Why Media Literacy is Crucial in an Age of Untruths

That Solo Life, Episode 268: Why Media Literacy is Crucial in an Age of Untruths

Michelle Kane (00:18):
Thank you for joining us for this episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves, people like me, Michelle Kane, with The Voice Matters, and my wonderful co-host, Karen Swim with Solo PR Pro. Hey Karen, how are you today?

Karen Swim, APR (00:33):
Hey, Michelle. I'm doing great. How are you?

Michelle Kane (00:36):
I'm doing well. It's another great week in pr.

Karen Swim, APR (00:40):
It is another great week in PR.

Michelle Kane (00:44):
I used to have one of my algebra teachers always used to start class with. It's a beautiful day for mathematics and a wonderful day for Algebra two A.

Karen Swim, APR (00:54):
I love it. That is setting things off on such a positive note. I love it.

Michelle Kane (00:59):
I'm trying really hard because often we can get a little cynical in this business, one of those, the things of the job. Anyway, how are you all doing? But yeah, we want to talk about media literacy because we can get a little jaded about that, right?

Michelle Kane (01:19):
It can be frustrating. Certainly our senses are heightened to it in an election year when words and ideas are thrown around with sometimes not enough scrutiny and just how the publics that we serve can be disserviced just by lack of, not that they're, I don't want to say no one's beneath us or anything, but just the discernment about these things is not in their first nature per se. Whereas we're trained to scrutinize everything. And what we really want to focus on is how the development of AI and how it is getting so good so quickly has become a major force in all of this, and how we can help people continues to know what's true and what's right, and especially as we champion our brands. So that's just a little bit,

Karen Swim, APR (02:17):
I agree, media literacy is one of the keys to fighting mouth and disinformation, obviously, and for PR pros, we have to train ourselves in it and make sure that we are staying on top of it. But equally important is to provide information to our publics because brands get subjected to this too, in big and small ways.

Michelle Kane (02:43):
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we've seen the video technology has gotten really, really good, and I'm sure we all encounter people who think, oh yeah, I saw that thing online, and you're like, well, that wasn't real. Oh, it looked super real to me. And you're thinking, oh, and it's a lot to wrap our arms and our minds around, and we're certainly not going to vanquish it here in this podcast episode, but it's certainly something that I think we, in the PR business, I almost wish that
maybe we do a PSA campaign on it, right? As an industry.

Karen Swim, APR (03:22):
I wish that we would too. And I know that our industry association, PRSA definitely does have a hub of information around this, but I think that we as PR pros really have to take the lead in disseminating the information to our publics. And it may feel like we are just dropping a tablespoon of water into the ocean, but when we are all committed to it, we can make changes in our small little corners of the world.

Michelle Kane (03:54):
Yeah, it's true. It's true. We can each influence both personally and professionally just by advising. So what does that look like? Does that look like in conversations with your clients, depending what the projects are, just raising awareness and saying, Hey, we realize that this is out here. How might this impact you? How can we position ourselves in whether the content we produce, how we produce it, how we present it? How can we help our publics know that we are operating in truth and accuracy?

Karen Swim, APR (04:31):
I agree, I, and I think for clients, we have to do two things. I think that we need to equip the clients to be able to monitor patients. Part of that is our responsibility, but that means things like having great monitoring systems set up and if necessary, having your client pay for those tools so that you can effectively do that.
(04:54):
We need to monitor for their brand name, for their logos, for images, for videos. When we produce content for the clients, there should be something on there that stamps ownership even with the images so that we at least have that documented trail of veracity. I think verifying clients on social media sites is important. Sometimes we skip those steps, but that's important. And equipping the public with tools to be able to fact check. There are fact check sites for news. There are, maybe it's adding stuff to clients' websites or adding things when we share articles, please be aware that this article was only published in X, and if you see this anywhere else, it is not the original article and it's being used without our permission because there are scraper sites that will take content and mash it together, and then sometimes they get facts wrong and information wrong.

Michelle Kane (05:56):
And that speaks to the temptation. I know some clients love to subscribe to those aggregators of, oh, it's great. I only pay $10 a month for this content. I'm like, yeah, you and everybody else. Google's not going to love that, but that's another issue for another day. But yeah, really protecting themselves and their property, so to speak, their intellectual property as best we can. And in turn, really taking the lead and helping their audiences know, Hey, this is out there, so just be aware and the information you're consuming, do your best to make sure it's real.

