainstream” media sources and the related comments and sharing of those messages. Additionally, we attach the media ethnography practices of “thick description” (e.g., Geertz, 1973) to our understanding of the messages of interest. 

Our data includes a selected collection of the Latvian, Bulgarian, and the USA mass media messages and education policy documents. In the case of Latvia, for our collection strategy, we used the online print media archive news.lv and the most popular online news portals Delfi, TVNet & LSM (KANTAR, 2023); in the case of Bulgaria, we used the Media Literacy Coalition (2024) and newspaper news, popular report portals, and web-based sources; finally, in the case of the USA, we used library-indexed transcripts and files from the most accessed national media– CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, and web-based sources (Guttmann, 2024).

To implement our analysis, we first used keywords associated with ML to locate the relevant media content that mentions ML. We then proceeded with a close-up inspection of wording and meanings media writers/producers and quoted policy makers used when describing what ML is and what kind of knowledge, competences, and skills ML provides for whom, with what motives, and toward what ends. 

To evaluate and organize our three-country integration and comparison of notes about media content, we each considered headlines, major themes in articles, and the intensity/strength of offered arguments and “concerns” articulated by message sources. We also examined the reputations of experts and authorities cited in articles, and the repetitive-force of the topics of the articles. We found that the core themes could be organized around a handful of concepts. We collectively, in research meetings, discussed, clarified, compared, and named our-most prominent themes. Finally, we grouped our findings to identify popular meanings, visualized these, and proceeded with the analysis in line with the social construction approach. Our analysis illuminates the reality constructed by the ways in which the media depicts ML for the general public and the wider consequences this depiction might contain.

Findings

Identification of themes

Our findings are offered in nation-by-nation graphics, followed by evaluation and some analysis. For the sake of illustration, elements of our graphics are enumerated from more to less prominent in the media texts of our focus. We invite approaching these in terms of their “intensity” or “urgency”–from the red color symbolizing more prominent themes penetrating content for a variety of audiences to the blue color symbolizing only recently appearing themes more addressed to expert consumption.

In the case of Latvia, media analysis indicates the meanings associated with protecting vulnerable groups from harmful content. The most prominent theme aligns ML with national security and resilience building in the context of pro-Putin information war and attempts to picture Latvia as a “failed state”. ML here is seen as a “remedy” for being able to tell apart truth and choose “the right path” in one’s media consumption. 

Other popular themes are devoted to specific groups such as youth, seniors, and kids. While youth need to be protected from propaganda and deepfakes (also related to ad scams), in the case of seniors, recognition of financial scamming and skills associated with digital literacy (e.g. use of a variety of online tools and platforms) are put under the umbrella of ML. Finally, kids need to be aware of anonymous (sexual) predators and the importance of privacy protection. These three groups, for various reasons, are seen as unable to make their own decisions just yet and, thus, must be protected by learning from ML educators. While undoubtedly useful for helping individuals avoid harmful content, on a larger scale, this approach potentially contributes to the mistrust in media and ICT. The departure point always is the current issues (mostly in social media), such as propaganda, the harmful use of AI, new scamming techniques, and using media tools for protection, rather than offering ways to enable oneself to be successful in the online environment. This kind of approach also ignores the power of involvement in content creation, democratic debate, and freedom to access information.

One of the subtle themes occurring just recently, and in line with financial support available for modernizing print media, is the role of ML in societal integration and media sustainability. Here we see the reverse of power—from the source of “evil” media, finally comes a possible source of empowerment, albeit of a very specific kind. We discuss it more in detail at the sub-section devoted to the integration “problem” below. To elaborate on the empowering role of media, paradoxically, media representatives in Latvia are often invited as ML educators to teach, for instance, fact checking, reverse image searching, techniques employed by analytical journalists to verify their sources and information, and content creation. Here the underlying interests beyond creating an understanding in media work are rather pragmatic–to attract youth to media professions such as journalism and online content management. While it is valuable to learn journalistic skills from professionals who practice them everyday, here we also see a potential structural restriction for opening up ML curricula to include the critique of the media content beyond propaganda, disinformation, and information manipulation associated with information warfare. In other words, what criticism of advertisement-driven media economy can media representatives themselves teach to youth audiences in some sort of professionally ethical and integrative way if the criticism of consumer culture even once becomes a prominent topic in Latvian ML education curricula?

