Pop Culture Happy Hour - Are We In A Media Literacy Crisis?

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Online discourse has become a fun part of enjoying and dissecting big pop culture events. But after seeing all the commentary around Ryan Coogler's Sinners, our pal Brittany Luse has one question: are we in a media literacy crisis? Difference of opinion is one thing, but it feels like some viewers are missing important clues or misreading the film entirely - and it doesn't stop with Sinners. Today we've got an episode of the podcast It's Been A Minute that explores what this could mean for the way we engage with the world at large. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Okay, everybody, Aisha here, and the other day I went on NPR's It's Been a Minute to talk about a crisis we've been seeing in pop culture. I won't spoil it, but basically we've all gotten really, really bad at watching movies and TV shows. Here's how It's Been a Minute's host, Brittany Luce, describes it. Like almost every other person in the country, I flock to see Ryan Cougler's sinners when it hit theaters in April. And while I enjoyed the film, part of the fun was seeing all the excitement. online. So when I was finally able to scroll through all the spoiler-heavy commentary, I was shocked to see some of the wildest takes I've seen on a movie in a while. For example, there's a Chinese character in the film named Grace, played by Li Jun Li.

And for those who haven't seen it, this is a light spoiler, but she's responsible for a pretty big moment in the film. But what I, and also the director of the film, Ryan Coogler, felt was a rash decision made by a mother in distress, some viewers thought was a representation of a lack of POC solidarity from Asian folks in black communities. Even stranger, some audience members thought Annie, played by actress Wumi Mosaku, was one of the main characters, Smoke's mother.

Now, for those who don't know, Annie is the estranged wife of Smoke, one of the two Smokstack twins, played by Michael B. Jordan. Just wild stuff. But this isn't the first time in the audience, has been out of step with the content itself. The endless rabbit holes and theories around season two of severance may be want to swear off the fandom entirely.

It made me think about a phrase that gets thrown around a lot online. Media literacy. According to the National Association of Media Literacy Education, media literacy is the ability to encode and decode the symbols. Communicated in what we consume, and for me, most importantly, being able to critically analyze those symbols for a richer takeaway. And seeing some of this commentary has me concerned that we're struggling with the necessary tools to even critically approach some of the things we're watching for entertainment.

So I called up Pop Culture Happy Hours, Ayesha Harris. For better and to some extent for worse, we come to pop culture with all of our baggage. And code switches, B.A. Parker. Oh, we don't. We don't have subtext anymore. Like, we have subtext, but we can't read it. To ask them, where else are they seeing this? And what does this media literacy crisis mean for the way that we engage with the world at large?

The furthest back I can go of a recent example of this is wicked. Wasn't even coming from, you know, Randolph's on the internet or strange on the internet. I imagine both of you saw a strange loop, the really great Broadway show by Michael R. Jackson. I'm familiar with it, but I haven't seen it. So he had some very interesting opinions on Wicked. And he actually wound up writing about this around the time of the Oscars in the New York Times. He wrote an opinion piece titled, Is Wicked Really a Resistance Musical? He's kind of going after people who, when Wicked came out, were claiming that it was very relevant to our times.

And Wicked came out like maybe a couple weeks after Trump was elected. Right. So people were, you know, tying threads together to call Wicked a musical that is. is representative of our times. And Michael R. Jackson basically wrote, like, he caused this progressive, magical thinking and that people are trying to reclaim Wicked as, like, this resistance musical when it's not, actually.

And to me, that's kind of inaccurate. I'm not saying that Wicked is necessarily a super radical piece of theater or as a movie. But the novel that it's based off of is incredibly political. It's very different from the musical, and it is intended to be an allegory. And I will also say the production notes for Wicked, they literally say that it is a show

about the quiet, insidious rise of a fascist movement that seeks to demonize the intelligent-speaking animals of Oz, end quote. So whether or not you believe that it's actually resistant is one thing, but I think it is inherently a political piece of movie and show in a way that, like, I'm not sure Jackson is willing to give credit for. But that's a really fascinating read. It's made plain as day by the people who actually created the thing.

But I'm curious Parker. Have you had this experience? I mean, I had recently, I was watching clips of an interview that Katie Kirk had with Noah Wiley, who's the star of the pit. Oh, yes. She asked him a question that gave the feeling like she hadn't absorbed anything that was happening on the show. There's like a big scene between Noah Wiley. And like another main character. And Dr. Collins, who's like a black doctor.

And Katie Carrick says, so was something going on between the two of those characters? And there's like a big, like that's a huge, what you're referring to is a huge emotional scene on the show that makes it very clear that they share some type of very serious, like intimate past. Yeah. Yes. And I was like, oh, we don't have subtext anymore. We have subtext, but we can't read it. Like someone has to blatantly say, hey, remember that thing we did like five years ago? This is how it made me feel.

