Module 5: Studying Media Representations
Objectives: After completing this module, you will be able to:
- identify the specific ways in which media representations uses images, sound/music,
intertextuality, language, and techniques to construct a version of reality associated with a
particular phenomena, group, world, institution, or profession.
- apply these specific aspects of media representations to analysis of a media text.
- be familiar with websites/texts that contain examples of texts illustrating certain types of media
representations
- construct a webquest that involve students in analyzing media representation of a particular
phenomena, group, world, institution, or profession.
What Are Media Representations?
Media representations are the ways in which the media portrays particular groups,
communities, experiences, ideas, or topics from a particular ideological or value perspective.
Rather than examining media representations as simply reflecting or mirroring “reality,” we will
be examining how media representations serve to “re-present” or to actually create a new reality.
For example, beer ads portray drinking beer as a primary component for having a party.
SUV ads create the impression that driving an SUV as an exciting, outdoor adventure. And,
perfume/cologne ads imply the using perfume/cologne makes one sexually appealing. These
ads all create idealized experiences associated with the uses of these products, experiences that
may not jive with alternative perspectives on these experiences:
http://www.nothing-sacred.net/articles/1/171/
Similarly, the Disney Corporation, one of the major producers of film and television,
represents stories and fairy tales for children primarily in terms of White, Western, middle-class
values. And, DisneyWorld/Disneyland creates artificial realities that represent different
“worlds”—other “lands” in ways that sanitized and idealize any political, cultural, and
ideological differences constituting the unique cultures of those worlds. For example, “Safari”
boat trips represent Africa as a primitive jungle experience. For a discussion of the role of
Disney in constructing their own representations of different realities, go to the following site
and click on the video:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/CommercialismGlobalizationAndMedia/MickeyMouseMonopol
y/
Why Study Media Representations?
Why study media representations? Media representations shape adolescents’ perceptions
of experience—their beliefs about gender, class, and race, their assumptions about what is valued
in society, and their notions of urban, suburban, and rural life. However, it is important to
recognize that adolescents are not simply passive dupes who accept all of these representations
without some interrogation. As James Tobin (2001) argues, students are able to resist these
representations, resistance that is often specific to adopting stances valued in certain context,
particularly is they can parody or adopt creative alternatives to representations.
Creating a critical context in the classroom where students practice interrogation of
representations helps them acquire a critical stance. In adopting this stance, they learn to
examine the underlying value assumptions inherent in a representation and whether they accept
or reject those assumptions. For example, in studying local television news representations of
urban landscapes as rife with crime and danger, leads them to challenge these representations as
serving to reify suburban viewers presuppositions about the city as dangerous and problematic,
beliefs held by many suburban adolescents.
Students learn to adopt a critical stance by recognizing how the media serves to
“mediate” or define ways of defining the world and their own identities. For example, the socalled “reality” television shows portray ways in which the sensationalized, edited forms of
television itself defines what program participants assume to be appropriate ways of behaving on
television. Audiences may then assume that these program participants are behaving in a
manner considered to be “normal”—normal in terms of how television represents “reality.”
Adolescents may also recognize that media texts represent idealized role models or
identities that shape their own self-images. For example, in the program, “Merchants of Cool,”
adolescent females who are preparing to be “supermodels” draw their sense of identities from
images of fashion magazine models, images that mediate their own self-perceptions.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/
Adolescents may also recognize the ways in which their perceptions of gender, class, and
race may be shaped by norms portrayed in the media. For example, in analyzing the portrayal of
diversity on television, students may note the lack of diversity on television in terms of white,
middle-class identities as the norm. Research on the level of diversity of characters and people
in prime-time children’s television programs by Children Now found a lack of diversity:
According to Children Now's study, Fall Colors 2001-02, prime time remains
overwhelmingly white, with people of color appearing largely in secondary and guest
roles. Whites account for 73% of the prime time population, followed by African
Americans (16%), Latinos (4%), Asian/Pacific Islanders (3%) and Native Americans
(.2%).
These findings were similar to those of other studies:
In its 1999 State of Children's Television Report, the Annenberg Public Policy Center
found that 40% of children's programming on network and cable channels had no
diversity, while 32% had "a little" and 28% contained "a lot." In 2001, Tufts University
Professors Calvin Gidney and Julia Dobrow found that 70 to 80 percent of lead characters
on children's programs in the 1996-97 season were either Anglo or Nordic
The lack of diversity as well as the portrayals of people of color engaged in deviant social
practices influences children’s racial perceptions:
When asked to cast television roles from a collection of photographs of diverse people,
children had very definite ideas of what a "good" person and a "bad" person looked like.
After choosing an African American for the part of a criminal, one white boy said, "he
just looks like the type of criminal that would probably steal or something." Children who
chose Latinos for the criminal role explained it was because he "looked mean" or "like he
could kill someone." When casting a white person for the part of a police officer, one
African American boy stated that he did so because, "he looks intelligent" (Children
Now, 1998).
http://www.childrennow.org/media/medianow/mnsummer2002.htm
Using analysis of representations to construct their own representations. Another important
reason for studying representations is that students can then think about ways in which they
create their own representations of experiences, topics, issues, groups, world, etc. For example,
in studying how ads use images to represent phenomena, students can then create their own ads
employing images in a similar manner. Rather than simply studying different types of video
shots, angles, or editing techniques, for example, students learn about these characteristics of
film as they use video production tools to best represent their intended meanings.
