Keeping an Open Mind

Why do media people hate media education so much? The latest exponent of this tendency is Tim Bell, erstwhile ad expert for the Tories, whose splenetic response to the idea that children might learn to be critical of the media appears in today's Observer.

The sociologist Steve Fuller has apparently suggested that media education could help primary school children be less susceptible to advertising (well, some debate to be had here about how susceptible they already are, and about the effectiveness of media education that only aims at this outcome, but anyway, give the guy a break, it's a reasonable enough question in these times when even the Government has commissioned a study on the impact of the commercial world on children's well being - though why they have still not published the results is a bit of a mystery - maybe they're scared of Tim Bell and his ilk).

The Observer journalist Anushka Asthana got passed on to me for a quote about media literacy in primary schools, poor woman, and got an earful about relationships between moving image and print literacy, children's early acquisition of comprehension skills, you know the sort of thing, which she rendered reasonably well given the limited space she'd been allocated. I don't know whether she took a hint from one of my comments to her about media hostility to media education, but she certainly went to the right place for an example of it.

The fascinating thing is that Bell bases his contemptuous dismissal of media education on the fact that "we need people who are educated and have open minds". So encouraging critical analysis of the media leads to closed minds, does it? Or is it just that Bell fears the effect of such analyses on the PR industry's reputation for objectivity, accuracy and balance?