Finally, the first voices are observed echoing their concerns about freedom of speech in the context where the notion of propaganda and disinformation can easily be used as a label, for example, to name and denigrate a valid criticism of one’s country’s political or socioeconomic deficiencies. If we divide all information as “true” or “false” in the world where reality is almost never that simple, how can we even be in dialogue and peace with people different from us albeit with the same rights as fellow human beings?

In the case of Bulgaria, the analysis highlights the focus on protecting vulnerable groups from harmful content (the elderly and the youth). Most of the ideas and language surrounding media literacy in Bulgaria are translated directly from English (imported from the “West”) with programs, initiatives, and funding centered on first, examining local media ownership linked to political parties (propaganda and corruption linked to the political parties and government institutions), and second, as creating training for particular audiences (youth and seniors, but also broader) on various skills such as battling disinformation, fact-checking, and general digital editing. Unlike Latvia, however, when addressing pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation, the field does so very subtly by responding to propaganda and disinformation as a whole, since there is well-known and deep-rooted pro-Russian and pro-Putin support within the government. ML in Bulgaria is thus predominantly concerned with media consumption practices, education about media consumption (and its consequences), and the role of media ownership (and thus government-linked corruption) within major Bulgarian media. 

Similarly to Latvia, the major pedagogical programs are created to educate specific groups such as children (privacy and awareness of predatory behaviors), young adults (propaganda, deepfakes, general critical thinking skills), and seniors (financial scamming in addition to general digital literacy). The educational programs are as diverse and multifaceted as digital literacy as a whole, and the language employed to discuss such experiences is still comparatively new and predominantly “translated” from the “West”. Since the field of “communication” in Bulgaria has for the most part existed solely as “communication technologies” and “journalism,” education and research about media practices and processes which link media, communication, and context are still not centralized or often even coordinated across the separated university and other research units. As a result, such pedagogical programs (even when organized by the same coalition) may come across to the general public as unrelated; for example, classes one could choose from including “How to be confident and secure online” (for seniors) and “Wikipedia in the classroom” (for teachers) are all in Bulgarian, while articles such as “Your role in the information ecosystem” (unknown audience) is in English. On the other end of the spectrum are research publications and public discussions (such as presentations, think pieces, and symposia) focusing on general discussions of media ownership, which in Bulgaria often refers to well-known media moguls tied explicitly to political parties. This, while not directly contributing to media mistrust, does not allow for actual understanding of the larger media processes that run across these topics as larger ideologies and practices within ML. 

Furthermore, media representatives (mostly journalists) are often invited as ML educators, where they explicitly frame ML as linked to civic participation, emphasizing that “an informed citizen is a voting one.” As the role of the media (in this case often linked to political parties and local corruption) in creating and spreading disinformation has frequently been criticized in EU reports of the state of ML in the region, independent journalists and media scholars (often trained in the “West”) have attempted to create and maintain organizations for general ML education; however, this component seems to be one of many across the several abovementioned ML education “needs” identified within Bulgaria. 

A related “digital skills” category that is often featured as linked to ML in Bulgaria is media creativity and self-expression, where numerous trainings and stipends are offered for video production on various topics. These are often targeting younger people, both providing training and offering rewards for creative movies or shorts showcasing various “talents” and Bulgarian culture (often linked to attempts at reinforcing nationalism and combating “brain drain” by “showing all the current talent” in the country).

In the USA, regarding ML, a significant amount of media coverage is aimed at telling people that as a vulnerable group, senior citizens and less-educated working adults need to be especially cautious when evaluating the financial messages that they encounter. (In part, this level of coverage may be because “mainstream” media are still consumed by older people, lower-income people and people with less education, so the press is addressing their audience.) Caution is stressed regarding divulging banking and financial information, for instance, with the implication that the less-literate should be trained to be less trustful. 

Fomenting distrust is also a ML theme in mediated messages regarding child protections. Many of these accounts are directed toward parents, but several additionally put the onus of responsibility on Language Arts/English teachers, Biology/science teachers, and school librarians. The fear presented is that the less-literate will not be able to prevent children from seeing pornography, anti-family messages, and/or messages which contradict or call into question the beliefs promoted by “trusted institutions” (e.g., the church, schools, police, etc.) Relatedly, some rarely-occurring, anecdotal, but shared-by-media messages sensationally relate instances of entrapment, solicitation and/or “cyber-bullying,” in an effort to scare adults into limiting or forbidding youthful investigation of media consumption and creation.

