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For 16 years, Elizabeth Thoman has been a unique resistance leader, urging ordinary people to be more critical and skeptical of television.
Her weapon is the pithy, pertinent, Los Angeles-based magazine Media&Values. Her cause is media literacy among viewers - and it has suddenly become an urgent matter as questionable reality shows flood TV, news and entertainment increasingly merge and fake a truck crash on "Dateline NBC" has deepened distrust of the medium.
If media literacy once seemed an ivory-tower concept, it now has a place on the street where you live. Or should.
Of the growing... Read More
Summer Seminars Take on Hot Topics in Media Literacy
Educators learn exercises to make media study come alive in the classroom. By Lisa Tripp
How could a plain, white towel help a sixth grader improve her language skills? This summer Southland educators immersed them-selves in classic media literacy exercises and learned how playing an ad exec selling towels to teenage girls or a talk show host debating the American Revolution can teach students core classroom skills while helping them become savvy media consumers.
The exercises were part of four lively day-long seminars hosted by the Center for Media Literacy and co-sponsored by Unite L.A.
Taught by leaders in sociology, education, and... Read More
The heavenly hoopla continues. While the righteous religious right of presidential-minded Pat Robertson, Gospel-honking Jimmy Swaggart and TV-dancing Jerry Falwell rules the headlines and airwaves, though, who is ruling the high ground? While the electronic clergy's demagogic media bashers make noise, who is making sense? Los Angeles-based Media&Values — the only magazine of its kind in the nation — that's who. Published quarterly, it's simply terrific. The executive editor is a Catholic nun; the associate editor a Jew. Yes, it's "an interfaith media magazine"; no it doesn't... Read More
Media Awareness Education: Eighteen Basic Principles
By Len Masterman, University of Nottingham, 1989
Media Education is a serious and significant endeavor. At stake is the empowerment of individuals, especially minorities, and the strengthening of society's democratic structures.
The central unifying concept of Media Education is that of representation. The media mediate. They do not reflect but re-present the world. The media, that is, are symbolic sign systems that must be decoded. Without this principle no media education is possible. From it, all else flows.
Media Education is a lifelong process. High student motivation, therefore, must become a primary objective.
Media... Read More
This declaration was issued unanimously be the representatives of 19 nations at UNESCO's 1982 International Symposium on Media Education at Grunwald, Federal Republic of Germany.
We live in a world where media are omnipresent: an increasing number of people spend a great deal of time watching television, reading newspapers and magazines, playing records and listening to the radio. In some countries, for example, children already spend more time watching television than they do attending school
Rather than condemn or endorse the undoubted power of the media, we need to accept their... Read More
Growing Up Female in a Media World
An overview of issues on women, girls and the media. By Elizabeth Thoman and Dale Ann Stieber
The media world is a lot more complicated for today’s girls and women than it was for prior generations who watched Annette grow up on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s. During our 20th century lifetimes, women have witnessed the increasing influence of the mass media in shaping our values, needs and identities — and those of our daughters and granddaughters.
The world is saturated with messages telling or selling something. Americans are exposed to over 2,000 ads a day, sixty channels of tv, movies showing at the local theatre or on video, airwaves full of radio talk and music,... Read More
A little time and a set of four color highlighters are all you need to evaluate your local paper's treatment of female reporters and newsmakers. A week of monitoring should provide a good sample. As you read your papers, use blue and red to mark male and female bylines. The remaining two colors can be used to mark references to men and women as newsmakers (proper names only – no pronouns) in photos, headlines, captions and stories. After marking each day's paper, count the total number of bylines and divide the number of female bylines by the total. Use the same procedure to find the... Read More
What are Other Countries Doing in Media Education?
An exerpt from the 1988 Annual Report of the L.J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation By Laura Lederer In the past 20 years, several European governments have...introduced media education curricula into primary, secondary and university levels of schooling. In an international survey, media communications scholar Father John Pungente outlines a media awareness program put forth by the ministry of education in France which helps French citizens to learn how to receive, analyze and interpret images. "In order to avoid passive viewing and manipulation" the ministry said, the student must "learn how such images are produced, how they are organized, and how to enrich them in association with... Read More
Four Steps to Success in Media Literacy
What’s needed to ensure the development of media literacy — in a country — in a district? — even a school? Notes from a 1991 UNESCO conference attended by CML Founder Elizabeth Thoman
Unless a country has all four elements in place, ongoing, and in sync with each other, it will not be able to successfully implement media education for all of its citizens.
— Elizabeth Thoman, Center for Media Literacy, Los Angeles
What does it take to put media education into place in a country's educational system? At the 1991 conference, "New Directions in Media Literacy," sponsored by UNESCO, the British Film Institute, the Council of Europe and others at the University of Toulouse, the following four steps were identified as required for success. Reflection on the current status... Read More
A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide." And for plenty of good reasons, since:
it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting
it is a major component in acid rain
it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state
accidental inhalation can kill... Read More
Media Violence: We All Share In It
The following opinion essay appeared in the Los Angeles Times Calendar (entertainment) section: June 16, 1997 in response to a Calendar interview with actor John Malcovich. By James Read
As a parent of two small children who is concerned about the impact of film and television violence, I was glad to read that John Malkovich also worries about the effects of movie mayhem on young minds (L.A. Times: Calendar, June 4, 1997). It was disheartening however, to see him trivialize a very complex issue by suggesting that ultimately "parents (should) do a better job raising their children"... so as not to be adversely affected by the constant slaughter that is part of our media culture. Pointing the finger at negligent Moms and Dads perpetuates a circle of blame (in which... Read More
Sut Jhally, an associate professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. He recently spoke to Rosalind Silver, Media&Values' editor, about advertising's role as a source of meaning for our culture. Following are edited excerpts from their conversation. Media&Values Editorial Assistant David Ruth was the principal editor of the interview. Media&Values: You have developed some theories about the ways television watching becomes a kind of... Read More
A study of Media Education around the world, shows that there are nine factors which appear to be crucial to the successful development of Media Education in secondary schools.
