Fostering the truthful individualCommunicating media literacy in the comic Bamse

Media literacy can be understood as “the ability of a citizen to access, analyze, and produce information for specific outcomes” (Aufderheide, 1993: 6), which makes it a skill or an activity to which critical thinking is central (Potter, 2010). Although media literacy can be understood in a variety of ways, there is certain agreement on the following: media can have negative impacts on the user; media literacy can protect users from these negative effects; media literacy, as a skill, is something that needs to be developed; and media literacy involves several dimensions, such as cognition, morals, aesthetics, and emotions (Potter, 2010).

The analysed Bamse special issue is here understood as a means to promote and educate children in media literacy through children's edutainment media (Buckingham & Scanlon, 2001) in a historical epoch characterised by an increased circulation of information, most notably via digital media, increasingly challenged traditional media institutions, and intensified political polarisation in many Western countries. The circulation of so-called fake news, alternative facts, conspiracy theories on the Internet, the use of cyber-attacks for political ends, and the use of deceitful behaviour within mainstream politics have made some characterise our contemporary epoch as post-truth, a word that Oxford Dictionary named the Word of the Year in 2016 (Block, 2019; Farkas, 2020; Farkas & Schou, 2020). In such a context, media literacy practices such as source criticism become a way to provide tools for people, especially young people, to navigate in such an information-dense context and to be able to sort and verify information. However, without questioning the good intentions behind it, there is a need to problematise how media literacy practices are used for such goals.

On one level, it is problematic to try to solve the problems of fake news and misinformation by resorting to “the truth”. At the end of the day, who decides what counts as a true fact or not is a question of power, and as Farkas (2020) argues, trying to solve misinformation with “truth” inevitably involves the suppression of information and positions, which in turn leads to a restrained democracy. Furthermore, Farkas (2020) illuminates that what is considered “fake” or not is not really a question of the validity of facts, but one of political control, which can be seen in the use of the slur “fake” to discredit political opponents. As boyd (2017) argues, citing Cory Doctorow, one must see the epistemological disagreement at the core of the discussions on fake news. Either you believe in facts as something based on independent verification, or you believe that independent verification is a myth or always flawed and therefore can be abandoned altogether. This epistemological disagreement is also interrelated with the existing political divide, about which source criticism or media literacy can do little or nothing. Instead, as boyd (2017, 2018) argues, the calls from media literacy proponents to question everything make people doubt what they see. Although this could provide awareness, it could also backfire and cause people to question established facts and institutions.

On another level, one must understand the production and distribution of fake news and misinformation from a wider societal angle. As Buckingham (2020) notes, fake news can to a certain degree be explained economically, as it is often produced as clickbait, which generates income. This, in turn, should make us shift the focus to the business of digital media. Furthermore, and echoing boyd (2017), Buckingham (2020) notes that fake news is a symptom – rather than the cause – of a polarised political climate, which calls for an analysis of the political sphere. Moreover, Zimdars (2020: 361) argues that although fake news is “part of a complex problem involving the production, distribution, and reception of various kinds of information, the majority of current ‘solutions’ to fake news deal primarily with reception and with individuals”. Furthermore, if fact-checking is not accompanied by a power-centred analysis of information, it may help to identify specific incorrect elements in pieces of information without necessarily helping people to see the bigger picture (Zimdars, 2020).

The attempts to make media literacy a solution to misinformation are, according to boyd (2018), expressions of the neoliberal focus on individual agency. It is then “up to each of us as individuals to decide for ourselves whether or not what we’re getting is true” (boyd, 2018: para. 28). This line of critique is echoed by scholars who have stressed that media literacy has become a neoliberalism-friendly alternative to regulation of the media market (Buckingham, 2020; Livingstone, 2008). Responsibility is then shifted from corporations to individuals.

Three things must be taken into consideration to understand the framing of media literacy messages in children's edutainment comics: genre conventions, the sociopolitical context, and the mode of production.

