Building Inclusive Global Alliances
By Yonty Friesem
I keep returning to a simple question: what does being safe mean in an age when public trust is constantly under attack? In January 2026, that question feels unavoidable. Russia’s war against Ukraine continues, including recent large-scale overnight strikes on Ukraine’s energy system, and the information shockwaves travel far beyond the battlefield.
Not to mention the constant aggression and efforts to break the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. At the same time, the recent disputes triggered by U.S. pressure tactics toward European partners has created visible strains within the NATO alliance, reminding us that this is not merely a military structure. It is a relationship.
This is why I want to revisit the report by Tessa Jolls entitled, Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic (2022). Yes, the report frames media literacy as “strategic defense.” Yet what I see underneath that framing is something even more foundational: community-building. Not a “soft” add-on to real policy—but the social infrastructure that makes resilience possible in the first place.
A personal note: Tessa, and the way our community showed up
Some readers know that Dr. Tessa Jolls passed away on March 31, 2025. As we got the news of her move to hospice in early 2025, I watched how the international media literacy community responded, not only with grief, but with an almost immediate instinct to gather: sharing stories, tracing lineages, connecting newer educators and researchers with the history she helped shape. One small but telling example: On March 8th, three weeks before her passing, Tessa colleagues from all around the world came together to send her positive messages and share fun memories about her. Carolyn Wilson was visiting Tessa in hospice at the time and she shared the recording and personal messages. This is just one example that says something profound about the field: we memorialize by convening. That is community-resiliency in practice, and it’s also a reminder that the media literacy community is a community – and it has always been more than a focus on skills or even human rights. It’s people, networks, and a shared commitment to democratic life.
What Tessa’s report actually is—and why it matters
Tessa Jolls wrote the report as part of a Fulbright–NATO Security Studies Award. It draws on more than 60 interviews with policymakers, media executives, journalists, and media literacy researchers and practitioners across the transatlantic space. The most-cited line from the report is probably the defense-oriented one: that citizens are “the first line of defense” and that media literacy is essential to combat propaganda and weaponized information.
But Tessa also makes the argument for community engagement in plain language:
“Media literacy is a movement growing around the world; a field… and a pedagogy for teaching and learning.”
The pedagogy rests on inquiry, globally shared core concepts, and practice over time as people develop “habits of mind” that are enabled through dialogue and discussion.
She explicitly frames the long-term goal as embedding media literacy into a society’s “cultural fabric,” a phrase that is fundamentally about belonging, norms, and shared meaning.
She warns because many programs are short-term and “sparsely funded,” they fade when grants end, limiting continuity and infrastructure.
In other words: behind the national-security wrapper, the report is also a map of how a field becomes a community through shared language, shared practice, and institutions that last.
The critiques we need—because community requires trust
Two critiques help clarify what’s at stake if we confuse “strategic defense” with “community building” and here I review two critical responses to Jolls’ report from Nolan Higdon and David Buckingham.
Nolan Higdon argues that Tessa’s report reads like a blueprint for using media literacy to advance militarism and corporatism. Especially when it calls for funding from “government… and the private sector,” and when it praises “NATO values” as a foundation for initiatives. He warns that using mass media, aggregators, and influencers to spread a NATO-aligned media literacy agenda resembles narrative management, not education. Whether or not one agrees with Higdon’s politics, his core point matters for community-building: if media literacy is perceived as a top-down messaging campaign, people will reject it—and we lose the shared space needed for democratic resilience.
David Buckingham critiques the broader trend of collapsing media literacy into a narrow “information literacy” that treats the problem as “bad information” and the solution as teaching people to sort “good” from “bad.” He argues beliefs are tied to identity, emotion, and material conditions, so information skills alone won’t “fix” politics.
In response to Jolls’ report, he says its existence is significant because it frames media literacy as a “weapon” in an information war. He argues NATO is not a neutral actor in that war. Again, even if we debate his framing, the warning is crucial: community collapses when institutions claim neutrality while exercising power.
My takeaway: media literacy is community-building, not narrative control
Here’s where I land: we need media literacy to address the problems that war and political polarization reveal. As tensions among allies grow, we need media literacy as a way to build civic relationships, locally and across borders. Not as a loyalty test.
Tessa actually gave us language that supports this more democratic approach. She quotes principles of media education that emphasize critical autonomy and state that media education “does not seek to impose specific cultural or political values.” That is the community-building path: teaching transferable inquiry tools, making room for dialogue, and refusing to turn education into indoctrination or institutional PR.
