My Media Literacy Education

I never received any formal media literacy education while I was in school. Our school had a newspaper, but all it was about was gossip and other school stories like the football team or basketball team. We did have channel 1, but only one of my teachers ever showed it. When she did, the news was on early in the morning before our 8am start time and it was always muted. I never really paid attention to it, because I was usually really tired and it looked really, really bad. I always wanted to change the channel, but she never would let me.

The only thing that I learned about media bias before I came to college, I learned on my own through two different experiences. The first experience happened when I watched Bill O'Reilly's show in high school. It presented the stories in a different way and it surprised me that it seemed to have an obvious bias in every story that was aired or discussed. It was not that I necessarily disagreed with the bias all the time, but it was just weird to me at the time that there was such an apparent bias and it shocked me. The second experience had to do more with radio. I remember being in Tulsa and listening to a station and then going somewhere (I think it was Florida), and on the exact same frequency, was a station that sounded exactly like the one at home with the exact same host, who was reporting the same news and playing the same music! That sort of shocked me, but it opened my eyes to the fact that if this was happening that only a certain few were in control of the messages that were being sent out to the American public.