Media Education, like other innovative programs, must be a grassroots movement and teachers need to take a major initiative in lobbying for this.
Educational authorities must give clear support to such programs by mandating the teaching of Media Studies within the curriculum, establishing guidelines and resource books, and by making certain that curricula are developed and that materials are available.
Faculties... Read More
Family Life is Serious Business in the Comics
Researchers report six-decade study analyzing images of family life in comic strips published on Mother's Day or Father's Day. The perception of fatherhood has shifted with the forces of social and political tides, according to a study of some of America's best-known families. A six-decade analysis of fatherhood and motherhood as played out by popular comic strip characters charts the parodies that challenge and perpetrate national ideologies and gender stereotypes.
The chronological study, headed by Georgia State University sociologist Ralph LaRossa and reported by the National Council on... Read More
The Power of Numbers: Making Sense of Media Statistics
Those sensational statistics sbout kids and media may only be half of the story By Julie Dobrow
"TV violence continues to rise, study finds," proclaimed the headline in a major newspaper after the release of the third annual National Television Violence Study this past April. It made for a compelling headline, but was this actually what researchers found?
In fact, what the researchers concluded is that the overall percentage of programs on television that contain some violence was virtually unchanged from the two previous years of the study. What the writer of the article (and the... Read More
Involving the Media in Media Education
Report from Commission 1 New Directions in Media Education Conference July, 1989 / Toulouse, France Report by Michel Huguier Commission I, chaired by Odile Chenevez, training officer at CLEMI, comprised twenty-four participants representing ten nationalities and a range of professions, both in education and in the media (journalists and television producers). In its opening session the commission drew up a list of three different kinds of collaboration that the media could offer to media education. Each of the professional groups then outlined and compared their aims and objectives. The group concentrated on education about information media, although many of its conclusions could apply to a wider range of... Read More
Like history, because the media interpret the past to us show us what has gone into making us the way we are.
Like geography, because the media define for us our own place in the world.
Like civics, because the media help us to understand the workings of our immediate world, and our individual places in it.
Like literature, because the media are major sources of modern culture and entertainment.
Like literature, because the media require us to learn and use critical thinking skills.
Like business, because the media are major industries and are inextricably involved in commerce... Read More
Development-oriented journalism need not always accentuate the positive, says communication director Phil Harris, director of training and communication studies, InterPress Service (IPS), but it shouldn't accentuate the negative either. "Coverage of human-interest development reveals the reality of rural life, the grime, the injustice, the squalor as well as the success stories. "Development journalists have often been told: don't touch coups, earthquakes and disasters," because such negative stories are the territory of event-oriented Northern hemisphere wire services. "This is nonsense... Read More
Listening to the Beat of World Music
Plus "How to Make Musical Comparisons" activity By Barbara Osborn
Music puts a face on a country in a way no news report ever can. Paul Simon's Graceland album, recorded in the mid-1980s with the South African a capella group Ladysmith Black Mombazo, brought life in South Africa close to many North Americans for the first time. Music offers a life-affirming, human-scale introduction to others and ignites a desire to understand more about the people and culture who make it. Graceland was early evidence of a new development in the music industry: World music. Go into any major record store today and you'll find that world music has become big business.... Read More
In the vanguard of the Marines, the press corps had already stormed Somailia. Now we will see more of the famailiar pictures of grotesque human degradation, with foreign angels of mercy ministering to starving children, juxtaposed with images of trigger-happy teen-age looters. Such pictures prompted President Bush's military adventure-now they will justify it. The camera can't lie, we are told. But anyone who has watched a Western film crew in an African famine will know just how much effort it takes to compose the "right" image. Photogenic starving children are hard to find, even in... Read More
Snapshots from a TV Album: Scenarios Explore Family Viewing Habits
Two skits to help kids and parents reflect on TV viewing habits. By Barbara Osborn
When TV was introduced in the late l940s, the upscale lifestyle magazine Better Homes & Gardens looked into the future and predicted that television would become a member of the family. Fifty years later, 98 percent of American households have welcomed television into their homes. Families spend more time with TV (an average of just over seven hours a day) than they do anything else but working and sleeping. Still, few people stop to examine when TV crosses the line from companion to intruder. Its development has been gradual so we don't always notice it, but TV has established an almost... Read More
"Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties." -John Milton
Although articulated by an English poet and statesman, the expression by John Milton quoted here represents the principles of free expression that most Americans fondly believe in as the guiding principles of their country. It is commonly believed that as a child of the Enlightenment, the United States inherited and installed a libertarian model of a press open to all shades of opinion. As research reveals, however, the actual history of U.S. free expression is not... Read More
The question, "Who tells the stories?" is one of special significance to those working in the church or synagogue in today's media age. Who imagines the world for us and what are the procedures by which they do so? What story do they tell? George Gerbner pinpoints the importance of the question when he notes; "Children used to grow up in a home where parents told most of the stories. Today television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time." When parents cease being the primary story-tellers, offering their children their own versions of the world, a significant... Read More
The necessity for and methods of media literacy education are often absent or unclear for many teachers and parents. Teachers are struggling with many problems already: illiteracy, new educational technologies, and students from dysfunctional families. We deal with drug problems, poverty, minority underachievement, and even violence. Why should media literacy be added to our challenges? Didn't we get along without media literacy for 75 years of radio, 50 years of television and centuries of newspapers and magazines? The answers to these questions are intertwined: Media literacy is no... Read More