Although this study reviewed post-COVID-19 pandemic media, the ML media in the USA was still devoting attention to addressing ways to review and evaluate health messages. The focus on experts, authorities, and health professionals working to debunk alternative forms of “wellness and healing” indicate that the reputation of medical information sources had been (according to mainstream media), improperly decoded by many receivers as politically partisan, and the recovery of valuing ideas about evidence, experience, and medical advice was not yet completed in social practice.

The attention to “fake news” and associated concepts in the USA sample, last among the most-prevalent categories, utilized well-worn frames of derision or dismissal. Domestic, rather than international, messages were identified as “concerning”, and much of the discourse aimed to tell people ways to identify media sources as politically left- or right-leaning, and emphasized which types of messages the public should consider to be made by “reliable sources”. Fact-checking and detail triangulation were praised, but recognition of the consensus and intra-quoting of pundits/article reprinting were not highlighted. There was a secondary focus on reading news and “citizenship”. 

Of particular note, although ML theorists often promote making as well as consuming messages, there was very little mention of creation/production in the collected media reviewed. ML news stories in the US, from the most-popular broadcasting and print sources (and their associated corporate web pages and social media posts), offer message receivers an emphasis on mainstream, organized, and socially and economically dominant mass media. This configuration suggests that mass media “do things to us,” rather than that the audience is particularly active. Furthermore, this logic reifies the concept of communities/citizens doing preferred-readings and responses from a smaller assortment of options, and implies communities are living within one-way communication flows. 

Propaganda  

Examining aspects of our review, we recognize that some issues and topics appear in all of the contrasted content. However, upon further review and discussion, it is apparent that the same words mean different things in different instances. In this section of the paper, we highlight a prominent element of concern as we ask: In what ways are ML related to national security, defense against propaganda, and the national or social practices associated with “integration”? ML is offered as a remedy to propaganda and/or fake news, with varying connections to explicit or assumed government interests in our respective nations. It may also be employed in strategies to educate the public about who the “enemies” we are to counter are. This variance in respective national/citizen understandings derives from our geographic and political histories.

How/why does identity matter? In this paper, we highlight that when we use the expression “Eastern”, we refer to a particular local (Bulgarian and Latvian respectively) ideological use of this term, for the term “Eastern Europe” locally is rarely a mere descriptor of a geographical location.  Instead, it is used as a socio-political designator, functioning as a synonym for a compilation of behaviors, practices, and “national traits” with not always the most positive of connotations. This is not as extreme as the term “Balkanism,” but is a similar “geographic appellation […] transformed into […] powerful pejorative designations in history, international relations, political science, and, nowadays, general intellectual discourse” (Todorova, 2009). 

While Bulgaria can be both geographically and ideologically (within a post-socialist and socio-political discussion) labeled as “Eastern Europe” without ideological and discursive connotations linked to Balkanism (see Todorova, 2009; Mazower, 2007), Latvia has ideologically and discursively pushed back on a similar label (despite a geographic position to the East of others within Europe). Such a distinction here is necessary, as both Bulgarian and Latvian populations have powerful ideological and emotional responses to the sometimes propagandistic uses of the term “Eastern” due to the nations’ national/historical contexts and their long and fraught relations with Russia and Türkiye (and the historical empires from those regions). Hence, resistance to propaganda from the “East” as well as messages deemed from the “West” are understood beyond their literal meanings associated with directionality. For Latvians, it means reacting in an oversensitive manner (with good reason, in the context of the current geopolitical situation) to anything coming from the “East,” (from the Russian Federation-based sources) as propaganda and harmful content in general, while maintaining a relative lack of criticism toward national media and sources from the “West.”

