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Ever wonder why you see few articles in women's magazines on the dangers of smoking and alcohol? As reported in the Wellness Letter, a study by Lauren Kessler of the University of Oregon, published in Journalism Quarterly, surveyed six large-circulation women's magazines that also regularly report on women's health issues: Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, McCall's, Woman's Day and Ms. (Ms. has recently been redesigned to carry no ads, so the Kessler findings apply only to the old magazine.) All these magazines except Good Housekeeping ran cigarette ads. In the five years... Read More
Beverly is an art director. She works with images all the time, and knows just how advertising tries to work on her. And she's fought hard to maintain her independence - to be herself. But I hear her talk about her friends, and she always ends up comparing them to some famous face: "Oh, you know her, she looks like Cheryl Tiegs." And when I ask her whom she looks like, Beverly glances down and shrugs, "Oh, nobody, just plain old me." Everybody struggles to develop a sense of security, a sense of personal identity, but most of us end up constantly glancing around to see if we measure... Read More
The following set of guidelines for the entertainment community about the use of alcohol in TV entertainment shows has helped to raise the consciousness of producers and writers for over a decade. Use it in your own viewing at home, or in a class or group to evaluate the depiction of alcohol use in the programs you watch. Check to see that shows don't:
Glamorize the drinking or serving of alcohol as a sophisticated or adult pursuit;
Show the use of alcohol gratuitously-in those cases where another beverage might easily and fittingly be substituted;
Omit the grim consequences of alcohol... Read More
"Absolut Magic" proclaims a print ad for a popular vodka. "Paradise found," headlines another. "Fairy tales can come true" says a third. All these ads illustrate the major premise of alcohol advertising's mythology: Alcohol is magic, a magic carpet that can take you away. It can make you successful, sophisticated, sexy. Without it, your life would be dull, mediocre and ordinary. Everyone wants to believe in happy endings. But as most of us know, the reality of alcohol for many people in our society is more like a horror story than a fairy tale. The liquid in the glass is... Read More
"No street-corner crack dealer ever had a better line than the one Madison Avenue delivers at every commercial break: Buy now! Quick thrills!" - Barbara Ehrenreich, Ms.
When the Media&Values editorial staff first started thinking and reading about an issue on media and drugs in the middle of 1990, there was no shortage of material. It seemed that every magazine in America had done a cover story on crack houses, "the Colombian connection," and, above all, "the drug war." Yet as we read, we had a feeling of disquiet. The problem of illegal drugs, with their physical and mental... Read More
Picture your most recent family get together. Dinner, TV, maybe an argument over what to watch?
How about an evening where "the tube" stays black and your family is the star!
Maybe you're a grandparent with lots of stories you'd love to pass on to your grandchildren - terrific! But what about little Lucy and Billy who are only six or seven - can they join in, too? Sure. As a matter of fact, they may have an edge; this technique involves writing from a child's point of view.
Hiring a director and film crew isn't required. You just need storytelling skills. Instead of a film, the end... Read More
There was a time - in fact, only 30 or 40 years ago - when children were not spoken of as spenders or customers but as savers and future consumers. Sure, they bought penny candy and an occasional soft drink, but retailers did not think of them as customers per se. They were more often perceived as "Mrs. Bohuslov's kids" who just happened to buy something while they were in the store. Children had money, but it was for saving, not spending. They were always saving up for something, according to them, but they never actually seemed to buy very much. They would, for example, save up for a... Read More
In a documentary I produced some years ago called Part Time Work, 17-year-old Danny recognizes that he's wasted his high school years and faces a bleak future as "just another worker." After the documentary aired, however, Danny enrolled in college and majored in television production and theater. In another documentary, Ricky is a high school dropout naively dreaming of a career in the National Basketball Association. But Ricky now has a high school diploma, is attending community college and hasn't played serious basketball for years. I am not confessing to fraud and deception. The... Read More
At first glance it looked like The Return of the Rainbow Coalition. First Whoopie Goldberg, then Edward James Olmos took the platform to rouse the crowd to action.