Students can use multimedia software tools such as Adobe PremiereTM and Avid
CinemaTM for video editing; Adobe Photoshop for image editing; SoundEditTM for sound editing;
Adobe PagemillTM, Claris HomePageTM, and Netscape Navigator/ComposerTM for web site
authoring; and Microsoft PowerpointTM, HyperstudioTM, AuthorwareTM, or StoryspaceTM for
hypermedia presentations. These tools can be used for larger projects in which students collect,
store, edit, and construct links between many images, sounds, texts, or video. For example, one
high school student used the computer-based video-editing program, Adobe PremiereTM, to
create QuicktimeTM videos as part of inquiry project on romance:
My artifact was a video that I created by cutting parts of the movie Days of Thunder and
pasting them together. I then played the movie to the song “The Distance” by Cake.
While I was watching the movie to find clips, I was mostly looking for scenes that
involved two people who were romantically involved. I was also looking for action
scenes because I was trying to relate the social worlds of sports and romance. The video
part of the artifact turned out great. It contained scenes that I felt showed a direct
relationship between sports and romance. The clips included many shots of race cars
whizzing by. There were also many shots of the two main characters separated. What I
was trying to do was show how the two worlds related to each other. I felt that I was
successful in doing so, because I thought that my artifact showed how athletics can play a
big role in romantic relationships. (Beach & Myers, 2001, p, 87)
Students may also use audio or visual tools to represent their perspectives. In creating
documentary representations, they may conduct audio, photo, or video interviews to capture
people’s perceptions of a world or experience. For example, one student used photos to capture
her relationships with her friends:
It is a tradition that all my friends come over before the dance and get ready together. Then
we take a group picture of all of us on my porch and go to the dance. . I also have included
pictures of friends in the hallway. The hallway in school is where most of the socializing
gets done, either before homeroom, during classes, or after school. It is noticeable that the
two girls are friends because they have their arms around each other. . . The other picture
that I have is at Hi-Way Pizza. The two girls look like they are good friends to me because
they have chosen to come out together and spend time with one another. The two girls also
have matching coats in the background of the picture which could suggest that they went
shopping together before. (Beach & Myers, 2001, p. 95)
As they are creating these representations, students are learning how to critique
representations through critically examining their own uses of tools.
Studying Media Representations
Studying media representations therefore involves interpreting the creation of new forms
or ways of understanding reality. As Stuart Hall (1997) argues, this approach differs from more
traditional notions of studying media representations as “false” or “misrepresentations” of some
reality or experience. This concept of “misrepresentation” assumes that there is a “true” or
“fixed” meaning associated with some external “reality” against which a media text can be
compared as either “true” or “fixed” to that “reality.”
However, the meaning of that external “reality” itself is a construction of media. Media
texts are not simply external ways of representing a reality “out there.” They themselves
constitute the meaning of reality. The cultural meaning of “party time” is created by beer ads,
which portray social practices that are valued by participants who believe that drinking beer
constitutes “having a good time.” To hear more on what Stuart Hall as to say about this, go to
and click on the video:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaRaceAndRepresentation/RepresentationandtheMedia
Dan Chandler argues that this more constructivist approach moves away from analysis of
stereotyping or bias—that presupposes some fixed, objective meaning to an analysis of the
institutional forces or systems that use representations to construct and maintain their own
ideological agendas. He therefore focuses attention on the “systems of representations” that
work to create certain cultural meanings through media texts to demonstrate that certain practices
are “natural” or “common sensical.” As he notes: “A key in the study of representation concern
is with the way in which representations are made to seem ‘natural’. Systems of representation
are the means by which the concerns of ideologies are framed; such systems ‘position’ their
subjects.”
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/MC30820/represent.html
Museums, particularly anthropological or ethnographic museums that portray past
cultural worlds, can construct a version of those worlds that reflect certain cultural attitudes
about those worlds (Walsh, 1992). From this constructivist notion of representation, these
museum exhibits are neither mirroring or reflecting past cultures; they are actually creating a
version of those cultures. It is often the case that these exhibits of Asian, African, South
American, and/or Third World countries often reflected a Western, colonialist discourses that
positioned. For example, museums, as systems of representations, portray cultures in ways that
are assumed to be “scientific.” During the 19th and early 20th century, European and American
museums often exhibited “other” cultures in as inferior, primitive, or exotic. These exhibits
reflected a Western political and ideological perspective of colonized sections of the world
(Lidchi, 1997). For example, an exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair portrayed the Igorots,
a Philippine tribe, as purchasing and eating dog meat, a representation that only served to portray
them as “primitive” or “savage” (Lidchi, 1997, p. 196).
Media representations and cultural models. Hall also argues that representations reflect
cultural values. He notes that cultures serve ways of making sense of the world. For example,
they provide us with “maps of meaning” or frameworks for classifying the world according to
some hierarchical value system—what is most versus least valued; who has power and who does
not; what practices are or are not condoned or sanctioned. These “maps of meaning” or cultural
models serve to order people’s lives. As Gee (2001) notes:
Cultural models tell people what is typical or normal from the perspective of a particular
Discourse…[they] come out of and, in turn, inform the social practices in which people
of a Discourse engage. Cultural models are stored in people’s minds (by no means
always consciously), though they are supplemented and instantiated in the objects, texts,
and practices that are part and parcel of the Discourse (p. 720).