In the USA, propaganda studies matured during WWII, and continued during the “cold war” (circa 1930s to late 1980s), but now direct and explicit fears are often broadly perceived as a remnant of a distant past, and academic research has taken different turns (DeFleur, 2017). Furthermore, external threats are understood in the USA from a perspective of the geographic privilege of location; the USA understands itself (often) as a very large, relatively-isolated nation in the western hemisphere, with very few threatening adjacent countries. The notions of American assumptions of distinction/exceptionalism are also paired in the public’s imagination with the enormous reach of popular American-made media, which leads to assumptions that world-wide exports of American messages (and ideologies) receive internationally favorable opinions (e.g., Lang & Lang, 2013, and others).

Based on these understandings, our findings and positions are described below, in a nation-by-nation review and analysis.

In the case of Latvia, the propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation that ML education tends to counter is contextualized in the current geopolitical situation whereby citizens of the countries in the Baltic region are closely paying attention to the Russian war in Ukraine. The “information war” and “foreign influence operations” had become a mainstream frame for understanding and addressing popular criticism towards the State since 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea. These are seen as a major threat to the stability and security of the countries of the region, which have historical reasons to beware Russian attempts to expand their territories. In this context, ML in Latvia plays a role within a comprehensive national defense system and is seen as one of the essential remedies that strengthens the resilience of the citizens who need to be schooled in recognizing and countering “pro-Putin” messages, mainly those in social media and/or Russian-speaking media contents that are available (often illegally) in the territory of the Republic of Latvia.

To facilitate the ML skills and competences necessary for building the aforementioned “resilience”, the focus is on teaching “critical thinking”, which in this case constitutes the recognition of (political) manipulation in social media with a focus on source evaluation, fact checking, and (rather obvious) manipulation techniques such as the use of emotional language, threats, framing, false images, argumentation fallacies, and typical Kremlin narratives of the “failed state” and “rotten West”. As a result of this ML training, citizens are expected to recognize these types of messages, avoid sharing them, and, ideally, stay away from the sources of “harmful” information in general. 

While being able to recognize and evaluate problematic content is undoubtedly a valuable skill to have, the political agenda of ML curricula indirectly presumes the “right” way in which one becomes a critical thinker vis-à-vis critical (media) content about one’s country. This may lead to a situation where anyone eager to criticize the State’s policies can be easily labeled as being disloyal or Putin’s supporter. Politicizing ML education, therefore, threatens the freedom of speech and the quality of a democratic debate since it (softly) schools citizens into what is “right” to think about one’s country and its situation by employing paternalistic means. 

Bulgaria has been strongly criticized in numerous European Union reports for being a country where the government is often spending more time “generating disinformation instead of combating it.” And, as this is often well-recognized within the country, numerous journalists and ML organizations often focus heavily on “propaganda” as a problem internal to the country (even when discussing Pro-Russian ideology coming from outside Bulgaria, it is often disseminated by Bulgarian political figures themselves). As a result, from its onset in the country ML organizations have heavily focused on encouraging the establishing of independent media in the country. 

Secondary to that has been the focus on mis/desinformation from the outside. Those efforts have led to funding for training programs aimed towards developing critical thinking skills among the youth, with particular attention to education and digital media skills. Within education, ML has been added as part of a larger overhauling of the educational system, where reading comprehension skills have been found lacking at extremely high levels. Numerous programs and funding have focused on early education (skills related to fact checking and evaluation, as well as privacy) as opposed to larger misinformation trends related to national security. 

As noted previously, in the USA, the ML stories about propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation are rarely about international relations or explicit international threats. Although partisan media are sharing and adopting messages from “foreign agents” and international “troll farms”, the USA’s ML news stories in our collection instead devote attention to considering propaganda as the spreading of false claims from Republicans (and “conservatives”) and/or Democrats (and “progressives”) aiming to influence public thinking. Threats to stability found on “marginalized social media” are ignored or minimized.

Regarding the perceived target of “harmful” messages, a significant component of American ML focuses on instructing vulnerable sub-populations (e.g., children, the elderly, those with low psychological/social well-being, etc.). One educational program described by ML news coverage involves the SIFT system, directing message consumers to Stop, Investigate, Find, and Trace suspicious content. This has been used in several library workshops and schools in several states, and has been taught in courses for educators. A newly-promoted alternative suggestion of message resistance seems to be found in news stories of school and public-education programs conducting psychological inoculation or prebunking (e.g., Roozenbeek, J., & van der Linden, S., 2018; and van der Linden, Berinsky & Thagard, 2018-19) involving teaching people to recognize rhetorical strategies, persuasion, and false claims in messages, rather than skills in debunking false claims. Although academic meta-studies critique claims of effectiveness of prebunking tactics, it is now promoted by (some) US teacher training because it presents a clear method which can be employed.

