Rush To Judgment
The Public’s Immediate Response To The Trump Rally Shooting Illustrates The Need For Media Literacy Education
Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff
[Note: This essay was written two days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump when Joe Biden was the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. While now outdated, it still illustrates the need for media literacy education.]
“He will never stop fighting to save America, no matter what the radical left throws at him,” exclaimed Donald Trump Jr. just after hearing his father had been struck by a bullet while speaking at a rally with supporters in the rust belt town of Butler, Pennsylvania. The July 13, 2024 shooting left two people dead, one of them the suspected shooter, and injured three others, including former President Donald Trump. Trump Jr.’s comment was undermined by reporting that revealed the 20-year old suspected shooter’s political proclivities were complicated: he was a registered Republican who donated to a Democratic Party organization in 2021. Nonetheless, Trump Jr.’s rush to blame his political opponents, when little to no evidence existed, is indicative of America’s deeply polarized, media illiterate political culture.
In fact, the U.S. is a highly media illiterate culture. Numerous studies show that massive portions of Americans – regardless of age – struggle to determine the veracity of media content. Someone is considered media literate when they have “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication.” While many other countries began offering media literacy courses in the late 20th century, the U.S. did not. As a result, too few Americans have the media literacy skills to navigate the nation’s increasingly and deeply polarized political environment.
An April 2024 poll found that a significant number of Americans, 20 percent, believe that violence may be needed to get the country on the right track. By May, another poll found that nearly half of Americans think it is likely they will see a civil war in their lifetime. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the shooting, many liberals were warning about the divisive rhetoric from individuals such as Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation (the right wing think tank behind the controversial Project 2025 manifesto), who recently commented on Steve Bannon’s War Room, “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
In addition, scholars and journalists have noted that the news media’s preference for framing most stories as Republican versus Democrat has exacerbated deep polarization in the U.S. This polarized approach to reporting is particularly problematic for breaking news stories such as the July 13 shooting because the fog around unfolding events often produces false stories such as the claim Muslims were celebrating in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, or that there were two shooters in the 2012 Sandy Hook murders. In addition to spreading falsehoods, decades of polarized reporting has been linked to numerous high-profile acts of political violence. In response, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a warning in 2023 that the U.S. was at “high risk” for a violent political attack from “lone offenders or small group attacks that occur with little warning.”
Rather than learn from previous errors and slow down their reporting process, which media literacy educators teach people to do, most corporate media outlets charged forward, claiming that this was clearly a politically motivated shooting, while musing how and why the Secret Service botched Trump’s security. At the same time, many high-profile politicians and pundits asked for the nation to unite and temper divisive language and destructive communication.
However, rather than heed the calls for unity, across the political spectrum many Americans demonstrated their weak media literacy skills and began constructing poorly supported and baseless claims. Just as Trump Jr. had done for conservatives, many left leaning social media users concluded, without providing substantive evidence, that the attack was a false flag– meaning that it was carried out by Trump and his supporters to boost support for his presidential run. Others in the Democratic Party floated that the shooting was staged with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, many Republicans blamed President Biden for the shooting, pointing to reports that Biden told donors: “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Others blamed the right for political violence such as Sharon Zhang, who wrote in Truthout that “In reality, the right has been working to normalize violence of many kinds for years, with Republicans downplaying or even attempting to justify acts of violence committed against their opposition.”
Democracy necessitates that people have disagreements, but that those disagreements need to be rooted in facts. The knee-jerk responses to the shooting, which saw people across the ideological spectrum create self-serving narratives based on little to no evidence, illustrate the need for media literacy education in the U.S. While America struggles with a dearth of media literacy skills, new complications are developing, such as AI or deepfakes, which can allow individuals to doctor and change the audio/visual evidence of critical events, like the recent shooting.
We have our work cut out for us. If the U.S. hopes to maintain its form of open government, the public needs to be media literate, and they need a truly independent media system that cuts through the polarized rhetoric and exposes how our public and private institutions undermine the democratic process, regardless of partisanship.
Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored National Judge, author, and lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack (https://nolanhigdon.substack.com/). He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge).
Mickey Huff is a professor of journalism, director of Project Censored, and the president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. His most recent books include Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2024, co-edited with Andy Lee Roth; The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People (co-authored with Project Censored and the Media Revolution Collective, 2022), Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (Routledge, 2022) and United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it), published by City Lights Books, 2019, both co-authored with Nolan Higdon.