JCOM 2010 Quiz3 FIXT!

.
FIXT!
WEEK3 Media Smarts Quiz • 9/22/10

Name: Dr. Ted

1. In his “Some Principles of Media Literacy,” David Considine says the old saying, “The camera never lies” isn’t necessarily so. Why?

Dr. Ted sez: As we are learning, there are a number of reasons why the camera does lie. And that’s not just an artifact of the special-effects era of PhotoShop, multimedia manipulation and the rest. During the Civil War, photography was a technology in its infancy, but even then, famed Civil War photo-documentarian Mathew Brady repositioned dead bodies for “artistic” and storytelling reasons. He may have said, “My greatest aim has been to advance the art of photography and to make it what I think I have, a great and truthful medium of history," but how “truthful” is it? We also have learned that the way information—text, images or whatever—is framed can alter its meaning, just by including and excluding different elements. In “Forest Gump,” Tom Hanks’ character is seen mooning LBJ, and in “Saving Private Ryan,” Hanks is fighting on Utah Beach in Normandy. Does the camera lie? Of course. But in any media image, how a story is framed—whether in text or photo or video…—affects its message and, potentially, its truth. (See framing in mass comm. theories, and this URL. And Principles of Media Literacy.)

2. In the media literacy readings, the authors suggest that production techniques like superimposing a reporter onto a green screen of the White House can have what effect?

a. Makes the news more exciting.
b. Misleads viewers.
c. Increases journalistic credibility.
d. Enhances viewer comprehension.
-->e. All of the above.

Dr. Ted sez: I can argue that all of these is potentially true. If you watch The Daily Show, you will often see Jon Stewart talking to his reporters in the field—but John Oliver and Jason Jones and Co. are actually just standing there in the studio in front of a green screen and footage from Iraq or the White House or wherever. The studio audience laughs, but the TV viewer could be fooled…. Still, it’s better and more effective storytelling. Or is it?

3. Why do media literacy proponents argue that citizens need both to understand and be able to analyze/evaluate media messages, but also to create media messages themselves?

Dr. Ted sez: Literacy in the 21st century means not only reading, but visual literacy (see No. 1) and capabilities to communicate with multimedia. The pencil has become a much more sophisticated instrument! Effective communication is a tool for everyday life in 2010. Understanding how that “pencil” is used and the techniques it can employ helps message receivers understand how they may be manipulated…or not.

4. Explain each of the following principles of media literacy and provide a brief example to illustrate your understanding (1 pt each):

a. Media are constructions: All media messages—words to special effects—are products that someone constructs. This is not the same as advertising—any time I write a sentence phrase I use employ certain words and reject don’t use others. That’s not necessarily evil, but it is the definition of “construction,” which then expands from word choice to idea selection and ideology.

b. Media representations create reality (how and to what effect?): Because of what the message creator selects and how s/he arranges the message’s components, the media product may represent reality to varying degrees. When you see Bigfoot in a business meeting, that may not be complete reality (!) Misrepresentations of fact can mislead readers/viewers. We call that “lying.”

c. Audiences negotiate their own meaning: Audiences (or individual audience members) are not passive recipients of media messages who just soak in the sender’s intended meaning. All of us see the world and interpret is differently. For us Red Sox fans, Derek Jeter is no hero….

d. Media constructions have commercial purposes: Sure, money—filthy lucre!—is king. But take a broad view of “commercial”—we who communicate want our target audiences to “buy” something: a philosophy, a perception of the world, an idea, a political position, a bottle of shampoo. More crassly, the more eyeballs a media message attracts, the more valuable it is to people who can sell it….

e. Media messages contain values and ideologies: The worldview of the message producer governs the message tone and focus and emphasis. Even if we try to be absolutely “straight” in our reporting of events, we can’t help but have our own ideas of what’s important, why it matters….

f. Media messages have social and political consequences: Media messages can’t tell us what to think, as we know from agenda-setting theory, but they can tell us what to think about. As the public starts to focus on some issues (and ignore others), pressure may grow to “do something.” People who see the world as a dangerous place may pressure lawmakers to create stronger laws and stiffer penalties and to build more prisons. Policy decisions grow from public sentiment.

g. Each medium has its own unique aesthetic form/impact: Communication is an art form, and like all art forms, some media lend themselves to telling certain kinds of stories better than others. A radio report on a tornado has a different impact than video footage of the damage (or did you see the recent floods in Europe?) Some years ago, CBS News anchor John Chancellor reported the unexplained crash of a jetliner coming from Europe to New York. All they had was a map of the North Atlantic with a little arrow from England ending in a big, jagged orange star south of Nova Scotia. They didn’t know what happened, who did it, and the story, er, died....

5. Explain (briefly) the relationship between the rise of mass communication and the industrial age.

Dr. Ted sez: As people moved from the countryside to cities in pursuit of work or marketplaces or whatever, it became easier to communicate to large groups of people—town criers, pamphlets and posters on walls, newspapers that communicated between a single individual editor/printer to many people at once. Gesellschaft.

6. Explain what the heck Marshall McLuhan was talking about with his fish analogy.

Dr. Ted sez: One more time: The fish in the pond is unaware of subtle changes in its environment, and may happily swim around, “breathing” in and out an increasingly toxic environment even until it became so toxic it kills him. We are generally as unaware of our daily media “diets”—stuff we absorb from mass media without even thinking about it, until our perceptions of the world may be altered. See this link.

7. On Teddy TV, Professor Pease talked about how the advent of TV might have changed Fiji. What happened and what might have been the cause? (The same thing was at work with Dr. Ted’s teenage crush on a French woman…)

Dr. Ted sez: Fijian perceptions of the “norm” of the world—what bodies should look like, how people should act—was influenced as this Polynesian culture started seeing American values on TV. Similarly, ma petite amie française had seen too many Al Capone and Bonny & Clyde movies: Chicago was a dark, dangerous place.