For example, value stances towards social practices in schools ultimately reflect cultural
models. Much of American schooling revolves around cultural models of “individualism”
associated with middle-class values (Bellah, et al., 1996). Within a middle-class value system,
the individual is assumed to be an autonomous being who is not dependent on institutional
support. Being a complete individual is equated with being independent from constraints or
forces, while being an incomplete individual is equated with being dependent on institutions
(Jung, 2001). Within schooling, the ability to act on one’s own or being self-disciplined is highly
valued in school as a marker of individuality; lack of “self-discipline” is equated with an
inability to “control one’s self” and one’s emotions. Emotional expression/outbursts are
perceived as problematic and as needed to be controlled (Jung, 2001).
Representations and discourses. As noted in Module 4 on critical discourse analysis, media texts
represent experiences in terms of various discourses constituting meaning. Again, discourses
are ways of knowing or thinking based on, for example, scientific, legal, religious, sociological,
economic, political, psychological orientations. Museums represented colonized cultures in
terms of the discourses of “Orientalism” reflecting a Western ideological position of the middleeastern, Muslim cultures as exotic, mysterious, elusive, and potentially dangerous (Said, 1979).
In studying representations, students attempt to identify the various discourses shaping
the representations of particular groups, communities, experiences, or phenomenon. These
discourses reflect the economic, political, and ideological agendas of institutions, corporations,
communities, or political organizations. For example, as noted below, students may examine
how the beauty industry employs discourses of gender to define the ideal female body weight as
slim consistent with the discourses of femininity, popularity, and appearance. By identifying
these various discourses, students can then examine the institutions constructing representations
through the use of these discourses.
For further reading on methods for analyzing discourses in the media:
Fairclough, N. (2003). Analyzing discourses: Textual analysis for social research. New York:
Routledge.
MacDonald, M. (2003). Exploring media discourses. London: Arnold.
Rogers, R. (Ed.). (2004). An introduction to critical discourse analysis in education. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Weissn, G., & Wodak, R. (2003). Critical discourse analysis: Theory and interdisciplinarity.
New York: Palgrave.
Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2001). Methods of critical discourse analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Methods for Analyzing Media Representations
While students may have an intuitive sense of how the media represents certain
phenomena, they need to learn some particular research techniques for how to analyze these
representations. It is often useful to model these different techniques, demonstrating how you
use them in analysis of a particular example.
The following are some steps involved in conducting studies, following by specific
aspects associated with analyzing representations:
1. Select a certain groups, worlds, topics, issues, or phenomenon, and then find different
representations of this topic/phenomenon in magazines, TV, newspapers, literature, Web sites.
2. Note patterns in these representations in terms of similarities in portrayals/images instances of
stereotyping or essentializing categories.
3. Note value assumptions in terms of who has power, who solves problems, how problems are
solved.
4. Define the intended audiences for these representations:
- What appeals are made to what audiences?
- Whose beliefs or values are being reinforced or validated?
- How are certain products linked to certain representations for certain audiences?
5. Define what’s missing or left out of the representation:
- What complexities or variations are masked over?
- What is included and what is excluded?
- Find alternative or counter-examples
6. Consider the potential influence of stereotyped or essentialist representations of gender, class,
race, or age on people
- List descriptions of others or oneself and note instances of stereotyping/essentializing
- Note how consumer practices reflect the need to live up to representations
- Examine stories, TV shows, or mini-dramas in ads
In analyzing representations, students can focus on the following aspects:
- images. The images employed that reflect certain positive versus negative value orientations
based on cultural codes and archetypal meanings, for example, uses of dark or black colors to
portray an urban area as dangerous or threatening (Lacey, 1998). In this semiotic analysis of
representation, students are examining how the meaning of images as signifiers (wearing jeans
vs. suits) creates certain signified or implied meanings (casualness/formality/dress for success)
based on certain codes that link the signifiers with the signified meanings. For example, in
reading the semiotic meaning of t-shirts, students draw on codes for interpreting the signs on tshirts (Cullin-Swan, B., & Manning, P. K., “Codes, Chronotypes, and Everyday Objects,”
http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~sssi/papers/pkm1.txt )
These codes are culturally constituted. Stuart Hall (1997) cites the example of the
meaning of traffic lights—the fact that the signified meanings of red and green are culturally
determined based on a code system that indicates that in certain cultures, red means “stop” and
green means “go.” The difference between red and green is what signifies the meaning based on
the cultural code. To determine how images are representing a social or cultural world, you
need to determine the code system underlying the media texts.
- sound/music. Media texts represent social worlds through the uses of sound or music. They
may represent certain regions of the world by using music associated with those worlds, for
example, Samba or Calypso music to represent South American worlds. These uses of sound or
music are often based on audience’s prior knowledge of certain types of music as associated with
certain types of experiences or worlds.
- intertextuality. Media representations also depend on audiences’ knowledge of intertextual
links between the current texts and other previous texts using the same images, language, sounds,
or logos. For example, understanding the Energizer Bunny battery ads, in which the Energizer
Bunny suddenly appears at the end of an ad, requires a prior understanding of previous Energizer
Bunny ads. Audiences understand the meaning of certain representations because they have
knowledge of these intertextual lnks. They enjoy fact that they are “in the know” about the
intertextual references being made. In analyzing media representations, you therefore need to
determine the intertextual links being employed to previous texts, and how these links are being
used to represent a world in a certain manner.
Dan Chandler’s discussion of intertextuality:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem09.html
Gunhild Agger, Aalborg University, Intertextuality Revisited: Dialogues and Negotiations in
Media Studies
http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/vol_4/gunhild.htm
- language. In studying how language is used to represent experience, you are studying how
language actually serves to create realities or worlds. The hyperbolic, idealized language of
advertising is used to create worlds in which flaws or problems are instantly dealt with or solved.
