Media Literacy (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Keeley, for securing this important debate and the committee on an excellent report. As ever, I declare my interest as a teacher.

The report talks about thinking critically about the content that we create and consume both online and offline, because there is a problem: when we talk about media literacy, we instantly think of AI and deepfakes, but offline is important as well. Most people are aware of the ability of AI to produce remarkably realistic media. In fact, there are plenty of people who have randomly filmed remarkable events—perhaps their cat biting a shark—only to have it dismissed as AI. The critical point to understand is that unless we witness an event at first hand, everything that we look at has been edited by other people. Some examples are more obvious than others.

I was at boarding school in the 1980s during the miners’ strike. We got to see all the main national newspapers and would read at least the front page of each of them. There were different stories in the Mirror to those in the Sun, which would usually have a picture of Arthur Scargill doing Hitler salutes on the front page. But we have usually read the papers that reflect our beliefs and have had them reinforced by what we read long before algorithms.

This has been going on since mankind first learned to communicate. There is a theory that Harold was not actually hit in the eye with an arrow; it is just a clumsy darn on the “Bayeux Tapestry”. Richard III was not, in fact, the “poisonous bunch-backed toad” of Shakespeare; his scoliosis was painted in later. There are other great examples of fake news pre-internet. The Cottingley fairies became famous in 1917 when 16 year-old and 9 year-old cousins photographed themselves playing with the fairies at the bottom of the garden. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used these photos to prove that fairies not only exist but reproduce sexually, because one had a belly button. Mercifully, he died before one of the girls admitted that the fairies were cut out from a picture book, the belly button was a pin holding the paper to a plant, and they were translucent as the result of a slow shutter speed and the wind blowing the paper fairies around.

Picture editors have always had great power. One told me that they would always pick the best available shot of Princess Diana and the worst of the then Duchess of York. The iconic photo of the naked Vietnamese girl Phan Thi Kim Phúc running towards the camera with her back covered in burning napalm is less dramatic when you see the full uncropped negative, with the photographer walking next to her casually reloading his camera. The much-sanctified BBC always accompanies a story of the House of Lords with a picture of us in ermine. The Guardian, surprisingly, has us in suits.

How do we teach media literacy in schools to equip our young people to be critical consumers? Might I once again suggest a solution that I have suggested before, this time to a different Minister? In response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review, the Government said:

“The secondary curriculum will both mirror and be a graduation of this core content, encompassing the vital threads of government, law and democracy, climate education, financial and media literacy”.


But where do we fit this into our crowded and knowledge-rich curriculum? Religious studies has to be taught to the age of 18 in maintained schools. I say stop: rather than embedding it across the curriculum, we could teach religious studies, government, law and democracy, climate education and financial and media literacy as a subject under the umbrella of citizenship, instead of just religious studies, with as much weight given to it as maths and English. If it was well planned and well taught, our students could become engaged and informed citizens. It could be fun to study and—equally importantly—to teach. Enthusiastic, well-informed teachers are good teachers.