What is media literacy?

I'm taking a media literacy class, and this is the prompt that we wrote about at the end of the evening.

What is media? What is literacy? Media = newspapers, magazines, television--things thtat inform society. At one time, we saw media as unbiased, purely informational. For a long time, we did not know what the results of television would be on society. Just like we don't know where the internet will lead us. There is this ignorance that media is something we use and we choose. We don't see media as using us. Media has a force on us. It affects us more than we realize. We spend a lot of time in classrooms analyzing old books, but I'm not sure literary analysis of The Scarlet Letter will help a majority of students to become critical thinkers. We might connect with students, gain the interest and motivation or more students, by analyzing media. It surrounds us, and many times students don't realize the messages being sent that are embedded in images and music and stereotypes (all beamed into the schools by Channel One). The literacy part comes with our reading of the media--our analysis of these visual and verbal messages.