The language of sports commentary is used to dramatize the significance of a game to keep
viewers watching the game.
Language is also used in media texts in ways that voice or “double-voice” certain
discourses or cultural models. As noted in Module 4 under Critical Discourse Analysis,
language references, mimics, or parodies legal, religious, scientific, business, romance,
economic, or medical discourses. For example, political ads about education that employ the
words “accountability,” “results,” “bottom line,” or “major investments of tax dollars,” are
voicing a business discourse or cultural model in describing education. This language is being
used to represent issues of education in terms of a business model in which being “accountable”
to “results,” i.e., test scores, is the primary goal. Thus, schooling is being represented in terms
of the discourses of business. By noting the types of discourses being referred to in the
language, you can then determine the uses of certain discourses to represent worlds in certain
ways.
In defining these discourses, you are also determining how audiences are being
positioned to accept certain representations as “normal” or “common sense” constructions of
reality. You may then describe how you are being positioned by these discourses by asking the
question: “What does this text want you to be or think?”
One approach to studying language use is uses to represent or construct worlds is to study
language use in cartoons. In cartoons, language is often used to mimic or parody certain
discourses. The humor of cartoons is often derived from the juxtaposition of two totally
disparate worlds or discourses that usually have little to do with each other. By identifying the
particular discourse(s) being ridiculed in a cartoon or similar groupings of cartoons, students
could then discuss other examples of how that discourse(s) functions in their own lives.
Students can find many cartoons on the Web. For example, they could go to The New
Yorker collection of cartoons at http://www.cartoonbank.com and under “search,” type in a
certain discourse, such as “business,” and study the consistent patterns in the language employed
in cartoons related to business—as reflected in the language of the following two New Yorker
cartoons:
“I don’t know how it started, either. All I know is that it’s part of our corporate culture.”
“The little pig with the portfolio of straw and the little pig with the portfolio of sticks were
swallowed up, but the little pig with the portfolio of bricks withstood the dip in the market.”
The first cartoon pokes fund at the use of the popular notion of a “corporate culture,”
language that reflected the human resource management discourse. The corporate/business
world is juxtaposed with the quite different practice of wearing polo hats. The second cartoon
draws on the discourse of accounting/stock-market, juxtaposing that discourse with the totally
different world of the “Three Little Pigs” children’s literature.
Some cartoons play one discourse off against the other. The following two cartoons
employ the discourse of romance—the uses of language to build a romantic relationship--is set
against other discourses.
“We’re a natural, Rachel. I handle intellectual property, and you’re a content-provider.”
In this cartoon, the discourse of romance is juxtaposed against a legal discourse.
“I wasn’t anybody in a previous lifetime, either.”
In this cartoon, the discourse of romance is juxtaposed with a discourse of religious
beliefs in “previous lifetimes.”
Students can search for cartoons on any number of different Web sites:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/cartoons/
http://cagle.slate.msn.com/
http://www.speeds-cartoons.com/
Students could also study the use of language in parody on the following sites:
The Onion—a journal/site that ridicules current political coverage
http://www.TheOnion.com
Modernhumor: the contains different types of humor and parody:
http://www.Modernhumorist.com
False advertising
http://parody.organique.com/
Song parodies
http://www.premrad.com/entertainment/comedy/parodies/songs/songs.html
For further information on this topic, see an article by Laura Shin, “Laughing all the way to the
Cartoonbank” USAWeekend, July 13, 2003
http://www.usaweekend.com/03_issues/030713/030713web.html
- technique. Different types of techniques may be employed to represent phenomena in different
ways. For example, the close-ups of faces employed in soap operas emphasize the emphasis on
the important of relationships and emotional conflicts communicated through nonverbal cues.
Carmen Luke argues that these techniques are gendered in that they represent gender in different
ways:
Semiotic Elements
Feminine
Masculine
camera angles
close-ups: private space
soft-focus
top-down shot: small stature
long & wide shots: public space
regular focus
bottom-up shot: large stature
color
secondary, soft pastels
primary, dark, metallic
pacing
slow
fast
lighting
soft, subdued, intimate
bright, glaring, public
sound
soft sounds, slow music
hard sounds, fast music
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/Luke/LITLEX1.html
- content analysis. In studying media representations, students could conduct content analyses of
media texts. Doing content analysis involves creating a set of categories or coding system for
analyzing the types of certain phenomenon in a media text. These categories focus on the
surface aspects of a text in terms of the types displayed that indicate the ways in which that text
is representing a certain phenomenon. For example, you might analyze the representation of
topics on the evening news in terms by counting the number of minutes devoted to different
types of topics: crime, local events, national news, health news, weather, sports, etc. Or, you
might analyze the gender role portrayals on children’s cartoons, as well as the ways in which
cartoon characters’ interact with each other: through physical/violent interaction versus through
language or through a combination of physical and language interaction. In doing content
analysis, you need to attend to both the surface meaning of images/language, as well as the latent
or underlying meanings, that require your interpretation of what certain patterns in the result
indicate about the representations employed (Sweet, 2001).