In the case of the analysed comic book, the construction of media literacy, and specifically source criticism, involves constructions and adjustments to different levels to fit the comic book genre in general, and Bamse specifically. Comics tend to be described as a sequential art (see Eisner, 2008; McCloud, 1993), meaning that their basic building blocks are images and words set in deliberate sequence to structure what we might call graphic narratives (Thon, 2015). As a children's comic, Bamse has a straightforward narrative, and as Magnusson (2005) has shown, it is committed to careful and unambiguous narration, where clear and focused images are set in logical sequence and the verbal components clarify and enhance the narration. Bamse usually employs a very overt narrator, which is also used to comment on the plot, provide information, and impart lessons.

On another level, one must consider the sociopolitical context in which the comic book is produced. As Brienza (2010: 106) argues, “to fully understand any artistic work, one must also study the larger social and organizational context of its production and dissemination”. When Bamse rose to prominence during the 1970s, the comic book market was flourishing while dealing with demands for ideological awareness and political representations of contemporary society. At the same time, processes of standardisation and commercialisation were occurring, but because it was entirely controlled by its creator Rune Andréasson, Bamse was able to retain an original voice (Magnusson, 2005). This voice was generally didactical and ideologically leftist and could speak on a number of topics, including politics, but ever since an editorial board took over the comic book in 1990, Bamse was developed into a branded concept (Magnusson, 2005) with commercial imperatives.

Today, the political context is, however, different. In line with Farkas and Schou (2020), we argue that the increased warnings of a post-truth society must be understood as part of a post-political context, characterised by an apparent absence of ideological struggles and alternatives to neoliberal democracy (see Mouffe, 2005). Such a context surely also affects the production of messages on media literacy. In relation to this, we consider the concept of the middle-class gaze (Eriksson, 2015; Lyle, 2008) – used previously in the analysis of class representation – to be fruitful. The middle-class gaze is a mode of production that takes for granted the habitus and identities of the elite classes, especially in distinction to the popular classes (Lyle, 2008), and that has become part of mainstream media representations in neoliberal contexts (Eriksson, 2015; Lyle, 2008). Here, we understand it as a framework through which media literacy–related problems and solutions could be constructed in the comic book, which inevitably would foster a privileged view of these issues. This does not mean that this mode of production only addresses the middle class, but rather that it naturalises middle-class perspectives.

The comic book Bamse – Theme: Source Criticism! is a 24-page special issue published by Egmont Publishing (now Story House Egmont) in cooperation with Barnens bibliotek [Children's library] in 2018, and it is based on materials from two Bamse issues published in 2017. The special issue contains two main stories – “Bamse and the Dark Forest” and “Who is the Thief?” – and two shorter “Bamse's school” stories, related to the two main stories.

All quotes from the comic book have been translated by the authors.

Figure 1

As stated in the studied issue, the idea for the two main stories, which were previously printed in regular issues, came from a teacher's conference. Three of the sections (“Tips about the Internet” and both “Bamse's school” stories) were created in cooperation with pedagogy scholar Elza Dunkels, and content was also created in cooperation with journalist Jack Werner. The special issue was sold to libraries and schools in Sweden, and a separate teacher's guide to use in schools is available for free download (Bamse, 2018). The teacher's guide was not included in the analysis because it is a different type of genre and centres on how to plan classroom activities around the comic book. The intended audience for the special issue was schoolchildren between the ages of 7 and 12 (Grades 1–6) (Serier i undervisningen, 2018), differing from the regular comic book, which is geared towards children aged 4 to 8 (Ekdahl, 2016). In 2017, Bamse was awarded the Magazine of the Year prize from the industry organisation Sveriges Tidskrifter [Sweden's Magazines] for its original materials on source criticism (Egmont, 2017).

In this study, we combine narrative analysis and elements of discourse analysis to examine the special issue of Bamse cover to cover. These two approaches serve to triangulate the analysis of the different subgenres and discourse types comprising the studied issue. While narrative analysis is used for analysing the stories appearing in the comic book, elements of discourse analysis are primarily used for analysing the other forms of communication in the comic book, as well as the lexical choices in the stories.

