As a society, we take literacy very seriously. We talk all the time about reading skills in education, about whether students can read at their grave level and who is lagging behind or is ahead of the curve when it comes to the ability to parse a sentence successfully.

Of course, that’s only basic literacy, i.e., the ability to read words and determine they’re telling a complete thought successfully.

We’re less concerned, it often seems, with reading comprehension, that is, the ability to read a sentence and know what it’s actually saying. Not what the words seem to mean, but what the author’s actual intent behind the sentence is.

And, given many adults don’t read much these days beyond grocery store labels and road signs, we spend even less time on overall media literacy. 

Yet as we continue to push to a world where most content is consumed as videos or podcasts or other non-literary forms, media literacy is more important than ever.

Some of this is due to our continual push into self-segregration on media forms. The liberals only consume liberal news, it seems, while the conservatives refuse to trust any news that isn’t firmly to the right.

Take, for instance, Thursday’s Supreme Court arguments on President Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity.

The left-leaning outlets screamed in terror that the Court was about to let Trump get away with any criminal act he wanted. The right was concerned that the Court wasn’t going to let him get away with enough crimes. Even murder was probably immune from prosecution if you’re president, some yelled.

As someone who does news for a living, I tend to consume more of it than most, so I see multiple sides to things and have learned to steer between the rocky shoals of liberal pearl-clutching and conservative chest-beating.

So it seems to me the Court is desperately trying to push this case into a neutral position of limiting immunity claims while retaining presidential power without fear of partisan prosecution.

There are flaws to this approach, too, but it’s hardly the apocalypse either side forsees.

But media literacy is more than just skewed news coverage.

I’ve seen internet trolls screaming lately about the Marvel cartoon series, “X-Men 97,” a continuation of the mid-90s superhero show on Disney Plus.

They feel the cartoon is “woke” because it focuses on issues of discrimination and racial harmony.

That’s right, they’re mad that the X-Men, mutants who are feared for their differences, are being used as a metaphor for tolerance.

Our inability to understand subtext in fiction, it seems, remains fixed in far too man people.

We need media literacy. It might be time to make sure we teach that in school, too.

Stephen Milligan is news editor of The Walton Tribune, the sister publication of The Covington News. Email comments about this column to stephen.milligan@waltontribune.com.