Methods for conducting content analysis:
http://www.edteck.com/michigan/lessons/conanalysis.htm
http://writing.colostate.edu/references/research/content/
http://academic.csuohio.edu/kneuendorf/content/resources/TOC.htm
Examples of studies employing content analysis:
Studies of content analysis of media texts
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Residence/1216/analysismedia.html
Gender differences in toy commercials:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/toyads.html
Gender differences in children’s commercials:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/lmg9307.html
Analysis of children’s toy-linked cartoon shows:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/lmg9311.html
Representation and Censorship
Another topic related to media representation is that of censorship. Censorship often
evolves from objections to the ways in which a certain phenomena is represented in ways that
threaten or challenge certain beliefs or ideas. When the rock group, The Dixie Chicks, objected
to George W. Bush’s arguments for the War on Iraq, there were numerous calls for censoring
playing their songs on radio stations because people objected to their criticism of that war. There
has been considerable controversy about the often highly sexist, violent messages in gangstar rap
songs/videos, leading some to call for censorship of these songs/videos.
Students could study censorship cases to examine how particular media representations
were perceived to be threatening or challenging to particular beliefs or values. One useful site is
The File Room, an interactive archive of censorship cases from throughout history.
http://www.mediachannel.org/arts/fileroom/
Other sites related to censorship:
National Coalition Against Censorship
http://www.ncac.org/
American Civil Liberties Union
http://www.aclu.org/FreeSpeech/FreeSpeechlist.cfm?c=83
American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/Content/NavigationMenu/Our_Association/Offices/Intellectual_Freedom3/B
asics/Censorship_Basics.htm
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org/
Freedom Forum
http://www.freedomforum.org/
Index on Censorship
http://www.indexonline.org/
People for the American Way
http://www.pfaw.org
Project Censored
http://www.projectcensored.org/
Organizations which recommend some forms of censorship:
American Family Association
http://www.afa.net/
Christian Coalition
http://www.cc.org/
Family Research Council
http://www.frc.org/
Focus on the Family
http://www.family.org/
Representations and Public Relations/Promotions
Media representations are also used in public relations or promotional campaigns to
portray some phenomena in a positive light. For example, casino gambling has been promoted
as not simply an experience involving gambling, but also as an enjoyable, exciting, even
romantic experience.
To study the ways in which Internet web sites represent gambling in Minnesota casinos
go to these different casino web sites. Note the uses of images, intertextual links, and language.
Black Bear Casino
http://www.blackbearcasinohotel.com/
Grand Casino, Mille Lacs/Hinckley
http://www.grandcasinosmn.com/grandcasinosminnesota/index.htm
Jackpot Junction Casino
http://www.jackpotjunction.com/
Mystic Lake Hotel/Casino
http://www.mysticlake.com/
Treasure Island Resort and Casino
http://www.treasureislandcasino.com/
The images employed in these sites represent gambling in terms of a glamorous pastime
associated with entertainment and pleasurable vacations. For example, the Treasure Island site
employs imagery of a tropical, Caribbean vacation escape associated with the activity of
gambling:
Tropical Rain Forest Casino
Make yourself comfortable beneath a rain forest canopy as you double the stakes at the
blackjack tables or try your luck at one of The Island's many slot machines.
Caribbean Village Casino
Feel the tides shift amid the ornate windows and balconies of this tropical island village
as you play The Island's video craps, video roulette and more.
Caribbean Marketplace Casino
Stroll along bright facades welcoming you to new attractions. Wander into the new Island
Pearl Gift ShopSM or Casino Host Office. Or just relax at one of the many new high
stakes blackjack tables or slot machines in this open-air atmosphere.
Sapphire Sea
This is the entrance to start gaming after a bus ride.
A great addition to our non-smoking casino area, Sapphire Sea is the place to enjoy clean
air and the hottest new slot machines. Have a cocktail at Barracudas smoke-free bar. A
convenient coat check and Tours Desk are also located here.
The intertextual links and language employed here draws on the discourse of romantic
travel in a tropical world with the world of casino gambling.
Gambling is also represented through magazine ads and on-line casino sites in equally
glamorous ways. Susan Link, in her CI5472 Spring, 2002, analysis of the representations of
gambling examined these magazine ads:
Another form of literature with deceptive advertising in favor of casinos is
magazines. Magazines like Casino, Casino Player, and Gaming Times all have articles
that create an idea that they are educating the reader on how to beat the casino. In one
edition of Casino Player some of the articles that lead you to believe this are: 2002
Loosest Slots Awards, The Wizard of Odds, Ask the Bishop (streaks and trends), Inside
the Sportsbook, Players Club Spotlight, and JV’s Poker Room. Each of these articles
gives the reader insight into the players’ strategies and how to break the casino and the
system. The ads in this magazine also create a sophisticated image; it is an appealing
image of elegance. Aces High Casino, Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, Harrah’s,
Foxwoods of Connecticut, and The Grand Casino all feature ads that encourage high
class with a big payout. The slogan for the Sheraton Casino and Hotel is “ Tunica’s
loosest slots stay here. You should too.”
Each casino encourages people to stay at their casino for the free perks, elegant
accommodations, and loose slots with high payouts. This, in turn, should bring the
casinos revenue through gambling of on-site guests. The free perks and shows they have
entice people to stay there so that they will gamble on site. Ads and magazines create
enthusiasm for gambling and promote an image that is lavish and high class. People want
to stay there and be a part of the action-packed image that they create.
The message is clear- gamble at these casinos and win money. The reality is that
the casinos could not afford casinos and advertising of that nature without gambling
losses of the people who attend the casinos. The reality is much different than the
message and image that is created. The advertising is intriguing, yet deceptive. The
underlying meaning is still the same- spend your money.
The message is the same whether it is through a casino or on the Internet. Internet
gambling has gone from being non-existent ten years ago to a multi-million dollar
industry in 2002. The image of easy access gambling is prevalent in the online industry.
The advertising image and message are deliberate; online gambling is the easiest to
access, and because there is no large edifice to support it financially, it has the best odds.
