Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed “If you can control the storytelling, then you do not have to worry about who makes the laws.” Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. — George Gerbner, media scholar and former dean of the Annenberg School1 Would you humiliate yourself in front of a huge television audience trying to win the affection of The Bachelorette or The Bachelor or singing off-key to gain media attention and possible fame? If you answered “maybe,” you’re not alone. Several thousand contestants show up for American Idol auditions every year in cities across the United States.2 Many simply hope for a few minutes of television fame. Some dream of media superstardom. OK, here is a harder question. Would you arm yourself with bow and arrow and battle to the death against a dozen other children for a reality television show? I sure hope your answer is “nope, nuh-uh, not ever.” But maybe you are familiar with the concept, especially if you’ve read the best-selling book or watched the blockbuster movie The Hunger Games, a work of fiction set in a futuristic world where young people annually attempt to slaughter one another. How could a society end up not only tolerating but celebrating something like this? The popular novel Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. explores how media forms can be used to shape and control how humans see our world and live in it. The stories and messages told by contemporary mass media—from books to television to social media—are important tools in shaping a society. As media scholar George Gerbner noted above, if an entity—person, business or government—wields the power of media storytelling, that entity will also be molding and structuring other parts of the human experience, ultimately influencing even the lawmaking process. Media Literacy is about understanding media messages on websites and social media feeds. It’s about exploring the stories told in books, podcasts, magazines, cable sports networks, radio shows, parody news, and cartoons. Because media messages affect the way audiences view and engage with the real world, this book asks a few simple questions about media’s honesty, independence from bias, and productivity in making the world a better place. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. That’s a tall order. Let’s look at a couple of examples from both a contemporary book and a 100-year-old textbook. The Hunger Games, a 2008 science fiction novel by Suzanne Collins, tells the story of a powerful and undemocratic government that controls the media. The government uses media messages, especially on television, to convince people that the only way their community can sustain its food supply is by cooperating with a gruesome reality TV show. The show pits children from various districts against one another in a bloody battle to the death. Who benefits from this dismal “game”? The Hunger Games depicts a Capitol of Panem where people enjoy ridiculous levels of wealth and comfort because of the hard work and inescapable poverty of all the other districts. Why don’t people rebel 2 Media Literacy Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. in this fictional world? Because the government-controlled media persuade them that their experience of the world is better than any alternative. Although it is a work of fiction, The Hunger Games offers an honest, independent, and productive glimpse into the consequences of media control, showing us how media stories can affect people’s lives. Collins says she wrote about a fictional world to explore ideas that affect people in the real world. “Telling a story in a futuristic world gives you this freedom to explore things that bother you in contemporary times,” she says. One problem that bothers her, she says, is “the power of television and how it’s used to influence our lives.”3 Collins worries that young people, and even adults, aren’t savvy enough about media to understand their emotions when watching, say, a reality TV show and coverage of real wars in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. “There’s this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn’t have the impact it should,” she says. “Because the young soldier’s dying in the war in Iraq, it’s not going to end at the commercial break. It’s not something fabricated; it’s not a game. It’s your life.”4 The Hunger Games is fiction, make-believe, a bad dream. In real life, in the United States, press freedom is protected from government control by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.5 But that doesn’t mean media are exempt from any type of control. Factors that influence media in today’s democracies include corporate ownership of media, pressures from audiences, demands of advertisers, and an unwillingness to challenge long-standing public attitudes about social values. These factors influence what we see, read, and hear in mass media today. Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. 3 But mass media in the good old days of yesteryear weren’t that much different. College freshmen grimace when I read a 100-year-old textbook to them. In a McGuffey reader published in the late 1800s for kids in about the second grade, stories offer insights into family values and good citizenship. Stories feature polite children who listen to their parents. These obedient children appreciate nature. They are thankful for the wonderful things life offers. And they don’t eat too much. Wait—don’t eat too much? Yes, that’s the theme of a second-grade lesson called “The Greedy Girl,” which I occasionally read aloud in my Introduction the Mass Communication class. The story focuses on Laura, a little girl who enjoys excessive quantities of food. “She isn’t wise,” the narrator adds, like the creatures of the forest who consume just enough and save extra, say, nuts for later. Gluttony has unpleasant consequences for Laura. The narrator concludes: “I do not love girls who eat too much. Do you, my little readers?”6 Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. That’s when my students groan and furrow their brows. Who does this McGuffey guy think he is? “I bet his wife and daughter end up with an eating disorder,” one student suggests. We talk about why the author might have chosen this topic and this heavy-handed approach. We’d never see a children’s story like this today, right? Then I hold up the latest edition of a woman’s magazine with illustrations of impossibly thin women—made slimmer and more “perfect” by photo editing software. I ask students: “How much of a stretch from ‘The Greedy Girl’ to this?” 4 Media Literacy Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. Good question. Today, some magazine editors talk a good line about empowering women of different sizes and shapes. An issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, for example, might contain an article about “out-of-whack” eating habits that don’t qualify as anorexia or bulimia but are dangerous nonetheless. At the same time, the photographs in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Vogue—most often digitally altered to make women look slimmer and more “attractive”—seem to be saying the same thing as the narrator of “The Greedy Girl.” Don’t eat too much or people won’t like you. Savvy students understand that they’re receiving mixed messages from contemporary mass media. This knowledge helps them navigate the flood of information they receive from TV, the Internet, print publications, and recorded music. That awareness is why Media Literacy exists. