Watching What We Watch

This article explores the outcome of an event on "media literacy" which seeks to describe the United Kingdom media regulator, Ofcom. Sandy Starr's article frames the discussion when she starts with "'Literacy' is commonly understood as the ability to read and write, which is acquired as a key stage in child development. But what do the terms 'media literacy', 'emotional literacy' and 'political literacy' mean? And why is the UK's media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), so keen on promoting them?"

According to Sandy Starr, Ofcom is a media regulator which tries to "assist in interpreting the media, rather than to ban things because they're immoral or seditious, as an old-fashioned censor might do." Ofcom is actually following a law from the 2003 Communications Act 2003 which states that Ofcom has a "duty to promote media literacy." Starr states that Ofcom's intentions were "motivated chiefly by an anxiety, on the part of an isolated political elite, that the media enjoys greater public influence than politicians do..."

Starr uses an event entitled "Emotional and Political Literacy and the Media" to illustrate her point that "choice" is a word used by Ofcom in its pronouncements and initiatives which is in effect a "recipe for imposing officially sanctioned values upon people." At that event, a speaker Annette Hill, professor of media studies at the University of Westminster, presented research about the emotional responses of TV viewers in response to factual television programmes. She gave an example of children's distress to watching animals suffer while parents instead focused on an educational value. According to Starr, "Hill implied that the children were in some ways savvier than the parents, for recognising that these sorts of programmes are emotionally exploitative."

Other speakers included James Park, director of Antidote, the campaign for emotional literacy, and his colleague Barry Richards, professor of public communication at Bournemouth University. According to the article, "Park and Richards acknowledged the concern that these new forms of literacy could become an insidious means of seeking to engineer people's ideas and behaviour. They argued that the pursuit of emotional and political literacy is no authoritarian conspiracy, but rather a 'process', an ongoing, open-ended affair. Yet this just demonstrated how slippery and difficult to pin down these new literacy projects are. Vagueness is a convenient means of avoiding being held to account for one's interests and objectives."

At the end of the event, Ofcom's media literacy manager Robin Blake admitted that 'there is no clear and agreed definition of media literacy. And while Annette Hill believes it it useful to have these categories: 'media literacy', 'political literacy' and 'emotional literacy', the author Sally Starr contends that "the once meaningful category of 'literacy' to be left well alone, before it dissolves further into a sea of meaningless Ofcomspeak."