And there’s an unexpectedly poetic bridge here: Tessa contrasts the “local village” and the virtual “global village” inside the report itself. That’s classic McLuhan territory of his idea that electronic media compress distance into a “global village.” The question is whether our global village becomes more humane or more tribal.
Where I find hope: UNESCO and an inclusive MIL community across borders
This is why I’m paying close attention to UNESCO’s recent moves. UNESCO describes its Media and Information Literacy (MIL) Alliance as a global network advancing policies and practices through knowledge exchange and partnerships across countries and sectors. UNESCO launched a new digital platform (June 2025) meant to function as a hub for collaboration and networking across the MIL community.
And just this month (January 2026), UNESCO announced the election of the Alliance’s first Global Board which I am honored to be a part of. The global board emphasizes inclusive, representative governance across regions and expert categories. As one of the Specialist Representatives, I intend to take that responsibility in exactly this spirit: to help build a media and information literacy community that crosses borders and keeps the “global village” from fracturing into hostile camps.
If resilience is the goal, then community is the method, and media literacy is one of the best tools we have to build it.
MediaEd Insights - January 2026 - Building a Community
Opening Essay: Being Villagers Together by Catherine Morris
Review: Will AI Shape Our Communities? by Vasavi Sai Nunna
Research Brief: Building Inclusive Global Alliances by Yonty Friesem
Case Study: How Media Literacy is Reconnecting Our Elders by Aurra Kawanzaruwa
References (sources cited in the blog post)
Jolls, Tessa. (2022, September). Building Resiliency: Media Literacy as a Strategic Defense Strategy for the Transatlantic: A State of the Art and State of the Field Report. Center for Media Literacy. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tessa-Jolls/publication/364182493_Building_Resiliency_Media_Literacy_as_a_Strategic_Defense_Strategy_for_the_Transatlantic_A_State_of_the_Art_and_State_of_the_Field_Report/links/633db81b76e39959d69fa41b/Building-Resiliency-Media-Literacy-as-a-Strategic-Defense-Strategy-for-the-Transatlantic-A-State-of-the-Art-and-State-of-the-Field-Report.pdf
Associated Press. (2026, January 24). Freezing and in the dark, Kyiv residents are stranded in tower blocks as Russia targets power system. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-energy-property-stairs-4eebf3a859afe1dbcf7033d051af8b5c?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Beaumont, Peter. (2026, January 24). Russia launches ‘brutal’ attack on Ukraine as peace talks continue. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/24/russia-launches-deadly-strikes-on-kyiv-and-kharkiv-ahead-of-day-two-of-peace-talks
Buckingham, David. (2023, January 4). The trouble with ‘information literacy’. https://davidbuckingham.net/2023/01/04/the-trouble-with-information-literacy/
Higdon, Nolan. (2022, October 7). The Military Industrial Complex Wants You to be More Media (l)literate!. CounterPunch. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/07/the-military-industrial-complex-wants-you-to-be-more-media-lliterate/
Litvinova, Dasha. (2026). Russia watches US-European tensions over Greenland with glee, gloating and wariness. AP News. (Date not fully visible in the scraped page; retrieved January 24, 2026.) https://apnews.com/article/russia-us-greenland-ukraine-war-aa9ec1941fd219ab840863946018346b
McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. (Book record/listing). Google Books.
McNeil, Sam. (2026). Diplomacy or retaliation? The EU mulls its options as tensions with U.S. rise over Greenland. AP News. (Date not fully visible in the scraped page; retrieved January 24, 2026.) https://apnews.com/article/tariffs-coercion-greenland-trade-eu-us-brussels-8b32f5c35a4568aacd105253065bcb9f
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Global village (definition). Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/global%20village?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Neptune Society. (2025). Tessa Ruth Jolls obituary. Neptune Society. https://neptunesociety.com/obituaries/paramus-nj/tessa-jolls-12326719?utm_source=chatgpt.com
UNESCO. (2025, June 23). New Digital Hub for UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance: Join Now!. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/new-digital-hub-unesco-media-and-information-literacy-alliance-join-now
UNESCO. (2026, January 20). MIL Alliance announces the election of its first Global Board. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/mil-alliance-announces-election-its-first-global-board
UNESCO. (n.d.). UNESCO Media and Information Literacy Alliance. UNESCO. https://www.unesco.org/en/media-information-literacy/alliance
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