But let's get into the meat and potatoes of why I brought you both here today because the online discourse around the film centers has broken my brain. They had me concerned about not just how people were misunderstanding story, as each of you have discussed, but also how people. how people were misunderstanding pretty common racial dynamics. And a lot of these reactions were coming from black people. I want to talk about a specific situation. There's a character in the film named Mary, played by Haley Steinfeld. Mary is a character who actually, like the real-life actress, Steinfeld, has a grandparent who is mixed race.

One of the main characteristics of her character is that she is passing for white, but she is aware and at least privately acknowledge, like many white-passing black people, that she has black ancestry and she was raised around black people. And I haven't seen so many people saying that she actually was white. She should be considered white. People simply just not understanding

how the one drop rule worked back then, how segregation worked back in the Jim Crow South. What in the Lena Horn are we doing here? Like, it stressed me out. But my concern with this is two-pronged because, you know, this seems like people don't know, A, how to understand history and locate a story within a certain historical context, or B, that they also don't understand storytelling, or in this case, how to understand cues and clues that a movie will give you to understand what it's trying to tell you. What do you all make of this phenomenon?

Aisha will hear from you first. This is something that I've written about and thought about a lot, which is that for better and to some extent for worse, we come to pop culture. with all of our baggage, all of ourselves. And especially in the age of the internet when we are all kind of identifying amongst groups and demographics, whether it's like, I'm a Trekkie or I'm a Harry Potter fan or I'm whatever.

It's like everything becomes super personal. And you often think about things from your perspective and then you project your perspective onto film, TV, whatever, in ways that maybe aren't always there. Like they don't actually exist, but you are bringing it to whatever piece of art you're consuming. And there's some good that can come out of that.

Queer and people of color fans who have inserted themselves into law culture in that way. And I think those things are not disconnected. I think about something like Joker, the first movie, which came out in 2019, and how that movie, like, depending on where you were on the political spectrum or how you view things. Like, there were some people who viewed the Joaquin Phoenix character as an in-cell as, like, the worst kind of thing.

And then there were other fans who were like, what are you talking about? This movie is like, it's the greatest thing ever. And Todd Phillips, he's the one who directed the film. He had to come out several times and kind of talk about it and how he claimed, like, it's not a political film. And it's like, come on, man. Of course it's a political film. Like, you can't backtrack there.

To me, that seems like straight up denial. It's straight-up denial. So it's like these things can get out of hand and you have to acknowledge that and acknowledge that people are going to interpret it in different ways. First of all, everything is political in some way. It's just some are more overtly so. So I think everyone's just bringing something different to these movies. And with social media, people are able to share that more readily than they were 30 years ago. I mean, there is like this frustrating aspect of it, like the online discourse. We've heard like the bean soup problem. No. There was a thing on TikTok. I've heard about this. Please explain it. There was like a TikTok video of a lady was like, here's how I make my bean soup.

And someone in the comments was like, but I don't like beans. How do I make this soup? And the creator was like, you just don't make the soup. Like the soup's not, you know, there's other soups. And that, I feel, has, like, infiltrated our media absorption. So there's, like, a lot of, like, very selfishly. Like, how does this pertain to me? Or it's like, this makes me uncomfortable.

Therefore, I don't like it. Or, oh, it has all these guys that I really like. So, yeah, this movie's problematic. And it's not very good, but, like, I love it. Therefore, it makes it a good movie. And, I mean, okay, sure. Coming up, how our digital lives may have changed the way we interpret media. There are clues, but if you are half watching on your phone, you're going to miss it.

And so is it immediately? literacy in the sense of like people are watching and just not picking up what is being put down? Or is it also just like they are literally not even seeing it half the time? I feel like a crucial aspect of this media illiteracy is moralizing. And Alexis, our producer, she brought this up. And I'm like, you're so right. There's almost like this entertainment moralizing process where you watch a piece of entertainment and then spend time researching or processing, whether the film matches your values

or the values of those around you in some cases. And then you decide how you feel about what you watched and whether you think it's good or bad. It kind of becomes less about like whether you actually think something is well done or entertaining and like more about whether or not this piece of media makes you seem or feel like a good person or confirms what you already believe about the world.

Okay, listen, being a 14-year-old girl watching Todd Solon's films for the first time, that'll like, ooh, I feel uncomfortable. This is weird. But also, I respect the crap. My moral compass doesn't make the whole movie bad. It's like saying, oh, Hannibal Lecter's a cannibal, how dare he? I would never be a cannibal. Therefore, Silence of the Lambs is a terrible movie, which is partly untrue.