Karen Swim, APR (06:35):
Can you imagine how quickly we could curtail? We're not going to eliminate this problem, but we could truly curtail it if every single company, every single organization took a step to educate their publics on how to determine fact from fiction and gave them some tools. We have this toolkit up here to say, what if every single brand had a toolkit that was easy for the public? Here's a site where you can check to see if, even if it has nothing to do with them. I would love to see that become the norm where companies said, you know what? We're tired of this. It hurts us. It hurts industries. It hurts us individually when misinformation is put out there. If we could just teach the public what's true and what's not, because I feel like much of the public, they really interact with and view information in a very different way than we do. And they view things in terms of their belief system. So if they, for instance, hold a particular political belief, anything that opposes that belief, they see as fake news.
(07:50):
And so they're missing critical information that helps them to make decisions because it doesn't agree with their values, and so they just believe it's fake or biased. But everything that agrees with their belief system, they see as real. And that's not a great way to look at information, because there are things that may uphold your belief system that are absolutely true, but there are also things that are absolutely false. And vice versa. When it opposes your belief system, it could be either completely accurate or completely false. And so we have to train, these are the people that are buying our products. I mean, I think about review sites. Does everyone know how to understand if these reviews may not be factual? Well, that can completely hurt a brand in itself. If someone decides to attack them with fake reviews, this has happened. Oh, yes, it has.
(08:49):
And then people have a negative viewpoint, and it's not even true. Oftentimes not even people that have purchased the products and services, they're just slamming them because of some perceived slight or some attack or because they think it will be fun to do this. I mean, I've even seen this in real time on social media where somebody gets mad at a brand and everybody says, we should go and give them reviews. Well, you've never been to that restaurant or you've never bought that product. And the reviews are legitimately for how you feel about what they're selling, not how you feel about the organization.

Michelle Kane (09:26):
Yeah. Yeah. Recently I saw a local business affected by a former disgruntled employee. I mean, this person just lit a brush fire across social media in reviews, Facebook, everywhere. And you're thinking, don't you have anything better to do? It's a shame. And I've also encountered a person who right away just wrote off a local newspaper as being biased. Well, they're all biased because it's so ingrained in them that every news entity is biased. So I just calmly ask them, have you read this publication, one of the few remaining with on the ground and bringing actual day-to-Day news to, well, no, I haven't. I've just heard that all. I said, well, I encourage you. Here's the link. I encourage you to read this. It's like, you're wrong. But I don't think I'm going to get anywhere beyond. Just think. Well, check it out. Take two minutes, ski, skim it.

Karen Swim, APR (10:32):
And this battle is often thankless and draining. I will say that we still have a responsibility as people who hold knowledge to share it and to do our best to advocate for truth and fairness and to lead the way in that, because this is the profession that we signed up for and it's part of our jobs.
(10:58):
And if not us, then who? And it's important for us to make an impact in the world around us. And we also were tasked with protecting our publics. And so in my mind, that also means protecting them from information that is inaccurate, incorrect. That's not fair to them either. They should have facts in order to make decisions, and they shouldn't be walking around with information that is not true. And then we have this recent problem, which is just important to me outside of political belief systems, it should never be okay to make up a story to get news attention.

Michelle Kane (11:39):
Yeah.

Karen Swim, APR (11:39):
You think unjust and unethical, nothing about it is okay. And as we've seen in recent incidents, when you perpetuate an untruth intentionally, it's not a harmless act. There is harm. I feel the same way about that as I do about PR stunts that have happened in the past. A stunt is just unprofessional. There are much better ways, and I'm not talking about campaigns or fun things that we do, but stunts that really are on the other side of ethics,

Michelle Kane (12:21):
They don't come from a place of honesty. Yeah, they don't come from

Karen Swim, APR (12:25):
Exactly. Exactly. It's just not okay. Don't deceive people intentionally because you can harm people and you can cause harm to others. And what we've seen in this recent incident is that it really has spilled over and people have been harmed by words that were not true. So yes, we absolutely have a responsibility to call it out to help other people. And I think the best thing is to empower people to be able to understand for themselves so that they can do their own research and that they can still believe what they want to believe, but we need to empower them and equip them with the tools to be able to spot this stuff out. I mean, in a perfect world, I would love to see social media also take a bigger role in fighting this fight as well. Even fighting against deep fake photos and having the AI fraud detection and mount information detectors be innovated faster than the technology so that it's ahead of the game and it can flag these things the same way that we flag spam. And sometimes things get marked spam that are not, and so there has to be human interaction with all of these tools, but at least being aware that something could potentially not be true is so helpful.

Michelle Kane (13:50):
It is. And as you're saying that, I'm thinking, I realize, but does Facebook, does meta realize that not doing that, not doing that has actually driven people off of their platform? How many people have enjoyed using it and because of those very things say, I don't go there anymore. I don't do any of that. So what has actually been gained by these platform creators? I think it's really shortsighted. Doing the right thing is always a good idea. Even if you don't think so in the short term. It really is, and it's so important because we are all hit with so much messaging throughout our days every second. You just can't escape it. That truth matters. It matters probably more than ever. So any way that we as PR pros can help with that, and yeah, it can be draining, it can be maddening. So don't knock yourselves out. But I love the idea of a teaspoon of water in the ocean. They will add up if we all contribute.

Karen Swim, APR (15:01):
I agree. So let's grab our teaspoons and join the fight.

Michelle Kane (15:05):
There we go. Spoons up people. Well, if you've gotten some value out of this and we hope you did, please do share it around. Check us out@solopro.com to catch up on old episodes. Hey, give us a review and until next time, thank you for listening to That Solo Life.