Session 2: The Role of Media Literacy and Narratives in the Age of Polarization and Misinformation

Redefining Media Literacy: From Defensive Strategy to Democratic Infrastructure

Dr. De Abreu opened her lecture by emphasizing a conceptual shift: media literacy is not merely a skill for navigating disinformation; it is a foundational democratic practice. In her view, the information age requires citizens not only to analyze content but to understand the power structures that produce it. She asserted that media literacy must evolve beyond fact-checking to include ethical reflection, civic dialogue, and participatory sense-making.

“Media literacy is about learning how to live with information, not run from it. It is about processing, verifying, and critically integrating it into how we understand the world and our place within it.”

Citing her book Media Literacy for Justice and Equity, Dr. De Abreu insisted that media education must not be politically neutral. Rather, it should foreground questions of justice, inclusion, and power. She referenced UNESCO’s Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy, positioning them as a global framework for building a more informed, empathetic, and resilient public sphere.

She further advocated for media literacy to be embedded in school curricula, journalism education, policymaking, and civil society training. “We are long past the time when this could be considered optional,” she declared. “In the 21st century, media literacy is a civic mandate.”

Narrative Construction and the Architecture of Misinformation

Dr. De Abreu’s analysis deepened through a series of current events that illustrate how media does not simply mirror reality, it constructs it. She offered powerful examples of how polarizing narratives shape public perception, particularly through the weaponization of binary frames.

Case studies included:

• Smartphone bans in schools (e.g., in the UK and Australia), where discourses of “protection” often mask deeper anxieties about youth autonomy, surveillance, and control.
• Cultural polarization in the U.S., such as university protests on race, gender, and speech, where the media often frames student activism as either noble rebellion or dangerous radicalism.
• The political framing of celebrities, like Taylor Swift, whose public statements are often magnified or distorted to fit ideological battle lines.
• Disinformation surrounding conflicts, where media erasure, framing bias, and historical amnesia complicate efforts toward understanding.
• Climate change communication, where science denialism, tokenism, and selective outrage dominate over sustained coverage of root causes and community solutions.

Through these examples, Dr. De Abreu illustrated how media environments reinforce ideological division by simplifying complex realities into dualistic tropes, good vs. evil, progress vs. decline, us vs. them. She warned that this architecture of polarization is not accidental, it is incentivized by profit-driven algorithms, political agendas, and sensationalist journalism.

“Narratives are never neutral. They are designed, often strategically, to produce emotional reactions rather than informed reflection.”

The Hans Rosling Experiment: Misconceptions and Mental Models

A standout segment of the session was the interactive knowledge quiz inspired by Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. Participants were asked global development questions (e.g., “How many girls globally finish primary school?”) and, as anticipated, most gave overly pessimistic answers.

Dr. De Abreu used these results to demonstrate what Rosling called the “gap instinct”, the tendency to overestimate global suffering due to a lack of positive media narratives. This misalignment between perception and reality, she explained, is both a media problem and a narrative problem.

“If people believe the world is getting worse, they become fatalistic, cynical, and vulnerable to manipulation. But when we show them the full picture, including progress, they feel empowered to engage.”

She argued that correcting facts isn’t enough. Instead, educators and journalists must retrain public imagination, enabling people to see complexity, nuance, and hope. This calls for new forms of storytelling that elevate underrepresented voices and challenge entrenched stereotypes.

Global Dialogue: Participant Voices, Regional Realities

The latter half of the session transformed into a vibrant global forum, where participants brought forth their own local struggles, raising critical questions that reflected the complexity and diversity of contemporary media landscapes. 

A participant from Pakistan raised a poignant concern about the increasingly violent landscape of gendered disinformation. She described how female journalists in her region were subjected to coordinated online harassment campaigns, often involving synthetic media, deepfake videos, and smear tactics. In response, Dr. De Abreu affirmed that such attacks represent not only violations of privacy but also a broader assault on civic participation and freedom of expression. She emphasized the need for trauma-informed media literacy frameworks, educational strategies that center care, safety, and resilience for those on the front lines of information warfare. Moreover, she advocated for the strengthening of international support networks to protect and empower female-identifying media workers, noting that digital violence is often compounded by institutional silence and legal gaps.