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. What Are Media? Everything we know that we didn’t discover from direct contact with our environment, family, and friends, we learned from media. The word medium, the singular form of media, refers to a mode of communication that transmits information—words, sounds, images—from a maker to a receiver. If I’m walking in the forest and get too far ahead of my hiking partner, I might stop to lay out an arrow from sticks, put it at a fork in the road, and keep hiking. My partner arrives, sees the arrow, and knows which direction I took. In this case, the sticks are my medium— used to make a message for my partner. My partner knows how to read the message and uses the medium to make a decision. Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. 5 Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. A nightly network news broadcast on television is also a medium, one watched on an average evening by 22.5 million people in the United States.7 So is a YouTube music video with 100 million hits or a social media status update viewed by 47 friends or followers. Media made for huge audiences are mass media, a category that includes television, websites, movies, books, newspapers, and radio shows. Because so many people encounter the messages of mass media, it’s important to think about how they work and the role they play in our lives. Here are a few reasons why understanding mass media is important: • Media stories shape our culture, serving both as a mirror of existing cultural practices and traditions and as a creator of new cultural traditions for audiences.8 • Media stories give us the perspectives and information needed to make good decisions about the paths we’ll chose as we career through life. • Media stories transport us into other worlds and give us a richer understanding of other people, places, and ways of thinking. • Media stories hypnotize us, immersing us in a fantasy more interesting or preferable to our real lives. • Media stories inspire us to imagine a better way of living in our worlds and act on our vision. • Media stories help us form ideas that we carry into our real lives. Media stories are powerful. Yet, we don’t often give them much consideration. I’ve taught mass communication to college freshmen in Nevada, Hawai’i, and California. It 6 Media Literacy Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. still surprises me when college-aged adults say that they rarely or never think about the role of mass media in their lives. They watch television but don’t consider its effect on their worldview or attitudes or actions. They listen to music without really hearing the lyrics or observing the style of the music. They watch advertising, lots of advertising, more advertising than at any previous time in the history of the human species. They’re adults, so they know the point of advertising is to sell a product, service, or idea. But that doesn’t mean they’ve given much thought to exactly how an advertisement works as a persuasive tool. My goal is to help my students—and readers of this book— begin or continue the lifelong process of becoming media literate. I say “lifelong” because media literacy isn’t a skill you acquire and then forget you’ve learned. It’s perhaps one of the most important skills that you’ll take with you as you launch out into the world of higher education, career, relationships, and family life. Your ability to analyze the media ranks as high as your studies in history, literature, and math. Media literacy will help you better navigate your academic experience, professional goals, and even your personal life.9 Media literacy is about exploring the stories told through media, reading them, listening carefully, and applying the skills of a media critic. For example, a media-literate person might watch a sporting event on television and consider what kinds of forces make her excited or bored during the show. During an election season, a media-literate person watches campaign commercials for political issues and works to understand what persuasive tools are being used to convince audiences to believe or vote a certain way. Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. 7 Media literacy helps humans have a conversation about who and what the media are representing and why many media messages represent these subjects the way they do. Two student athletes once showed my class clips from the reality TV show Basketball Wives and started a class discussion about how this show portrays race. Does the show rely on racial stereotypes to entertain its audience?10 A media-literate individual isn’t quick to judge a specific medium as terrific or trashy. Media-literacy educators note that it’s not always what you watch or listen to or read but how you watch, listen to, and read media. A medialiterate individual knows how to be a critic, asking good questions about media. She’s not a cheerleader, clapping her hands over every exciting new media trend. And she’s not a cynic, automatically assuming the worst and wagging a finger. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. Finally, media literacy can encourage you to use your own voice, giving you ideas about how to construct your own messages and how to use your media-making powers responsibly. A media-literate person might start a social media discussion about race or gender in Disney cartoons, create a YouTube playlist of music that promotes social justice, or write a blog about popular video games. Media literacy, it turns out, is contagious. A Memorable Acronym for Media Critics The goal of this book is to raise awareness of a variety of issues in all types of media—from social networks to blogs to YouTube videos to sports coverage and even to video games and cartoons. That’s a big task. How could we chop 8 Media Literacy Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. something as large as this up into manageable, bite-sized chunks? That’s the question I had in mind when I started to plan this project. I decided that what I needed was a simple and memorable acronym that could be applied to all media to look at them critically. I tried to come up with three simple attributes or qualities that a person could look for in a particular medium or a media genre, like parody news. I chose three values I care about—truth, bias, and usefulness. As an acronym, that turned out to be TBU. I wasn’t excited. