the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.
I find that a lot of the time people who don't see the value of literary/media analysis haven't been taught properly. They know that when they write they aren't thinking about themes and metaphors and assonance, so why should they care? But when you go through a text and pick out the techniques and themes that doesn't necessarily mean that the author included those things deliberately. In fact I would argue that in 90% of cases they probably didn't.
It's not always a question of "why did the author choose that"; choices in art are often subconscious. All creations are full of assumptions about how the world works, how other people think, how language works, etc.
All readers also bring their own baggage - we all have biases that we aren't aware we hold. It isn't some moral failure, it's just how humans process knowledge. Two people could try and communicate the exact same point, but the exact meaning understood by the reader will always be slightly and perhaps subtly different. Two readers could sit down to read the exact same text and would come out of it with different understandings of what the text is trying to convey and how it made them feel.
Completely unrelated but this is one of the reasons I dislike the rise of AI writing. When someone writes, regardless of intention, there is meaning in their word choice, grammar, tone, formality, what they choose to include vs omit, what assumptions they make about the world and the reader, etc. A lot of these are unconscious and therefore impossible to add back in to a text through heavy editing. LLMs flatten all of this down to the average level within their training data. It's one thing if it's being used a search engine (I have unrelated concerns about algorithms, truth and censorship) but an AI-written creative text no longer tells me anything about what you actually wanted to communicate, it's just paragraphs of bloat. It would honestly be more valuable to me as the reader to just read the prompt you used.
There are other reasons to care about analysis though. Media analysis is an important part of literacy. Even a person who has no education on the topic would be able to recognise that some works are more interesting than others, or resonate better with them as a reader, or are more persuasive. It you can't recognise what it is in a text that makes you feel a certain way, you won't be able to reliably reproduce this in your own writing. Even people who aren't authors still benefit from (and often rely on) being able to write. Even something as simple as writing a CV and cover letter when applying for jobs.