The narrative analysis employs analytical categories derived from comics narratology. Comics are seen here as graphic narratives (see Stein & Thon, 2015) that use multi-modal devices to tell stories. Graphic narratives are both verbal and pictorial, and they use specific devices such as panels, speech balloons, narration boxes, and frames. The analysis deals with how these are drawn and organised, given the ambition to tell stories about media literacy and source criticism. This involves identifying key moments in the narrative, analysing what the relevant panels depict, how they are framed (or not), what the characters are doing and saying, and how narration boxes steer the plot and provide information. Also of relevance when investigating how the stories represent the stated themes of the comic book is the function of the narrator, which is concretised here as a narrating character (Thon, 2015).

Categories deriving from multimodal critical discourse analysis are used to analyse presupposition as well as the use of semiotic choices in relation to words and images (Machin & Mayr, 2012). The overall ambition is to identify how different choices, both regarding language and illustrations, serve to foreground specific perspectives and positions and background others. The analysis of presupposition seeks to identify “what kinds of meanings are assumed as given” (Machin & Mayr, 2012: 153) in the analysed sections. The lexical analysis involves analysis of word connotations (the loading of different words and what they are associated with), overlexicalisation (over-description and over-persuasion), suppression (backgrounding or omission of facts or events), and structural oppositions (how words implicitly or explicitly embody differentiation from other words and concepts) (Machin & Mayr, 2012). The visual analysis centres on the meaning potentials of different semiotic choices, and it more concretely focuses on attributes (the objects in the illustration), settings (the framework, colour, and background of an image), and salience (what is visually foregrounded) (Machin & Mayr, 2012). One should note that these visual categories were originally used for photographic images. However, comic illustrations also contain attributes and settings, make specific objects salient, and are interrelated with texts. This makes the analytic categories also useful for the analysis of the named sections of the comic book.

The two main stories in the comic book both construct a certain relationship to truth through the use of the rumour mill as a central narrative focus. This is made clear by how the stories are plotted, by the use of specific framing techniques, and in the recurring appearance of an overt narrator.

“Bamse and the Dark Forest” tells the story of Lille Skutt [Little Hop],

In cases where character names contain significant descriptive elements, we provide a translation in brackets after the first mention of the character.

The second story, “Who is the thief?”, tells the story of Burre and his school classmates. It begins with Burre leaving math class to go to the bathroom, and then returning to class. His leaving provides reason for the other children to later accuse him of stealing Grävla's mobile phone. Burre pleads his innocence, but no one believes him, and the children – convinced it is true – spread the rumour that he stole the phone. However, when Grävla returns home, she discovers that her phone was there the whole time. The rumours are not acknowledged as such until an occurrence in the narrative shows that what was thought to be true is in fact false. In “Bamse and the Dark Forest”, this revelation is deferred until the very last few frames, while in “Who is the thief?” one character (and thus the reader) is provided with the information earlier, signifying a narrative shift, where telling the truth after realising you have made a mistake is the driving force rather than the rumour mill. Thus, particularly in the latter story, the construction of truth is framed by questions of morality.

Both stories contain key panels which are used to place narrative emphasis on moments where the rumour mill and source criticism are acknowledged. One example from “Bamse and the Dark Forest” occurs just after Brumme has been told about the monster, showing him in close-up saying, “I wonder if Bamse knows about the monster?” (Egmont, 2018: 7). There is no doubt here that the monster is real. A similarly designed panel shows a worried Brumme, close-up, telling Bamse about the Dark Forest: “I just heard that a horrid figure is running around and scaring people there” (p. 8). These panels stand out because they lack any distinguishing background and are unframed, emphasising the character's subjective perspective (see Horstkotte, 2015) and making what he says especially significant. In “Who is the thief?”, similar unframed panels are used to signify important moments in the story. One example has Vicki and Burre sharing an unframed panel. Vicki says, “You must have taken it”, and Burre replies, “I did not!” (p. 15). This panel is emblematic of how the narratives treat truth in terms of either-or, here represented by two opposing characters. Another such example is the panel where Grävla finds her phone at home and realises that Burre never stole it – a turning point in the story. Both Burre and Grävla now know the truth (as does the reader), but the power to do what is morally right is only in Grävla's hands. Looking at these panels in relation to the narrative as a whole, one can see that truth is constructed as existing in a binary relationship with falsehood.

