Une conférence de Marie-Ève Thérenty (U. Montpellier) et Emmanuelle Danblon (U. Bruxelles), dans le cadre du cycle « Que veut (et que peut) encore l’éducation aux médias ? ».
24 février 2022
Une conférence de Marie-Ève Thérenty (U. Montpellier) et Emmanuelle Danblon (U. Bruxelles), dans le cadre du cycle « Que veut (et que peut) encore l’éducation aux médias ? ».
24 février 2022
My starting point is a rather pessimistic viewpoint on Media Education: since the main goals of this discipline are now integrated into the very logic of the media themselves, what else can be expected from Media Education? In other words: since values such as “emancipation”, “transparency”, “participation” are now what define the core of legitimate discourse on media and in media, which critical perspectives could we still provide as media scholars, without being suspect of undermining the noble project endorsed by this discourse, in the very name of Media Education? Of course one could have a more optimistic, but maybe lazier, interpretation, which considers that the job of Media Education is actually done, and well done, by the media themselves, and that there is then nothing more to worry about. Let’s try to be neither pessimistic neither lazy.
Fake news is commonly recognized to be a direct generator of controversy as well as the “discursive events” (Calabrese 2018) that feed and structure it. The identification of fake news through media coverage then implicitly becomes the embodiment of critical thinking; along those lines, the act of identifying fake news turns into a set way of preserving the public’s ability to take stand on the democratic issues involved. However, I wish to draw attention to the observation according to which, despite this apparently close relationship between controversy and so-called fake news, discussing a public controversy around that frame does not fuel the debate, but rather tends to neutralize it, on a political level.