In news stories about ML education in the USA, specific processes like these are described as systematic means of reinforcing “proper ways” of thinking, rather than as offering diverse modes of interpretations to align with assorted values. Regarding the norms embedded in the US perspectives about the power of media interpretations and the ways media shape reality, a great amount of educational messages thus seem to be used for talking about ways to adopt the dominant culture’s readings of mainstream media sources. The establishment’s “preferred readings” are presented as “correct answers” on standardized tests (with published results shared in reports); therefore, some will argue that schools (and student groups) function as ideological state apparatuses (even though there are partisan undertones and criticism presented in school settings). Criticism by school pupils of the status quo may be devalued. Furthermore, because there is less focus on adult education than on training for school children, the news frame of ML in the USA situates the possibilities for learning as remaining mostly an assignment “for kids”. This frame then allows adults to remain resistant to improving their ML skills and unable to recognize the illogic of “alternative facts”, and results in a segment of the American public believing in conspiracy theories.

Integration

In this paper we highlight ways racial/social integration is presented by the media in our respective countries. The ML skills of understanding and the practical applications related to addressing integration of oneself, one’s community, and “others” is differently seen and differently provided with “solutions” aligning with media-provided messages and media interpretation skills in the content we examined. 

During the period of our data analysis, in Latvia, several documents devoted to societal integration that also speak to the role of media were under development. One of them was A development plan for a cohesive and civically active society 2024-2027, which received attention from public media since its content was submitted for public consultation until May 2024. This document illuminates the key role of media (and civil society) in the national security system, and refers to them as guardians of democracy in the context of the current geopolitical situation where the importance of internal and external security is significantly growing. It sees the security of Latvia’s information space as being based on strong local media and quality local content in the national language. It is local content in the national language that forms the backbone of any country’s information space, including spreading public understanding of world affairs, preserving heritage for future generations, keeping the country’s cultural space alive, and contributing to the development of the national language. It is important to take measures to ensure state support for the production of quality content in Latvian, including by addressing the minority population living in Latvia in the national language, thus promoting the cohesion of society on the basis of the national language. The use of other languages is justified if it aims at delivering important information from the State to the newcomers (Saliedētas un pilsoniski aktīvas sabiedrības attīstības plāns 2024.-2027. gadam). 

The draft of Latvian media policy guidelines 2024-2027 illuminates a particularly dangerous place where ML activities are especially necessary and strengthening media and information space is of a crucial importance– Latvia’s eastern border region. The remedy is seen in increasing media accessibility, reducing the consumption of illegal content, expanding media literacy activities and increasing the presence of the Latvian Public Service Media (Latvijas mediju politikas pamatnostādnes 2024.–2027. gadam).

To build upon the aforementioned excerpts and ideas, if ML in Latvia is mainly about critical understanding of political messages in the “right” way, then developing media quality for the sake of societal integration and cohesion leads to providing the public with better content of the “right” quality so that inhabitants have a wider choice and better chances to be exposed to the “right” content. Modernization of media ensures sustainability and resilience of inhabitants by providing quality content in the national language, thus contributing to the integration of ethnic groups and worldviews around Latvian as a national language. This version of integration can then become the integration of realities and worldviews of inhabitants into mainstream thinking. At the same time, in light of the historical fear of Russification and current association of the Russian language with disloyalty to the State, it fails to see the importance of quality content in minority languages beyond the official State’s information. We say “integration” but think “assimilation” instead.

In Bulgaria, if the word “integration” is mentioned, it is in relation to learning more about ML in order for one to become a more informed voting citizen, who is integrated in the EU, as Bulgarians often evoke their EU inferiority complex of being not-yet-European. As mentioned above, since most of the language and ideology surrounding ML in Bulgaria is imported from outside the country, its implementation is also somewhat superficial. For example, discussions of integration are often in the shape of mentioning “media pluralism”, as it appears in EU reports criticizing the ML level in Bulgaria as linked to such media pluralism. However, since the country has such serious problems with disinformation (from the inside/produced by government institutions) and is often strategically yielded by political figures, polarization, hate speech, and social division and mistrust are often used strategically by the same political figures. As such, integration as linked to disenfranchised and marginalized social communities is often left behind and not a major priority. 