We can't use our morality to gauge the validity of art. I mean, it kind of feels like there's like a newer self-awareness for many people around, whether it's around feeling like a good person or at least having your choices confirmed, that like kind of gets, I feel like audiences further away from actually sitting with art. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Another thing I think about in all this, we're talking about media literacy and entertainment, right? But there's other ways to be media illiterate that I think we've seen plenty of examples of. I mean, you know, more people than ever are getting their news through social media as opposed to through traditional news outlets. But this makes me wonder, like if audiences can't accurately read a film or TV show where the writer and director are giving them clues and directing their attention to what they need to be focused on, how might they understand or misunderstand complex news stories with huge real life implications? In the same way, right? Like, I think about that story about Katie Couric and the pit, right? It's like there are clues, but if you are half watching on your phone, you're going to miss it.

And so is it media literacy in the sense of like people are watching and just not picking up what is being put down? Or is it also just like they are literally not even seeing it half the time? And the pit is the type of show that you like kind of need to give all your attention to because it's not giving you everything. It's not it's not, it's not grace anatomy. It's not broad. But that's also like very direct of like choose. me love me. Yeah, exactly. You do not have these big grand pronouncements of love or lust or whatever. It's all taking place in a single day. Only so much can happen. Yeah, even the way it

duels out information is a way that like I think a lot of modern audiences are perhaps not attuned to or used to getting information, which is usually like those big grand pronouncements. And instead it's like it comes out in the way it would if you were actually there on that first. day, like, you wouldn't learn everything about this one doctor in two seconds. Like, that's how it works. Also, I would not with people working in the hospital that I'm being served at, like, giving a speech an hour. No, thank you. I don't need to speak. I'm like, please pay attention to me. But that's a really good point. People's attention is very split. And I see those things pop up in the way that people consume news. I see that pop up in the way that people are engaging with our rapidly changing

political landscape. And also I think that makes me think about algorithms. Like people's individual worldviews are now also deeply affected by their algorithms. I wonder, like, where does that take us as a society? Like, where does that leave us? Where are we going, y'all? Yeah, I think we're already in the abyss. It's just like, how long are we going to wait here and when are we going to pull those those out? I mean, I even just think about sort of this same idea of how we all project our different ideas and beliefs onto our pop culture, I think about Luigi Mangione and how there have been such differing reactions

to what he is accused of having done. He's currently on trial for the killing of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, and how, depending on your algorithm, you might be fed a bunch of stuff that's very pro-Louigi in support of him or, like, gushing over how hot you think he might be. and you could be on the other end of things.

And I think that it's the same side of the same coin, right? Same thing allegedly happened. And everyone has a different opinion to it and as scribes a different meaning to it. And I do think that it's not that dissimilar from the way we consume our pop culture, which is that like, you know, deciding whether or not a character was right or wrong

to do what they did, even something like The Last of Us, like all the sort of like hand-wringing over Joel and played by Pedro Pascal and like what he did, there are two sides to every story. And I'm all for debate, but also sometimes what's right in front of us is what's right in front of us. I like that. I'm loving the analysis. The best I can compare it to is you ever watch like the traders? It's like a group of people who are using their behavioral skills to figure out if someone is like a traitor.

Yeah. And everyone all of the same. sudden thinks they're Dr. Phil and like even or they're like, or they'll be like, oh, he twitched. That means he's lying. Or like, or like, oh,

they went into this hallway. Clearly they are a traitor. But that's all of us. That is the level of like kind of like literacy we're on right now. Remember spitgate? Remember spit gate? Oh my God. When they, when people were like, oh, Harry Styles might have spit on Chris Pine.

And it's like, I just don't think that happened. I saw that. I was like, I don't think he did that. Someone made that up on Twitter and people just ran with it. We're at the point where I have to explain to her relative like, no, this is AI. Rihanna is not showing her sonogram to her

grandmother and posting it on Facebook. Like that's like a legit thing that happened to me this weekend. I had to be like, that's not real. I'm glad I was able to come and commiserate with the two of you because I have been trying to make sense of this, and you all actually at least gave me some good ways to think about and understand what's going on. So Parker, Aisha, thank you both so much.

You're welcome. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. That was Pop Culture Happy Hours, Ayesha Harris, and Code Switch's B.A. Parker. And I'm going to put on my influencer hat for a second and ask you to please subscribe to this show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you're listening. Click follow so you know the latest in culture while it's still. Hot. This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by

Alexis Williams. This episode was edited by Nina Potock. Our supervising producer is Barton Gerdwood. Our executive producer is Varyland Williams. Our VP of programming is

Yolanda Sanguini. All right. That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.