Everyday Media Literacy

Sue Ellen Christian is the Western Michigan University Presidential Innovation Professor in Communication (2021-2024). An author and former Chicago Tribune journalist, her past awards include Michigan Professor of the Year and WMU's Distinguished Teaching Award. She is guest curator of Wonder Media: Ask the Questions!, an interactive museum exhibition focusing on news literacy and media literacy and the author of Overcoming Bias: A Journalist's Guide to Culture and Context (2021).

In this second edition, award-winning educator Sue Ellen Christian offers students an accessible and informed guide to how they can consume and create media intentionally and critically.

Introduction: Why media literacy and why you 1. Using: How your time with media can be more intentional 2. Spending: How the big, big business of media affects you and where you can profit 3. Thinking: How to protect your daily allotment of attention 4. Informing: How news media seek truth and shape reality 5. Verifying: How to find a fact and know when you've found one 6. Selling: How audiences are bought and sold and your role in the transaction 7. Analyzing: How media messages deliver meaning through content and creativity 8. Connecting: How media communicates culture and how cultures respond 9. Creating: How to create messages with purpose, expression and ethics 10. Protecting: How technology invades your privacy and how to protect it 11. Choosing: How to curate your media use to positively shape your sense of self 12. Participating: How technology supports and challenges civic engagement and democracy