8. Critical thinking about media, according to the reading on Key Concepts of Critical Thinking, is NOT …

a. finding fault with media performance
b. learning what to think
c. eliminating incorrect media messages and content
d. protecting children from violent images and ideas
--> e. none of the above

Dr. Ted sez: That’s confusing: critical thinking is none of those things…. So what is it????

9. Discuss your responses to the Billy Joel video in the context of the concepts of media literacy and the central question of this class—how do we know what we think we know?

Dr. Ted sez: Your responses to this (and any media message) are your own, of course (which illustrates the mass comm. theory of selective perception, right?), but this video goes beyond our own individual perceptions of Gandhi and The Bomb and the Beatles, etc., because the images the video producer uses are framed by other media producers—the press—in the context of the events themselves. This is actually quite cool when you think about it. You’ll remember (I hope) that sociologist and media scholar Marshall McLuhan said, “The media is the message.” Part of what that means is that how a thing is framed and presented and frilled up (like for a party: Paris Hilton) or frilled down (like a war: Afghanistan or Vietnam) helps define that thing, whatever its actual reality (Remember Erma Bombeck’s kids, who wouldn’t eat anything they hadn’t seen dance on TV?). For us and for your parents and grandparents, the images that accompany Billy Joel’s song about history and culture framed events both the same—an image can’t lie, can it?—and completely differently, based on the individual viewer’s background and training and sociology and selective perception of those events. Today, images of Marilyn Monroe and Farah Fawcett are pretty pictures, dated and amusing. For people who “consumed” Marilyn in movies and then as JFK’s girlfriend, that image takes on much more meaning and power. So historical/social/cultural context, plus our own individual (selective) perceptions of a thing—from a Campbell’s soup can to a Jeep to a pretty girl (or boy) pin-up—can completely change and enhance that image’s power and meaning. This is a powerful and tricky tool for the professional communicator and her audience. Because for me as a creator of an advertisement about red grapes, for example, it’s just about grapes. But for Erma Bombeck’s kids, it may be about Fruit of the Loom underpants. I think you’ll agree that’s very different. For someone who lived through WWII or Vietnam or the Rolling Stones (or Lady Gaga), images from those times means something very different than they do for people who “know” war from history lessons, or Mick Jagger’s songs from commercials for floor cleaners. For producers of messages, this is very tricky, and we must remember in creating an image or a message that everyone sees and remembers (or doesn’t remember) historical icons differently, and that the meanings of these icons have been changed by previous interpretations of them by historians and writers and the popular media—movies, news, advertising, books, etc. Was Ulysses S. Grant a heroic general or a drunk? Was Marilyn Monroe a sexy icon or an abused girl? Was Private Ryan a national icon or a poor kid who got slaughtered in a senseless war. And is “senseless war” an editorial comment, or just redundant?

10. Over recent weeks, the pastor of a small Florida church with a congregation of fewer than 50 became one of the most important people on the planet with a threat to burn the Qur’an. Talk about the role of the media in this.

Dr. Ted sez: Librarian and historian Daniel Boorstin came up with a term, “pseudo event,” that was really a throw-away line to express his contempt for public relations and the media culture that will accept anything as equally newsworthy and important if it’s hyped correctly. But “pseudo event” lives on in scholarship and our understanding of media because it is so true: The importance of a thing relates directly to the amount of attention it receives in the media. So even if your “event” is putting on new socks on a Wednesday morning, if you can get enough media attention and “film at 11” and Tweets and viral video on the Web, then your socks (or Lindsay Lohan’s DUI) takes on lives of their own in the popular psyche. In Florida, Terry Jones came up with something that appealed to journalistic news values, as well as to people who buy into the simplistic equation of Muslim = terrorist. Here’s a “good Christian preacher” (all three of those terms are in question in his case) who was striking a blow for “Christian values,” for American “patriotism” and for the media icon that the 9/11 events have become. It was a brilliant pseudo event, and was hyped to the nth degree, first my Jones himself and then by the best and the brightest in American media and politics. Was this a legitimate news story? Yes and no. Elements that make news include timeliness (in this case, selecting the 9/11 anniversary) and human interest (playing off the 9/11 victims, general ill-informed hatred for “Muslims,” and ignorance about what the Qur’an is). But where’s the journalistic (or human) judgment? Once this carnival got going, it was impossible to stop. Because it was impossible to stop, it was newsworthy, so the press had to cover it, even as journalists were puking off-camera, and hating themselves for promoting a “story” that helped prompt violence in the Middle East, with people dying because of the story—which became news, of course, and escalated the story. So whose responsibility is this? His? He has First Amendment rights. The press—do they have the right to decide that we don’t need to see this (or an accident or a war or Lindsay Lohan)? Us, who loved the story? The people who want to know what’s going on, or the people who tell them?

Joy Brisighella in our class wrote this: “I was amazed and frustrated by the number of news sources that glommed onto this story and gave it legs. In 2008 a similar event in Topeka Kansas was purposefully ignored by the media. Yes, a Koran was burned. End of story, move along folks, nothing to see here. That could have been the case with Rev. Jones’ planned event too, but instead it was escalated into an international issue and a widely covered conflict. The difference was apparently the connection with the ongoing protest over a “Ground Zero Mosque,” which is neither a mosque or at Ground Zero. I like the quote from Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, who in criticism of the media said that there were “more people at his (Jones’) press conferences than listen to his sermons.” Pastor Jones had a congregation fewer than 50, but due to the media attention, he had an audience of millions. I also like this quote from Chris Cuomo, an ABC News anchor, who tweeted, “I am in the media, but think media gave life to this Florida burning ... and that was reckless.”



x/16 = %