But it wasn't a minority rally. It was Earth Day. And it brought viewers the all-too-rare media coverage of minority figures speaking out on other than specific minority issues.
Moreover, the media have begun to examine the usually-overlooked relationship between general and minority environmental concerns. Coverage this spring of pollution-caused cancer clusters in largely black industrial towns in the Mississippit Delta are... Read More
Altered States: How Television Changes Childhood
An interview with Joshua Meyrowitz by Barbara Osborn
In your award-winning book No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, you deal with television's role in blurring traditional distinctions between public and private spheres. In particular, you say that TV and other electronic media have connected the home to the outside world. What impact has this had on the family?
The family sphere used to be defined by its isolation from the public realm. There was the public male realm of "rational accomplishment" and brutal competition, and the private female and child-rearing sphere of home, intuition and emotion. The... Read More
It takes only one summer for a child of the right age to bond with the natural world, to know in her bones that the world is alive, and wild and kin to her. There is a kind of imprinting that either takes place, or doesn't, in a girl or boy before the age of 10 or 11. As long as the wilderness survives, there is a place for this bonding to occur. As long as there are unspoiled natural places near enough that we can reach them and spend enough time in them, our children can have that inner awakening and sense of connection. But it can never happen through media. Television's nature... Read More
Envrionment News: No More Business as Usual
Does today's media have the courage to tell the truth about the Earth? By John De Mott
The environment is "in" again this season. Thanks in part to all the hoopla of Earth Day 1990, the media have once again climbed aboard the environmental protection bandwagon. But where have they been for the 20 years since the last Earth Day? While today's environmental tragedy was unfolding, where was the media? While Spaceship Earth spun toward destruction as a habitat for all life, the press busied itself reporting the exploits of football players, the sexual adventures of entertainers and other junk news. For a while during the euphoric days of 1970, it looked like things... Read More
Since this article first appeared in Media&Values #39 "Militarism: The Media Connection," (Spring, 1987) the volunteer army--recruited through advertising and marketing programs like those described--has been to war. Although today's advertising programs may vary in message or detail, they still center on commercial marketing techniques. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, activist organizations have scored some successes in persuading local school boards to review campus recruiting... Read More
Brands R Us: How Advertising Works
Plus Six Ways to Reduce Advertising in Your Life. By Stephen Garey
Hyundai tells us that their cars make sense, Apple Computer offers us the power to be our best, and most of us don't believe a word of it. The fact is, when all is said and done, most people don't believe, don't remember, don't even notice, most advertising. This has always been so and always will be so. The vast majority of advertising is ineffective and inefficient.
And yet, there is a direct connection between a society's (or individual's) levels of exposure to advertising and the levels of consumption. How can this be? If advertising... Read More
"The collapse of America's "will" to fight in Vietnam resulted from a political process of which the media were only one part...It is hard to see how, short of a real turn to authoritarian government, political doubt and controversy could have been contained much longer.
What can be said is that such issues as what was best for the people of Indochina and how substantial a national interest did the U.S. have in its political struggles were never seriously discussed in news coverage of the war, not, at... Read More
Where Does it Come From? Where Does it Go?
The media aid and abet us in our daily efforts to pretend the world isn't interconnected. by Tyrone Cashman
When I was growing up in a small Midwestern town, my mother almost always knew which farms the meat, the potatoes and the corn on our table were raised on. From our upstairs window we could see the water tower where our water came from. We played by the wells that fed the tower. We kids had learned about the workings of the local sewage plant, and we knew what the water looked like that flowed from it into the river and on down to the next town. We had visited the dump and knew how the garbage got there, and what was done to it... Read More
News: Beyond the Myth of Objectivity
Plus How to Analyze a News Story: Eight Guidelines for Reading Between the Lines. by Jay Davis
Objectivity, n. (Apparently,) The practice of presenting both sides of an issue. Spend a week watching any of the network news reports and you are likely to conclude that all issues have only two sides and that middle-aged, white males have the only insight on them. From Sunday afternoon interview programs to ABC's Nightline, satisfying the U.S. media's standards of "objectivity" seems to require bringing opposing personalities together to debate issues of foreign and domestic policy. The ensuing dialogue, usually between Democrats and Republicans or some equivalent, suggests that all sides... Read More
When I read the daily newspaper or watch the evening news, what is missing often upsets me as much as what is there. What is missing frequently seems to be the truth.