In the USA, integration is one of the many social issues for which ML is an offered response or remedy. Social integration is thus often linked to “identity politics” and/or racial justice. Various categories of people are “othered” in American society, specifically people who do not conform to the dominant culture’s expectations of race, gender, physical or mental ability, or who present other marginalizing factors. To all of these people, and society at-large, at various times the media suggest that the “improved” ML response is to provide more diverse visibility on screens and representation in print forms of news stories, advertising and publicity.The “counting” of types of faces and types of bodies is a common ML exercise noted in news stories, with statements that there are more of “X” than there were years ago, or that the percentage of “X” shown in a given media is beginning to parallel their numbers within the national population (Greenberg, Mastro & Brand, 2002). Much of this content analysis is useful, but is oftentimes treated neutrally rather than as a call to action.

As a counterpoint, ML aiming for integration in the US will be more effective when empowerment is coming from not only the telling/showing of diverse stories about lived experiences, but also relies on expanding opportunities within news industries– with skilled and valued workers “behind the scenes” (e.g., EU cases, as cited in Finkel, et al, 2017) rather than merely in advertising copy with tokenized images. Although examining representations of our “mean world” and fictionalized stereotypes can be a way ML can inform the struggle for justice, this championing of media potential has been variably realized. For instance, despite having people of color assigned to news crews in the USA, persistently stereotypical news coverage of police practices and criminals have not been sufficiently scrutinized, and social justice has not (yet) been realized.

The “normalization” of color-blind arguments, with stresses on common rather than distinctive values, have been attempted by some within the ML movement, while others have celebrated the “diverse voices” of those pushed into the positions of “others” in some creative work being done, however very little cultural dialogue has resulted from either initiative.

Conclusions and ways forward

ML is sometimes offered as the solution to a multitude of social problems that get tied into information access and knowledge formation. We offer arguments regarding ways the media have used the terminology of “literacies” to supplant the call for greater public knowledge and stronger basic education, because government support and funding agencies embrace the vocabulary ML professionals have utilized. Therefore, it becomes right to investigate the ways “literacy” gets added to the instruction and development of public responses to difficult topics. If people do not understand local politics and government, how health initiatives function, how mechanical and technical systems operate and become adopted/distributed, and how finances can be managed, is “literacy” a basic-level or an advanced-level mode of thinking and behaving?

In Latvia, the discipline is mostly recognized by its full name once studied at undergraduate courses or graduate programs. On a primary and secondary level of education, it belongs to the set of transverse competences championed by several disciplines mainly in the field of humanities (history, literature, etc.), and with a strong emphasis on national security that uses ML primarily for building resilience against harmful information. For undergraduate and graduate courses, it is often tied together with argumentation and critical thinking, mass communication, media studies, literary criticism, philosophy of logics, and other courses that deal with understanding a variety of texts, cognitive biases, behavior economics, and philosophies of science. Most of them are taught within a range of applied communication programs that teach professions in journalism, media, public relations, marketing, and advertising. For adults and other audiences operating outside formal education, there are a range of non-governmental initiatives, financed by EU and the USA donors as well as the Latvian government. While some signs demonstrate a certain maturity of the field of ML (establishment of first graduate programs, research institutes, and UNESCO chairs) educators involved in the process often express regret for the lack of a systematic and sustainable approach to developing education policies and allocating sustainable funding for ML initiatives, as well as the lack of educational focus on the content creation skills and competencies of ordinary media users e.g. beyond often patronizing focus on recognition harmful content. The understanding of ML by policy makers initially sees it as a tool for equipping people with abilities to evaluate information and its sources to tell apart and use objective information for forming their opinion (Latvian media policy guidelines 2016-2020). This kind of definition excludes the quality issues that other information sources besides mass media can have. It also fails to see a critical approach to information beyond dichotomies of true-false, objective-biased, and the like. The said approach pertains to the understanding of ML for the next planning period for documents regulating the development of media and social cohesion. There, content creation as a part of ML has a more prominent place; however, the context of creating a resilient and safe country and its people is still the predominant motivator for developing ML education.