An overt narrator usually makes itself known through narration boxes or through characters’ directly addressing the reader in the two stories, and its function is to provide story information and normative commentary. The final two panels of “Bamse and the Dark Forest” show an embarrassed Lille Skutt realising he should have investigated things more carefully. In response to Nina Kanin's statement that there are no grounds for a newspaper article, Lille Skutt concludes the story in the final panel saying, “Yes, you can write about how it can be smart to find out the truth instead of spreading rumours” (p. 11), while looking at the reader. This is the lesson of the story explicated directly (verbally and pictorially) by the main character, functioning here as an overt intradiegetic narrator. We argue that the overt narratorial voices in the comic are also a form of covert authorial representation (see Thon, 2015), even in the case of verbal expressions presented as characters’ speech (in speech balloons). The fifth page of “Who is the thief?” contains important story information. The narration box of the first panel states, “In school they continue to talk about Burre and the missing mobile phone [emphasis added]” (p. 17). By using the word “missing” instead of “stolen” – and thus not accepting the characters’ interpretation of events – the extradiegetic narrator gains certain critical distance from the action and complicates the otherwise rigid notions of truth constructed by the stories.

Finally, truth is a central theme in the second of the two short stories titled “Bamse's school”, this one subtitled “Internet and source criticism”. The story starts with Lille Skutt reading on his laptop a piece of fake news and believing what he reads, that Bamse is finished and no longer powerful. Skalman [Shell man], a character associated with cleverness and science, asks Lille Skutt about the source of the information, something that Lille Skutt had not thought about. One of the panels makes an intertextual link to UR School: Is it True?, a television programme with the stated aim of encouraging source-critical thinking among children. Specifically, the story references five questions one should ask when reading something on the Internet (who, what, when, why, and how), and emphasises that it is important not to regard everything written as truth. The final panel shows two voles with a laptop saying how fun the Internet is and that everyone is going to believe that what they write is true. Even though there are several examples where truth is mentioned in the story, it is still represented as a rigid concept in the sense that things are either true or not true. Lille Skutt believes something that is false. Skalman and the extradiegetic narrator know to question what is written online, but there is still a clear dichotomy between true and false. Finally, the voles know what they write is false, but everyone (except those who are media literate and source critical) will believe it is true.

An individualised notion of media literacy is constructed in different ways in the analysed comic book. On one level, one can see this in how the reader is addressed and in the expectations that the issue creates in the reader. For example, there is a letter that begins, “Hi! Do you use the Internet?” (Egmont, 2018: 2), which provides, among other things, some background information about the comic book. As the quotation shows, the reader is addressed personally as a media user, revealing that it is a literate child who is being addressed. Below the letter, on the same page, is the section “Tips about the Internet!”, with five recommendations for the child reader about Internet use, all of them addressing the reader as an individual. For example, Point 1 states: “If you encounter something online that you wonder about or that worries you, talk to an adult about it” (p. 2). Although inviting the reader to interact with an adult (more about this later), it is still the reader as an individual media user who is being addressed (using the Swedish word “du”, second-person singular). A similar address is visible in the “Bamse's school: Rumour mill on the Internet” section, which intratextually connects the story “Who is the thief?” to an Internet context. In a school context, the teacher Fiffi instructs the reader from her classroom with a direct address (characters looking at the reader) about what could have happened if Grävla had posted her accusation on the Internet. In the last panel in the sequence, Fiffi is looking at the reader from a featureless white background, which places emphasis on the character's serious expression and what she says: “Do not write mean things or gossip on the Internet” (p. 22). In this way, the moral lesson of the story is directed to the individual reader.