Another participant from Latin America posed a more systemic challenge: how to teach media literacy in environments where the state itself is a major source of disinformation. In countries where press freedom is deteriorating, and where government narratives dominate public media, traditional educational institutions often become complicit in silencing dissent. Dr. De Abreu responded with both empathy and strategic optimism. While acknowledging the gravity of authoritarian media control, she emphasized the importance of informal and alternative educational ecosystems, community radio, independent digital platforms, youth-led journalism collectives, and grassroots civic workshops, as vital spaces for counter-narrative construction. These “parallel pedagogies,” she suggested, are not simply stopgap measures but models of participatory resistance that can foster critical consciousness even in repressive contexts.

The discussion then turned toward emerging technologies, as a participant raised concerns about the increasing use of artificial intelligence in content production and manipulation. Specifically, questions emerged about how AI-generated misinformation, such as deepfakes, voice cloning, and algorithmic bias, could be verified and countered. Dr. De Abreu issued a clear and urgent reminder: AI is not neutral. It reflects the biases, intentions, and blind spots of its designers. “AI,” she stated, “automates bias unless we intervene with regulation, ethics, and awareness.” She called for the development of critical AI literacy, a subfield within media education that equips individuals not only to detect manipulated content but to interrogate the structural logic of algorithmic systems. Without such awareness, she warned, societies risk surrendering their narrative agency to opaque and unaccountable technologies.

What emerged from this dialogue was a portrait of global interconnectedness: distinct regional issues, be it gendered harassment in South Asia, state-sponsored propaganda in Latin America, or technological disruption worldwide, were united by a shared urgency to reclaim control over information, narratives, and civic imagination.

Closing Reflections: Rebuilding the Civic Imagination

In her concluding reflections, Dr. Belinha De Abreu returned to the central thesis that had anchored the entire session: media literacy is not merely a defensive practice to shield oneself from falsehood. It is a proactive, transformative tool for democratic renewal. It equips individuals not only to critique media but to reimagine and reshape the informational ecosystems in which they live.

She reminded participants that in an age saturated with content, they are not passive recipients of media—they are potential authors of new narratives, stewards of ethical communication, and catalysts for change. She encouraged each attendee to examine their own habits of meaning-making, to elevate marginalized voices in their communities, and to cultivate storytelling practices rooted in empathy and justice.

“Disinformation is not just a crisis of data. It is a crisis of care, of how we see others, how we listen, and how we act.”

She concluded by extending a warm invitation to all attendees to remain engaged with the work of the International Council for Media Literacy. She encouraged participation in its research symposia, collaborative projects, and open-access resources, framing these as tools not only for professional growth but for civic healing. Participants responded with enthusiasm, gratitude, and determination. Many shared reflections in the chat about how the session had reshaped their understanding of media, power, and public responsibility. Some spoke of taking what they learned back to classrooms, newsrooms, and advocacy networks. Others expressed a newfound clarity about their role as ethical narrators in an age of distortion.

Dr. De Abreu’s session concluded not with a sense of closure, but with renewed momentum, leaving participants energized with a deepened sense of agency, solidarity, and civic responsibility. At a time when journalism is being reshaped by digital disruption, media spaces are saturated with propaganda, and public discourse is increasingly weaponized, her message struck a powerful chord.

“We don’t just need better news; we need better narratives. We need to think about how stories are told, who gets to tell them, and what kind of world those stories create.”

It was not merely a call to counter misinformation; it was an invitation to reimagine the future of storytelling itself. Dr. De Abreu urged participants to become architects of narrative ecosystems grounded in justice, empathy, and truth, where equity and democratic imagination are not abstract ideals, but embodied, everyday practices.