The school’s priority task is the literacy of the population, and there is clearly something we are not doing well and could do better. On January 31, 2020, Spanish media broadcast the words of the person they presented as the top expert on the subject: “Spain is not going to have, at most, more than a few diagnosed cases.” People with poor media and digital literacy, no matter how many university degrees they held, believed that what this expert said was scientific evidence. What is surprising and outrageous is that throughout the entire COVID-19 pandemic they continued to present him as the top expert, and it is now unbelievable (for anyone who does not know how the media work) that they still continue to do so.
A typical excuse, with serious consequences not only for literacy but also for health, is that what this expert said reflected the state of knowledge at that moment, and that no scientific evidence could have predicted what happened afterward. I myself was fortunate enough to participate in a scientific research project that, logically, was not based on the media, but rather on the rigorous analysis of social networks. In this way, we were able to know, on January 13, 2020, that a very serious pandemic was coming. The data were already on social media; one simply had to know how—and want—to obtain and analyze them.
The major media outlets neither carry out these analyses nor wish to disseminate them, since their financial dependence on political and economic powers (both through direct subsidies and advertising) leads them to avoid any information, however truthful, that might create problems with those powers. Social media, where many people share information freely, do not depend on or submit to those powers. A large proportion of those becoming infected anywhere in the world, or investigating the situation, published their messages on social media. It is true that most of what appeared on social networks was misinformation, but evidence could still be identified and analyzed. In the media, this was not possible, because there was nothing but misinformation.
Article translated from Periódico Educación
PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the best school of education in the world