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. Besides the bad acronym, some of the terms were problematic. Truth is a difficult word to define. A novel like The Hunger Games or the latest movie in The Lord of the Rings series can be not exactly truthful but still seem meaningful. Although the stories are fabricated, a character may encounter a problem or situation that seems familiar to me—something to which I can relate. When fiction resembles my own experience so much that I identify with the characters or situation, it seems—honest. The word bias was also a problem because it describes a medium that’s slanted or shaped to promote one idea while excluding another. That’s not something you want in media. A much better value might be described as independence, an open medium that doesn’t lean too far in one direction. And what exactly does the word useful mean? The word seems limp and passive. I decided that productive might be a better word and a better way to think about usefulness. I am a useful person, most days. I have some skills that can be employed to do lots of things. But some days I am more productive than others, putting my potential into action. That seems an important value for media as well. Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. 9 So my new acronym was born. What if we asked about the honesty of a medium, questioned its independence, and gauged its productivity? That’s an easier acronym because it spells out a word—HIP. HIP? Sorry, but that’s not very “hip,” as in trendy, fashionable, and current. I explained my plan to a friend who was working on a doctoral degree in literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her school has always seemed like a hip place to me. My friend was politely opposed to my plan, arguing that it’s not hip to use HIP as a media acronym. Her boyfriend, a lawyer in San Francisco, agreed. We spent some time trying to come up with something better. Honesty, openness, productivity—HOP. Honesty, accuracy, productivity—HAP. Honesty, independence, handiness—HIH. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. In the end, I liked HIP the best. It seems the easiest to remember. So, in this book, we’ll talk about the qualities of honesty, independence, and productivity in the hopes of finding out what media work the best in our own media diets. In the following chapters, we’ll see how these three values overlap, how honesty and independence are closely linked—and yet even an honest and independent medium can be unproductive. I like examples, so I’ll use lots of them. 10 Media Literacy Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. A “Dangerous” Tool! In 1999, author and media critic Douglas Rushkoff noted that the United States was the only developed nation in the world that didn’t make media literacy a required part of its public school curriculum. “Media literacy is dangerous,” he writes in his book Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say.11 “Not to the individuals who gain it but to the people and institutions that depend on our not having it.” Here’s why. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. Once you’re armed with the tools of a media critic, you use them—on every single bit of media from a 30-second commercial to the Netflix series on which you’re binging to a cable news show that picks apart a lawmaker’s speech. “If we learn the techniques that an advertiser uses to fool us, we have also learned the techniques that a government uses,” Rushkoff writes.12 Does that mean becoming a conspiracy theorist? Looking for hidden agendas in every bit of media that comes our way? Rushkoff warns that it’s tempting to think of some large organized force that we can label “they,” as in it’s “us” against “them.” But that can lead to cynicism, the dark side of media literacy. The advertising executive is not a bad person involved in some large conspiracy to brainwash the public. Neither is the public relations agency hired to repair a celebrity’s image after she’s been caught shoplifting. The celebrity herself isn’t part of the conspiracy any more than you, watching at home, clicking on the latest online gossip and recommending it to social network friends. We’re all in this together. Optimistic, forward-thinking media criticism can break the cycle for everyone. We can all become more aware Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. 11 as media consumers, more mindful of the messages we ingest, more critical of their value in our lives and their impact on our worldviews. If media consumers demand work that’s honest, independent, and productive, media makers will respond to this demand. Recently, I went to hear Canadian author Naomi Klein talk about the content of a book and documentary film she was working on.13 In Klein’s writing and visual media, she wants to deliver a message of hope—hope that people will realize the urgency of global climate change and work together to craft a more sustainable way of living. One of the reasons that people don’t do this, she suggested, is because we think humans are supposed to be selfish and greedy. We think that humans are supposed to be selfish and greedy because that’s a message foisted on us by media—from reality television to sports to news coverage of the banking industry. We have been “programmed” by the programs we watch. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. We don’t have to believe these messages. Critical viewers can figure out how to avoid being “programmed.” As aware media consumers, we can learn to see through the stories we’re told by mass media. As thoughtful media producers, we can make new messages. We can become the shapers of our own future and the future of our species. Does this sound overwhelming? To be honest, yes, it does. Rushkoff writes that we are so used to the media’s messages, to their coercive programming, that we may feel “powerless, passive, or depressed . . . suspicious and cynical.”14 That feeling, however, is another effect of the mass media, one that you can overcome. You don’t have to feel helpless. You have power—over yourself, your media consumption, your view of the world. You have options and 12 Media Literacy Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. ways of taking action. You can become a critic—a person who looks carefully at examples of media and evaluates them knowledgeably—instead of a cynic who becomes angry and dismisses all media as lies and more lies. Copyright © 2013. International Debate Educational Association. All rights reserved. The key is to not give up. In her talk, Klein told those of us in a crowded California university auditorium that it’s a great time to be alive. We have so many choices about what to do with our time and energy. We can learn to make good choices, not just for us but for the humans who will inherit the blissful future we create. That’s the passion that fuels the media critic. Introduction: Media Stories on Which We Feed Pike, Deidre. Media Literacy : Seeking Honesty, Independence,and Productivity in Today's Mass Messages, International Debate Educational Association, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usf/detail.action?docID=3433193. Created from usf on 2021-11-23 18:46:37. 13 
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