The 1998 joint report of the BBC, the Independent Televison Commission and the Broadcasting
Standards Commission, Violence and the Viewer, recommended that the Government should take
the lead in co-ordinating a national strategy for media education. In late 1999, in response to
this, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) hosted a Media Education Seminar.
The seminar was designed to examine current initiatives on media education and assess the scope
for a more coherent approach to critical viewing in an age of digital broadcasting and
technological convergence. To that end senior people in broadcasting, broadcasting regulation,
parenting support and educational theory were invited to attend. A report of the seminar was
subsequently issued by DCMS. This report promised that DCMS would issue a Media Literacy
Policy Statement intended to act as a general statement of what DCMS understands by media
literacy and as a point of reference for future endeavour. The seminar also informed the
development of policies in the White Paper A New Future for Communications, published on 12
December 2000, which proposed a role for the projected new regulator – the Office of
Communications – in the promotion of media literacy.
The genesis of this paper was therefore primarily in a debate on audio-visual communication, but
there are increasing opportunities for people to learn to understand and manipulate multiple
digital media (eg. graphics, text, animation and audio, as well as the moving image) in ways that
benefit from a similar understanding of their power and use.