The Media and Me is a joint production of The Censored Press and Triangle Square Books for Young Readers.
During the recent presidential election, “media literacy” became a buzzword that signified the threat media manipulation posed to democratic processes. Meanwhile, statistical research has shown that 8 to 18 year-olds pack more than eleven hours with some form of media into each day by “media multitasking.” Young people are not only eager and interested to learn about and discuss the realities of media ownership, production, and distribution, they also deserve to understand differential power structures in how media influences our culture.
The Media and Me provides readers with the tools and perspectives to be empowered and autonomous media users. The book explores critical inquiry skills to help young people form a multidimensional comprehension of what they read and watch, opportunities to see others like them making change, and insight into their own identity projects. By covering topics like storytelling, building arguments and recognizing fallacies, surveillance and digital gatekeeping, advertising and consumerism, and global social problems through a critical media literacy lens, this book will help students evolve from passive consumers of media to engaged critics and creators.
Author
Ben Boyington
BEN BOYINGTON is an advocate for integrating critical media literacy K-12, a high school educator, and the father of two teenagers who are immersed in the worlds of video games, Discord, and Twitch, as well as anime and other visual storytelling. (They also read books now and then, and occasionally join their parents for dinner.) A member of the Media Freedom Foundation board and former vice president of the Action Coalition for Media Education, Ben designs and conducts teacher trainings with Mass Media Literacy, in partnership with Allison Butler and Nolan Higdon. In his daily life, he works with high school students on self-directed learning and builds student-centered programming for a rural high school in Vermont. An avid media consumer, with a particular interest in film and television, he also enjoys music and podcasts, but eschews video games because they have too many buttons now.
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Allison T. Butler
ALISON T. BUTLER is a Senior Lecturer, Director of Undergraduate Advising, and the Director of the Media Literacy Certificate Program in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she teaches courses on critical media literacy and representations of education in the media. Butler co-directs the grassroots organization, Mass Media Literacy ( www.massmedialiteracy.org ), where she develops and runs teacher trainings for the inclusion of critical media literacy in K-12 schools. She is on the Board of ACME (Action Coalition for Media Education) and serves as the vice president of the Board of the Media Freedom Foundation. She holds an MA and a PhD from New York University. She is the author of numerous articles and books on media literacy, most recently, Educating Media Literacy: The Need for Teacher Education in Critical Media Literacy (Brill, 2020) and Key Scholarship in Media Literacy: David Buckingham (Brill, 2021) and the co-author of Critical Media Literacy and Civic Learning, a critical media literacy accompaniment to the open-source social studies textbook Building Democracy for All (EdTech Books, 2021).
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Nolan Higdon
NOLAN HIGDON is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies. Higdon’s areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, and critical media literacy. Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. He sits on the boards of the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) and Northwest Alliance For Alternative Media And Education. He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (University of California Press, 2020). His most recent publications include The Podcaster’s Dilemma: Decolonizing Podcasters in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism (Wiley, 2021) with Nicholas Baham III and Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (Routledge, 2022) with Mickey Huff. He is a longtime contributor to the Project Censored yearbook series. In addition, he has been a contributor to Truthout and CounterPunch; and a source of expertise for the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous television news outlets.
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Mickey Huff
MICKEY HUFF is director of Project Censored and serves on the board of the Media Freedom Foundation. To date, he has edited or coedited six volumes of Censored and contributed numerous chapters to these works dating back to 2008. Additionally, he has coauthored several chapters on media and propaganda for other scholarly publications, most recently Flashpoint in Ukraine from Clarity Press (2014). He is currently professor of social science and history at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is cochair of the history department. Huff is cohost with former Project Censored director Dr. Peter Phillips of The Project Censored Show, the weekly syndicated public affairs program that originates from KPFA Pacifica Radio in Berkeley CA. For the past several years, Huff has worked on the national planning committee of Banned Books Week, working with the American Library Association and the National Coalition Against Censorship, of which Project Censored is a member. He is also a longtime musician and composer. He lives with his family in Northern California.
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Andy Lee Roth
ANDY LEE ROTH is the associate director of Project Censored. He has coedited four previous editions of Project Censored’s yearbook, in addition to contributing chapters on Iceland and the commons (Censored 2014), the Military Commissions Act (Censored 2009) and news photographs depicting the human cost of war (Censored 2008). His research on topics ranging from ritual to broadcast news interviews and communities organizing for parklands has also appeared in journals including the International Journal of Press/Politics;Social Studies of Science; Media, Culture & Society; City & Community; and Sociological Theory. He reviews books for YES! Magazine. He earned a PhD in Sociology at the University of California–Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology at Haverford College. As of fall 2014, he teaches sociology at Pomona College and serves on the boards of the Media Freedom Foundation and the Claremont Wildlands Conservancy.
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