Individualism can also be seen in the ways in which specific knowledge and skills are presupposed from the reader, something that to some extent directs the lessons told about media literacy to the already skilled child, and to some degree also exposes a middle-class gaze. This can be seen in how the two main stories – “Bamse and the Dark Forest” and “Who is the thief?” – leave it to the reader to connect the rumour mill to source criticism and to a media context, when such a connection is not made explicitly in the stories. Furthermore, there are lexical choices in the remaining sections that presuppose specific knowledge from the reader. For example, the section “Tips about the Internet!” is introduced with a lead stating that “Elza Dunkels is a researcher at Umeå University and has studied children's Internet use. Here you are getting her tips on the Internet” (p. 2). The information in the lead serves to provide credibility to what is communicated in the section, but it requires that the reader understands terms like “researcher”, “Umeå University”, and “studied”, and associates them with academic authority. Moreover, one of the tips provided on the same page calls the reader to “Report also if you see someone else being offended, for example if you see something racist. Feel free to ask an adult for help” (p. 2). In any case, the reader must know what is meant by “offended” (in Swedish, “kränkt”) and “racist” to be able to act. Furthermore, the section “Source criticism quiz” (p. 12) provides a test with six multiple-choice questions with the alternatives “1”, “X”, and “2”. Alternative 2 is the source-critical alternative in all the questions, and the use of presupposition reveals that the reader is expected to have specific skills and knowledge. For example, the second question portrays Herr Gris as claiming that the moon landing of 1969 never occurred. Alternative 2 states, “Who is claiming this? Can you trust this person? I will search for more information on the Internet” (p. 12).

This source-critical alternative presupposes not only an already sceptical reader, but also one who knows how to search for information online and how to distinguish credible from less-credible information. Doing online searches about conspiracy theories like this one can lead to finding more information supporting the conspiracy theory. In a similar vein, some of the source-critical tips given in “Bamse's school: Internet and source criticism” also reveal that a skilful user is being addressed. One tip asks if the information under scrutiny is “facts or just opinions”, and whether the intention behind the information has been to “spread opinions or facts” or to “make money” (p. 24). Here, the reader is supposed to know how to distinguish between the constructed structural opposition of facts and opinions and to identify commercial interests, something that requires specific knowledge and skills that are not communicated in the text. Such knowledge and skills require education and training, and their presupposition therefore reveals a gaze that takes a media-literate habitus for granted.

An individualistic take on media literacy is also evidenced in how source criticism is constructed as a personal skill in the section where the quiz answers are presented (p. 23). There, three distinct positions are constructed, depending on the number of times the reader chose each answer on the source criticism quiz. For example, readers who answered alternative 1 most of the time encounter a paragraph beginning with a sentence saying, “Unfortunately, you are not that source critical, but you can learn to become so” (p. 23). For readers choosing alternative 2 most of the time, the paragraph instead begins, “Congratulations! You are source critical” (p. 23). In this way, source criticism, instead of being constructed as a complex phenomenon that is ever evolving, is made into a specific skill-level that the individual either has or has not acquired, a binary not unlike how truth is constructed.

Moreover, the analysed material offers several instances where the child reader is invited to interact with an adult. Some examples of this have already been illustrated, and it can be further noted that the letter on page 2, introducing the comic book to the reader, ends by stating, “when you have finished reading this magazine […] you can show it to an adult who needs to learn more about the rumour mill and source criticism”. At first glance, the call to interaction with adults can be perceived as a way in which individualised constructions of media literacy are offset. In this way, one could argue, media use is to some extent collectivised. However, it is still left to the individual reader to seek help from adults, at the same time as it presupposes that the child has access to an adult who is able and has the skills to help and who is not themselves part of the problem, involved in spreading misinformation, rumours, or hate online. In this way, the call for interaction with adults serves to individualise media literacy, especially if the practice is to take place outside the school realm. The construction is also one made with a middle-class gaze, which presupposes that the adult to be contacted has the sufficient time, interest, and skills to be involved.