In Bulgaria, the discipline is comparatively new in its focus on critical thinking, leadership, and media-related education and competencies for improved civic participation (Media Literacy Coalition, 2024). Previously, the primary interest was political disinformation and propaganda. The current active organizations (primarily non-profit) aim at pedagogical and research endeavors at the university but also at the general public level. Courses and dissertations at the university level are often housed within the departments of “Library and Information Sciences” or “European/Media/Journalism Studies”. Unlike other “imported” fields (ones that have entered the country from EU sources, without existing historical foundations in Bulgaria) such as sociolinguistics (taught primarily in English and not translated outside university departments and academic conferences), media literacy (медийна грамотност) exists in a translated and adapted to the Bulgarian audiences format, aiming at comprehensive media education and analysis in relation to cultural politics (another comparatively new term for the country) and specifically the role of the media (state or “private” ownership) in them. Such projects (including numerous conferences and workshops, links to which were advertised by the Media Literacy Coalition, 2024) have been predominantly funded by EU projects and funding from the US Embassy. There has been local government support for the field, but some such backing has become contested as the country continues to struggle with government corruption (and the aim of the field is to address and prepare audiences for exactly such widely used government disinformation practices).

In the USA, the development of ML education is piecemeal and unsystematic, addressed by a variety of regional and local initiatives and rarely funded by the national government. There are several professional groups offering their statements regarding best practices for teachers, mostly regarding the instruction of children in classrooms and school libraries. Their guides discuss the teaching of message identification and categorization, evaluation, and creation. Secondarily, some of these organizations offer instructional materials for adults, including community workshops teaching the identification/evaluation of message sources, and discernment skills to recognize information/disinformation regarding public issues. The primary concerns for youth, regarding the effects of screen time on educational attainment; the abilities of students to evaluate, critique and create responses to mediated messages; and the social/interpersonal effects of messages on physical and mental wellness have become coupled with a growing concern for adults needing instructions and assistance with skills related to evaluating sources of political, interpersonal, and health-related information and advice and their validity, as well as with recognizing AI-generated “fake news”. Twenty-first century media literacy education in the USA is responsive to some perceived contemporary threats, but is oftentimes overly specific and too insular due to the vastness of the commercialized American mass media landscape and the diversity of the availability of micro- and niche-audience online offerings. 

We see the politicizing of ML education as being a double-edged sword. While resilience of the people and security of the country are undoubtedly important motives for developing ML education, and seeing these initiatives as a tool for protecting individuals and their wellbeing is a valuable departure point, such positions also can function as a very restrictive force. A focus on prescriptive kinds of orientation can threaten the freedom of speech and the quality of a democratic debate, since this kind of ML may (merely) prescribe the “right” attitude towards one’s state, public policies, and societal issues locally and internationally, and may derive from a paternalistic perspective regarding the public. The limited, normative approach thus restricts the ability to experience and enjoy the plurality of opinions, since it schools individuals into the dichotomy of “right” and “wrong” information, media, and worldviews. We treat pluralism to be a sign of a quality of journalistic content and the right of a citizen in a democratic country, yet how ready, after applying a polarizing force of normativity, can we actually be able to hear diverse perspectives? 

Leaders and governments that tend to keep imagining creativity solely within the humanities do not always see how ML can bridge, for instance, developing virtual reality design with skills related to the deconstruction of deepfakes. They also may not be valuing photographers with expertise in image framing nor be supporting documentary producers with ML skills related to exposing and debunking propaganda. Therefore, although creativity and the entrepreneurial drive associated with content creation activity (and connected professions) are eventually noticed by policy makers as economically beneficial ventures to nurture, we assert support should be more-open, as people cannot rise to their full potential restricted by a paternalistic environment that entraps individuals into a normative approach to media and content creation practices. 

Lastly, the content we reviewed from the samples found in the media and in the policy documents of our respective nations, situated the focus on “Media Literacy”. We instead wish for a more regular practice of critical thinking that requires the skills of listening and dialogue within the (blended) context of Media and Information Literacy (MIL). Applying global understandings, recognizing contrasts and adopting the best practices we can find, and stressing interactivity in thinking across nations, educators, and the public can greatly enhance creative thinking about interactive as well as “delivered” communicative options to meet larger goals of connection and problem-solving.  

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