Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a clear warning about the corrosive influence that misinformation can have on society in public remarks Tuesday.
My colleague Jordan Rubin wrote a great post spotlighting Sotomayor’s comments on the importance of obeying court rulings during her discussion with Knight Foundation CEO Maribel Pérez Wadsworth at a Florida college.
That discussion later shifted to talk about freedom, at which point Sotomayor — one of the three liberal justices on the nine-member court — framed media and news literacy as fundamental to American democracy.
“We will lose our democracy” if people, particularly young people, don’t make it “their responsibility to be literate about the basis for your decision-making,” Sotomayor warned. She urged Americans to develop the knowledge to identify falsehoods and navigate the attempts at confusion and misdirection that are widespread online.
I took her comments to mean she wants everyone to be sensible in forming their media diet, and particularly as we navigate the cynical and conspiratorial hellscapes that are social media platforms, where a growing chunk of Americans get their news.
Watch a clip of the justice’s comments here:
Earlier in the program, Sotomayor said the internet “is creating an extraordinary challenge to the press and the world, because it’s largely unregulated, it has no standards of conduct.” She noted that internet-born reports tend to lack the rigorous fact-checking often deployed in more traditional news shops, but she also talked about taking personal responsibility in rooting out fact from fiction.
“All of us have an obligation too, right now, which is: information literacy is the most important topic of our society today,” she said.
I agree with the justice here. In fact, the idea of media literacy as a means of undermining misinformation and propaganda has been top of mind for me over the past few years. I recently came across an excerpted interview from movie director Martin Scorsese that speaks directly to the issue Sotomayor raised. His remarks were about getting young people to understand visual media, and how it can be used to “make an emotional and psychological point to an audience.”
“We have to begin to teach our younger people how to use this very powerful tool, because we know film — the image — can be so strong, not only for good use, [but] for bad use,” he told the education news platform Edutopia in 2012, noting how Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl amused the masses in Germany with her film “Triumph of the Will.”
Sotomayor and Scorsese make excellent points. Without media literacy, Americans will be hopelessly vulnerable to misinformation and manipulation.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.