Mass Media

“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.” 

~ William Bernbach

Media, no matter what kind, has a huge influence on youth. Whether a student sits to watch the evening news, or is simply surrounding by media through the commercials and advertisements targeted to adolescents, the youth of America are “learning” many things about their identity, gender roles, or life-style images. Morrell states that we need to help provide students the skills to critically question mass media. They need to be able to deconstruct the messages, and to do this, we need to teach them the analytical skills necessary.

Morrell mentions two types of mass media, media advertising and major news reporting; however, the majority of his focus was on the latter. In conjunction with others, Morrell created a summer research seminar entitled “Education Access and Democracy in Los Angeles: LA Youth and Conventions 2000”. This was designed to apprentice 30 urban youth as critical researchers of urban issues, within the context of the Democratic National Convention. Through the unit, the goal was for the students to develop research and literacy skills necessary for college success. 

The project consisted of four weeks. The first two were dedicated to research if the issues and topics that would be debated and discussed at the conventions. During the third week, the students interviewed politicians and community leaders about popular issues. To wrap it all up during the last week, the students went back to the university to analyze the data. The focal areas for the students were on youth access to media and media access to youth. Their concerns were that youth were not portrayed positively in the media, nor are the youth that are shown representative of the majority. Their conclusion from the study was that many students read and interact with the media without thinking about the perspectives, the truth, the author’s positionality, or the expertise of others. Most fail to consider how decisions are made in the media regarding youth and youth issues. 

This project was ideal with helping students with writing for empowerment and this is what I want to take into my classroom. My first semester curriculum is about issues and challenges in society and how they impact us. We first read Fahrenheit 451 and The Giver, and beginning in a couple of weeks, we will move towards a unit concerning the affect the media has on us. The students will read Animal Farm as we discuss propaganda techniques and rhetorical strategies and we will then move on to read The Hunger Games. (This is about a futuristic America where the country is broken into 12 “districts” and a Capitol. To remind people of the past uprisings that resulted in the new division of America, each district is to send one boy and one girl each year to the Hunger Games, where they fight to the death until there is only one survivor. During this time, the games are televised and it is considered mandatory viewing. It is such a good book!) With both Animal Farm and The Hunger Games, we will be discussing current media and propaganda and how it truly does shape of views and opinions. For example, the students will be analyzing commercials and advertisements, looking for the purpose behind them. I will probably add ideas from Morrell and have the students create pamphlets, newspapers, and websites that will help develop and hone their critical lenses of looking at media. 

For more reading, Morrell references Douglas Kellner’s Media Culture: Cultural Studies; Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern Media Culture and Peter McLaren’s Rethinking Media Literacy: A Critical Pedagogy of Representation.