Media exploration
Overview
A media exploration on economic topics that intends to help students make these publications more reachable. It is suggested that students search for media examples from different countries and find those with different perspectives, in order to make it clearer to the students how the news could be biased.
Aims
- To familiarise students with reading about economic news and to develop their skills in media literacy
- To teach students that the way we receive information about economy is biased
- To try to identify austerity or public stimulus measures applied by countries
Materials and time
Newspaper articles that discuss economic crises. The teacher decides if this could be a global or a local crisis; any of the crises above explained or a different one. Ideally, the articles would be based on the same crisis but from different sources. The material should be provided by the teacher.
The activity should take between 45 minutes to one hour.
Group size
Any
Instructions for trainers
- Ask the students to divide into groups. Photocopies of the media reports are placed facedown on the tables and numbered. In turns, each group chooses an article.
- Each group should read and discuss the piece, trying to identify any possible bias. For example, they should identify facts, opinions, speculations and so on.
- Some questions that could guide the analysis of the article might be (the teacher could decide to modify this):
- Are the students familiar with the source?
- Can the students identify where the article could be written?
- Is it providing facts or opinion?
- Is the article discussing only the economic perspective or also the political and social spheres?
- Does this material help them better understand the crisis it discusses, or was it making it more confusing?
- Were there different perspectives from the different sources?
- Are the students able to spot some of the keywords studied?
- Economic Policy
- Regulation
- Welfare State
- Public investment
- Neoliberalism
- Austerity
- Is the article defending any position about government intervention?
4. After some time each group reports back, explaining their answers to the questions, and anything else that they discussed. They can be respectfully questioned by the other students. Record the findings of this activity on the board.
Suggested sources:
- Financial Times
- The Economist
- The Wall Street Journal
- International newspapers as well ( El País, The Guardian, etc)
- Local economic/political economic media is strongly encouraged
Examples:
Chris Giles for Financial Times : Global economy: the week that austerity was officially buried. Link
The Economist: Beyond crisis management, Bold ideas for solving America’s financial mess. Link
