Critical Thinking makes Media Critics

When it comes to understanding our media, as Amy Poehler humorously notes, bias can be implicitly laden in the mere framing of a seemingly simple question.   This clip demonstrates that how a question is asked defines the parameters of what the answer can be and allows for implied meanings of association when none may exist.  Critical thinking skills can work as an antidote to media manipulation and add clarity to fuzzy logic and erroneously drawn conclusions. 

Critical thinking is a sophisticated, disciplined cognitive process essential to scholarly argument, intellectual advancement and widely applicable across disciplines and in life.  It is especially useful where a multiplicity of outcomes present themselves and an actionable decision is required.   Critical thinking involves a precise process of challenging explicit and implicit biases, information selection, evaluation and conclusions based upon data sources from which new understandings can be arrived at or the best course of action taken with available information.

This vodka ad image plays on the well known brand ads for Absolut Vodka but with striking counter-point messaging which impacts a new reality into the originally intended conclusion of cool, one which challenges the internal logic and preconceptions of the viewer's previous brand exposures.  To arrive at such imagery as this ad, the creative mind behind it probably walked through a critical thinking process that addressed what most definitions of critical thinking share: elements of reasoning, searching for bias or underlying motivations, uncovering the source of the information and adhering to intellectual standards such as clarity, truth-seeking and precision, and intellectual traits like openness, courage and humility.

Critical Thinking Takes Work

A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. 

~Charles Peguy

Think Critic Think!

To do the hard work of critical thinking means we are willing to face frustration and have the patience to work through a process that will deepen our empathy and change how we engage with media and scholarly work.   This rounded and widened viewpoint implies a deeply held awareness that imagery, video, and all written forms of information can be altered to support any point of view or thesis.  A driving diligence is required to discover motivations, methods, and data from where a source draws it’s information.  In fact, I suggest uncovering the source is often more revealing than the news item itself.

As Mayer (2010) notes in her recent New Yorker article on the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, they have quietly given more than $100 million dollars to right wing causes over the past several decades.  Most recently, they have been the main underwriters of the Tea Party movement and in the past, of similar hard-line libertarian political funding causes and think tanks like the Cato Institute.   Clearly it would seem that the Koch brother's political funding efforts closely align with their corporate anti-regulation, anti-taxation and anti-government business interests. 

Critical thinking certainly allowed journalist Jane Mayer to sense a coordination behind seemingly separate political movements and issues coming from the right.  Her training helped her ask the right kinds of questions to make connections others in the media did not.   One could say her critical thinking abilities led her to this powerful funding source group manipulating news media and turning the legitimate anger of many Americans into a tool for their own purposes (Mayer, 2010).  As Mayer comments in her interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air  these billionaire brothers have been actively working to make their personal and corporately motivated views into a political movement for decades.

Open Your Mind

As a media psychology researcher, cornerstone critical thinking skills will inform my academic and professional endeavors through Fielding and beyond.   I hope to contribute to the field of understanding and exposing bias in all its forms by sharing and utilizing this knowledge for greater social good via the media itself so that individuals, groups and society-at-large will become more fully empowered, electronically engaged citizens in the coming century.