Of course, as the Chinese proverb frequently quoted by the late Latin American journalist, Penny Lernoux, says, "There is your truth, there is my truth and there is the truth."
Most of us are convinced that "my truth" is "the truth." But as we move into the '90s, more and more sophisticated news management techniques will be used to convince us... Read More
At the beginning of my career in the 1970s I spent time actively looking in television and film for characters who would reflect my goals and help me see what was possible for a woman in this society.
At that time I could only find two images I could identify with on any level. Emma Peel, the cool crimefighter on The Avengers impressed me with her independence and savoir faire, while Mary Tyler Moore's Mary Richards was struggling with many of the same personal and professional issues I was myself.
Otherwise, the many women featured in... Read More
Real Issues in a Reel World
A feminist filmmaker describes how she makes films and uses them to bring about change By Kathleen Shannon
When I started working in documentary film in 1952, I thrilled to rhetoric about the Role of Film--to educate, to inform, to move people. By the time I joined the National Film Board of Canada in 1956, the thrill was wearing a bit thin. It was nearly threadbare by 1961 when it was kindly explained to me that "everyone at the NFBC contributes, whatever they're doing"—a gentle way of telling me I wasn't wanted in Unit B, where all the "best" films were being made.
In those days there were... Read More
The issues for women in a media world have a long history.
Long before there was advertising to objectify women's bodies to sell liquor; long before there were sitcoms to trivialize women's lives; long before there were movies to stereotype women as lusty, jealous bimbos who suspect other women of capital offenses; long before there were magazine covers, soft and hard porn and comic books to make little girls grow up thinking that being curvacious, slender and blonde will make them happy, there was Eve... Read More
How do Media Images of Men Affect Our Lives?
Re-Imagining the American Dream By Sam Femiano and Mark Nickerson
Turn on your television set and there is about a 90 percent chance that the first person you view will be male. Yet, although men predominate on TV, questions come up frequently about the types of men portrayed. How do they relate to the men we know in our daily lives? Very often it seems clear that they differ a lot. Primarily, they are less real, more perfect and more predictable. In other words, they are stereotyped. A stereotype is a view or a characterization of a person or a group of persons based upon narrow and frequently incorrect assumptions. Stereotypes are used by... Read More
At first, Dad seemed to reign supreme in sitcom country -- or at least in its better neighborhoods On the bulk of those shows set in the suburbs, Dad's authority around the house appeared to be the whole point of the spectacle. It was this implied paternalism that made most of those "comedies" so unamusing: Dad's status was, back then, no laughing matter. Despite their laugh tracks and bouncy themes the real , spirit of those shows was expressed in their daunting titles: Make Room for Daddy and Father Knows Best were pure and simple... Read More
Research conducted over the last 20 years offers a number of theories about the relationship between older people and TV.
Television viewing does go up after age 50. Physical limitations related to advancing age help to explain why, according to several studies. Older people experiencing problems with seeing or hearing (which afflict at least 20 percent of people over 65) find television easier to deal with, since it provides both verbal and visual information together. Thus they may turn to it when sensory loss begins to discourage use of radio and/or print. (S. Chaffee and D.... Read More
Editor's note: The sexual awakening of James at 15 was tough on Dan Wakefield, creator of the innovative and critically acclaimed 1977-78 NBC series. It cost him his job. Wakefield quit the show after NBC's Broadcast Standards Department censored the word "responsible" - a euphemism for birth control - used in an episode in which James was to lose his virginity. Ironically, the segment had been ordered by the network programmers to lift sagging ratings. Wakefield is a journalist and novelist as well as a scriptwriter. His latest book, Returning: A Spiritual Journey is available in... Read More