The reality is that this type of gambling is an easy addiction. Advertisers notice and
capitalize on the accessibility of online casinos, so they use propaganda that shows those
same “things”.
According to 2002 Gallup Poll, 75% of adults believe that internet gambling
should not be legal. The people polled cite reasoning for this disapproval as accessibility
to those who are underage and convenience for those who are pathological gamblers to
enable their habit (Gallup). Pathological gamblers will cost America over $80 billion a
year, as opposed to drug abusers who only cost the American Taxpayers $70 billion a
year (Gambling 235), and people are informed that online gambling is addictive, costly,
and problematic, but people are still vulnerable to the advertising because of the
convenience and message. Reality is much more ambiguous than it appears.
Studying Representations of Social Types or Groups
In studying various representations of social groups or types, students are examining how
people construct generalizations about categories of people—that scientists are nerds or Native
Americans are alcoholics. This analysis involves more than simply noting the stereotyping of
these groups. It also involves examining reasons for these representations as constructions of
beliefs about people, leading to questions such as “Where do these representations come from?”
“Who produces these representations,” “Why are their producing these representations,” “How is
complexity limited by these representations,” and “What is missing or how is silenced in these
representations?” (Hall, 1997). Representations of groups often serves to fix the meanings of
perceptions of groups. For example, media representations of black men affect how the society
perceives black men in the “real world.” (Hall, 1997):
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/RaceDiversityAndRepresentation/RepresentationandtheMedia
Groups are also often represented in highly essentialized ways by promoting
generalizations according to gender, class, and race group categories—that “all boys always do
X, and all girls always do Y,” or “all working-class people are like X and all upper-middle-class
people are like Y.”
Jane Tallim, Exposing Gender Stereotypes
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/gender_portrayal/exposing_gende
r.cfm
This essentializing fails to consider variations in identities, contexts, and cultures—the fact that,
for example gender differences in one culture may be entirely different in another culture. Such
essentialist categories are based on biological or behaviorist perspectives, rather than cultural
perspectives. For example, essentializing males versus females as biological concepts fails to
recognize that gender is a cultural construction evident in how people adopt or performs certain
gendered social practices. People who are biological “males” may adopt “feminine” cultural
practices, while people who are biological “females” may adopt “masculine” cultural practices.
Gendered media representations are important in that they are central to adolescents defining
their identities, as explored in the book, Media, Gender, and Identity
http://www.theoryhead.com/gender/
Representations of femininity. Femininity is represented in the media by the multi-billion dollar
beauty industry in ways that links certain social practices associated with femininity as central to
defining one’s identity as a female. All of this can have a limiting influence on adolescent
females, as documented in the following factoids cited on the PBS program, Girls in America:
http://www.itvs.org/girlsinamerica/findings.html
- The average model today weighs 23% less than the average American woman.
- If the measurements of a Barbie doll were translated into human terms, a 5'9" tall Barbie
would be 33-18-28 (bust-waist-hips). The average 5'6" beauty contest winner measures
36-25-35.
- More than 80% of grade school girls (6th grade and below) report having been on a diet
at least once. 40% of nine and ten year-old girls report having been on a diet. Most of
them were not overweight.
- 50% of white girls ages 12-16 consider themselves overweight and only 15% consider
their bodies normal. This is 6 times the rate for boys.
- Girls start school testing higher in every academic subject, yet graduate from high
school scoring 50 points lower than boys on the SAT.
- Prior to entering college, 23% of male valedictorians and 21% of female valedictorians
felt intellectually "far above average." After four years of college, 25% of the males felt
intellectually "far above" their peers; none of the women believed that about herself.
- When asked "What is the best thing about being a boy?" the most common response
among middle school aged boys was "not being a girl." When asked "What is the best
thing about being a girl?" the top answer was "I don't know" or "Nothing" followed by
responses focusing on hair and shopping.
- 85% of girls in grades 8-11 report experiencing sexual harassment.
One primary example of the role of media representations related to the construction of
femininity is a focus on body weight. This focus on slimness is a current cultural phenomenon
that reflects current cultural beliefs. In the late 1900s, women who were not slim were viewed
in a positive light given they assumption that they were well-fed—a status feature associated
with class. Since that time, the ideal body weight as portrayed in the media has moved towards
increasing slimness. The Jean Kilbourne video, Slim Hopes, documents the ways in which the
diet, weight loss, food, and even smoking industry associates slimness with a positive cultural
image:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderAndDiversity/SlimHopes
In media representations of female adolescent body weight, slimness is assumed to be the
ideal “look.” These representations have resulted in adolescent females engaging in unhealthy
eating habits and bulimia, with long-term negative effects on their bodies. For more information,
search for “Standards of Attractiveness” on the following site:
http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/index.cfm
See also the video clip and resources from the Media Education Foundation’s Recovering
Bodies: Overcoming Eating Disorders:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaAndHealth/RecoveringBodies
A study conducted in 1996 by Children Now of media texts frequently used by female
adolescents indicated that media texts emphasized the importance of adopting an ideal
appearance:
*
Across media, between 26 and 46% of women are portrayed as "thin" or "very
thin" (compared to between 4 and 16% of men.)
*
Women are much more likely than men to make or receive comments about their
appearance in all three media - on TV 28% of women compared to 10% of men, in
movies 58% of women to 24% of men, and in commercials 26% of women compared to
less than 1% of men.
*
Women are seen spending their time in appearance related activities such as
shopping and grooming. On TV 10% of women compared to only 3% of men can be seen
"grooming" or "preening". In movies, this grows to 31% of women and 7% of men. In
TV commercials, it's 17% of women to 1% of men.
