Hey Kate,
I enjoyed reading your concise post on media literacy. In the interview with Miller and Smith (2021), I also found the discussion on the misleading nature of news converge and the supply and demand aspect to be interesting.
I immediately thought about how this could relate to the frequency illusion (also known as the Baader-Meinhof) phenomenon. It’s related to memory and is the act of perceiving things to occur more often when in reality it only feels this way because you’re selectively attending to it. In the case of news outlets, since they often only cover extreme stories such as kidnapping, crime, natural disaster, etc., people may perceive these things to occur more often than usual. This along with internal biases can feed into people’s perception of the world and possibly feed into negative stereotypes and prejudice. This is all to say that I think media literacy is so important so we can consume information with all of this in mind.
Thanks for sharing!
Sincerely,
Kathy