Kilbourne, J. (Writer/Producer), & Jhally, S. (Director) (1999). Killing us softly 3 [Motion picture]. (Available from Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA 01060). Retrieved January 15, 2009, from [if link doesn’t work, search for keywords “killing us softly” via Google or YouTube] http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1993368502337678412&hl=en&fs=true
Livingston, S., & Bennett, L. W. (2003). Gatekeeping, indexing, and live-event news: Is technology altering the construction of news? Political Communication, 20, 363-380.
Cortes, Carlos. (2000). The children are watching: How the media teach about diversity. New York: Teacher’s College Press.
This course allowed me to reflect on the role of media in my life and instilled a deep appreciation of the need for media literacy in schools.
Parental monitoring and oversight of television in the household I spent a lot of my time in while growing up was highly concerned with the viewing of violence, which I didn’t realize until much later is uncommon. Also uncommon were the lessons of my 5th grade teacher Mrs. Tucker who taught us propaganda and advertising techniques (e.g., bandwagon, testimonial) and how the images we see on television are contrived and unreal (e.g., using materials such as glue to depict glistening food). She taught us to remain critical and not just accept everything we see and hear.
I didn’t realize until much later that media was a source of learning for many people and functions to influence behavior. Within my bachelor’s and MBA programs that both focused on marketing, I gained an understanding of the techniques for driving sales through media. For example, Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation is a must-read, particularly for his discussion of the child-to-parent “nag factor” frequently seen in grocery stores.
Jean Kilbourne, within the Killing us Softly educational video series, explains that media teaches us much more than to simply buy more. In her words, “Advertising is the foundation of the mass media; the primary purpose of the mass media is to sell products. . .it sells values. . .images. . .concepts of love and sexuality, of romance, of success, and perhaps most important of normalcy. To a great extent, advertising tells us who we are and who we should be.” She effectively applies these assertions to the depiction of women through the use of multiple examples, illustrating how media support cultural constructs of women-as-objects, women-as-violence-targets, and women as needing to strive toward a depicted ideal.
Related to the perpetuation of norms is Livingston and Bennett’s article that examines the increase of event-driven news (defined as “coverage of activities that are, at least at their initial occurrence, spontaneous and not managed by officials within institutional settings;” p. 364). After analyzing CNN international desk stories from 1994 to 2001 from the Lexis-Nexis database, they discovered that while institution-based stories decreased and event-driven news increased, the event-driven stories overwhelmingly still contained official voices; “reporters rely on official resources for news cues and frames” (p. 375).
Current examples are frequent. Look no further than the January 16, 2009 USA Today coverage of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 making an emergency landing on the Hudson River. New York’s governor and mayor, federal investigators, TSA officials, and a spokesman for the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, the Federal Aviation Administration, a former union safety chief who flew for US Airways, a US Airways spokeswoman, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and pilots for other airlines providing an assessment are among the voices of passengers interviewed for the story (USA Today, Landing hailed as ‘Miracle on the Hudson,’ probe begins by By Martha T. Moore, Kevin McCoy, Alan Levin and Rick Hampson). Events do not speak for themselves; they are framed by multiple, official views.
Cortes, in the text The Children are Watching: How the Media Teach about Diversity, holds that media is an educational force that imprints, reinforces, and perpetuates social constructs. In his words, they “contribute to the construction of beliefs and attitudes about diversity” (p. 23). He discusses a point of frustration that I share: studies of media treatment are frequently unigroup and do not compare treatment across groups. He cites the example of Latin American towns being referred to as “sleepy” (associated with siestas), whereas other villages and small towns in other parts of the world do not as frequently receive this association. He states that “while a unigroup analysis can suggest such treatment patterns, only a comparative analysis can confirm it” (p. 54).
Dr. Lynn McBrien, in her 1999 article New Texts, New Tools: An Argument for Media Literacy (Educational Leadership, 57(2), 76-79), describes a pedagogical approach for teaching media: studying
background - reasons for a medium’s existence;
tools - e.g., zooming into a product, using swirling transition scenes that serve to mesmerize;
deconstruction - i.e., breaking down the components of media such as lighting, shading, etc. that yield a final image;
evaluation - considering the message and controlling reactions; and
original construction - using media to make one’s own message.
Using these steps, students can “recognize stereotypes, biases, multiple viewpoints, advertising devices, camera techniques, and photographic manipulation, all of which contribute to the overall effect to move, entertain, persuade, or manipulate a consumer” (McBrien, 1999, p. 78).
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