*
37% of the articles in teen magazines included a focus on appearance.
http://www.childrennow.org/media/mc97/ReflectSummary.html
Such images may lead adolescent females to unhealthy eating practices and anorexia,
with highly adverse health effects. One study http://www.thechiropracticvillage.com/id95.htm
found that:
the majority of preadolescent and adolescent girls . . . were unhappy with their body
weight and shape. This discontent was related strongly to the frequency of reading
fashion magazines, which was reported to influence their idea of the perfect body shape
by 69% of the girls." It also obtained data showing that frequent readers of fashion
magazines were significantly more likely to diet and exercise to lose weight and to get
their image of ideal body shape from the pictures of grossly underweight models.
For other sites on body image:
http://www.bodyimagesite.com
http://www.aap.org/advocacy/hogan599.htm
A survey of adolescents’ perceptions of gender role portrayals on television conducted in
1997 sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation indicated that they are attending to these
messages related to body weight:
Both girls (61%) and boys (53%) say the female characters they see on television
are thinner than women in real life, but that male characters on television are about the
same weight as the men in real life (61% of girls and 58% of boys). Older girls (71% of
girls ages 16-17) are more likely to think women television characters are thinner than
women they know in real life than do younger girls (51% of girls ages 10-12).
Kids notice an emphasis on attractiveness, especially for women and girls, in
television shows: 57 percent of girls and 59 percent of boys say the female characters in
the television shows they watch are "better looking" than the women and girls they know
in real life.
Worrying about appearance or weight, crying or whining, weakness, and flirting
are all qualities both girls and boys say they associate more with a female character on
television than a male character. Playing sports, being a leader, and wanting to be kissed
or have sex, on the other hand, are thought of as characteristics displayed more often by
male characters.
Both girls (62%) and boys (58%) say the female characters they see on television
usually rely on someone else to solve their problems, whereas male characters tend to
solve their own problems (53% of girls and 50% of boys agree).
Girls want to look like the characters they see on television:
Seven out of ten (69%) of girls -- and 40 percent of boys -- say they have wanted
to look like, dress, or fix their hair like a character(s) on television. Furthermore, almost a
third of girls (31%) and 22% of boys say they changed something about their appearance
to be more like a television character. Only 16% of girls and 12% of boys say they have
ever dieted or exercised to look like a television character.
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/1260-index.cfm
As documented in the video, Playing Unfair, sports coverage women’s sport also
frequently represent female athletes in ways that emphasize their femininity and sexuality--as
being married, or as mothers, or even as sex objects. In contrast, male athletes are represented
more in terms of their physical strength and skills:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderCulture/PlayingUnfair
For example, an article in Golf for Women, examined the degree to which sex appeal was
being used by the LPGA to attract attention to women’s golf. Some promoters of the sport
suggested that increased focus on the physical appearance of female golfers would enhance
attention to golfing, currently dominated by Tiger Woods and the PGA.
http://www.golfdigest.com/gfw/gfwfeatures/index.ssf?/gfw/gfwfeatures/gfw200208lpgafeature.h
tml
The article raises the question as to whether sexual appearance necessarily attracts more
attention:
"Everybody keeps saying sex sells," says Mary Jo Kane, professor of sport sociology at
the University of Minnesota and director of the Tucker Center for Research on Women
and Sport. "Sells what? Maybe it gets a blip in terms of people who write about it in the
sports world, but does it translate to more sales on the ground? Does it make the purses
bigger? Do corporate sponsorship and TV coverage go up? Show me the data that says
that. Show me the research, the marketing studies. Show me a conversation where a
person says, 'I want to buy season tickets to a team because the players are sexy.'"
Media Awareness Project: Sex in Advertising lesson
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/ethics/sex_in_advertising.cfm
To study media representations of female athletes, students could examine descriptions
and images employed in sports magazine articles about female athletes, noting, for example, the
type of adjectives or categories employed in describing these athletes. Students could also
examine the discourses of sports, competition, gender, or bonding employed in these
representations.
Femininity is also represented in the media as fulfilled almost exclusively through
heterosexual relationships. For example, traditional Hollywood comedy or romance films, as
well as the romance novel, portrayed females in the role of the nurturer who transformed the
impersonal, distanced male into a more loving character (Radway, 1987). Adolescent females
in films such as She's All That conveys the message that popularity is achieved primarily by
adopting feminine social practices:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160862/
Similarly, females on soap opera or drama are often represented as primarily concerned
about relationships, family, personal matters, home, and talk, while males are more concerned
with business, institutions, self, and competition outside of the home. Female audiences are
positioned to be engaged as part of being “in the home” focusing on domestic or interpersonal
conflicts. The Children Now study indicated that women were represented more in terms of
being in relationships while males were represented more in terms of being in careers:
*
Women are most often portrayed in the context of relationships. Men, on the other
hand, are most often seen in the context of careers.
*
More women than men are seen dating across a range of media - on TV 23% of
women compared to 17% of men, in movies 27% of women compared to 16% of men,
and in commercials 9% of the women compared to 4% of the men.
*
In contrast, men are seen spending their time "on the job" far more often than
women in all media - on TV 41% of men compared to 28% of women, in movies 60% of
men and 35% of women, in commercials 17% of men and 9% of women.
*
Women are also more likely to be motivated by the desire to have a romantic
relationship - on TV 32% of women and in the movies 35% of women, compared to 20%
of men in each instance.
