5 Short Films, 5 Profound Lessons in Media Literacy

Now more than ever, we cannot take news media at face value – we need tools to read media critically, strategies to discern how information works. This is what inspired The Listening Post’s project: Media Theorised.

We’ve taken key works of five thinkers from around the world – theorists located in the space between the cosmopolitan centre and the 'global south'. Roland Barthes, French philosopher; Noam Chomsky, American linguist and political activist; Stuart Hall, Jamaican-British cultural historian; Marshall McLuhan, Canadian academic; Edward Said, Palestinian-American literary historian.

As Roland Barthes would have put it: these are writers who have taught us how to ‘read against the grain’.

Working with journalists, artists and political activists from Africa, Latin America, Asia, the United States and Europe, we have created five videos supplemented by essays to introduce you to these media theorists and to help you apply some of their critical tools in your everyday encounters with the media.

Incredible Animation Summarises Noam Chomsky's 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine 5 min · For decades, Noam Chomsky has been the agent provocateur when it comes to critiquing the US mainstream media. He co-authored ‘Manufacturing Consent’, a seminal work on mainstream journalism and its role in the mechanics of power.

Stuart Hall: Race, Gender, Class: The Politics of News 3 min · Known as the ‘Godfather of Multiculturalism’, Stuart Hall (1932-2014) gave us tools to understand how representation is always imbued with ideology - and how to resist.

How to Read the Signs in the News 3 min · Roland Barthes The work of French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is difficult, slippery, whimsical - it calls on us to read the world around us as a series of texts. He would have seen the TV screen as a cultural text - there to...

Digital Prophecies: The Medium Is the Message 2 min · In the 1960s, way before anybody had ever tweeted, Facebook Live-d or sent classified information to WikiLeaks, one man made a series of pronouncements about the changing media landscape. His name was Marshall McLuhan and you've...

Framed: The Politics of Stereotypes in News 2 min · Palestinian academic Edward Said’s (1935-2003) book ‘Orientalism’ showed how the West had the power to represent the colonial ‘other’ - while at once leaving them voiceless.