*
In contrast, on TV 32% of men are motivated by the desire to get or succeed in a
job compared to 24% of women. In movies 53% of men were motivated by their career
compared to 31% of women.
*
Magazine articles reinforce this message by focusing much more on "dating"
(35% of their articles) than they do on subjects like "school" or "careers" (12%).
http://www.childrennow.org/media/mc97/ReflectSummary.html
Magazines for females focus primarily on topics related to creating and establishing
heterosexual relationships. Topics include focus on fashions, cosmetics, flirtation, tips for
attracting males, romance, marriage, etc. Much of these magazines is devoted to advertising of
products associated with these topics, so it is difficult to distinguish between the articles and the
ads—both are attempting to promote or sell the idea of being appealing to males as constituted
by a discourse of romance and sexuality. Students could analyze the most prominent
topics/themes in these magazines, as well as the relationships between the content of the
magazines that promote certain social practices associated with consumerism, and the advertising
that does the same thing, creating blur between the two:
Vogue
http://www.style.com/vogue/
Elle
http://www.ellegirl.com/
Seventeen
http://www.seventeen.com/
Adolescents are often socialized or positioned to adopt certain stances and beliefs about
femininity through “quizzes” in these magazines. The questions employed often presuppose
certain attitudes associated with adopting an identity defined by being outgoing, appealing to
males, using certain products, or adopting practices associated with the idealized role models
portrayed in the magazine. By answering questions in a certain manner, females are then scored
on the degree to which they adopt the desired beliefs. For example, in a quiz in Seventeen
Magazine, entitled, “Are You Hot?” readers were given the following quiz:
Do you ooze sex appeal or play it cool? Forget posting your picture on HotOrNot.com,
take our quiz and find out! By Melissa Daly
Questions 1-3 of 10
At a long-awaited party in your best friend's basement, a group decides to start up a game
of Spin the Bottle. Everyone else is playing. Are you in?
- Duh! The game was your suggestion.
- Doubtful. You're not very keen on exchanging spit with any random guy.
- Sure, why not? As long as you can rig that Coke bottle to point to your buddy's big
brother across the circle...
You're taking a breather at the spring dance when the reggae version of "Sexual Healing"
comes on:
- You grab your friends and start grooving -- it's too good a song to sit still.
- Shoot your boy a come-hither glance while lip-synching the suggestive lyrics.
- Break from the girls to go grind with the nearest guy -- it's a couples' tune!
A candid photo taken at the cast party for the play you were just in is being passed around
class. You're in the background leaning against the set with your arms folded, talking to
crew members perched on the stage, legs crossed and one shoe dangling off your toe,
standing with friends, holding a cup of punch and laughing hysterically. The guy at the
locker next to yours compliments you on the great new angora sweater you're wearing.
You reply:
- "Oh, you like it? It's very soft ... wanna feel?"
- "Really? I don't know, I think the fuzziness adds a few pounds."
- "Thanks! It's new."
After receiving a score, reader were then given the following advice:
Feeling the Heat
You know what boys want -- you! There's a definite sexual energy that confident girls
give off and you've got it. "When a woman thinks she's attractive or desirable, it adds to
her sex appeal," says Rebecca Curtis, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Adelphi
University in Garden City, New York. But while you're always game to cha-cha with the
cute kid in gym class, your value as a person doesn't depend on whether you can
successfully proposition him. "You've got power to wait until someone appealing comes
along," explains Curtis. Keep being your alluring self -- and it won't be long till he shows
up.
For other Seventeen quizzes:
http://www.seventeen.com/quizzes/qu.fa.pra.question1.epl
These practices related to a discourse of heterosexual romance are also reflected in advice
books. For example, Ellen Fein's "The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of
Mr. Right" advertise and encourage the idea that a women's mission in life is to find a "keeper."
http://www.twbookmark.com/books/87/0446602744/index.html
Females are also represented in television commercials and magazine ads as consumers,
particularly in terms of assuming domestic family roles as homemaker, cook, mom, cleaner,
laundry person, and as finding satisfaction through shopping. Or, teachers are assumed to be
middle-class, white females. Students could draw pictures of what they envision “homemakers”
or “teachers” and then discuss how and why they portrayed these roles as they did
http://www.nelsonthornes.com/secondary/citizenship/activate2/cl_activity2.html
In a Campbell SoupTM ad, the mother is shown preparing the Supper Bake with a voice
over stating that "Any GOOD mom knows that a quick meal is a good one." The following ads
from the 1960s portray the housewife as obsessed with cleanliness—through use of Liquid Ajax
or Man From Glad (with its male image of power which needs to used by the female):
http://www.tvparty.com/vaultcom2.html
These representations continue today, in the image of a female housewife in the
following ads that presupposes that it is the female who is responsible for cleaning the house:
http://www.homemadesimple.com/swiffer/index_flash.shtml
www.tide.com/mytide/
It is also important to study counter-examples that challenge or interrogate these
traditional roles of femininity as evident in representations of females in non-traditional
magazines:
http://www.Msmagazine.com/
http://www.sojourner.org/
http://www.uppitywomen.net/
These include New Moon (for younger females)
http://www.newmoon.org/
BlueJeanOnLine
http://www.bluejeanonline.com/
TeenVoicesOnLine:
http://www.teenvoices.com/about.html
Although, as Lisa Featherstone argues, some of the these magazines are not all that much
different from the more traditional magazines:
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/02.19.98/girlsmags-9807.html
On the other hand, there are also many websites devoted to examining women’s issues in
more non-traditional ways:
http://www.cybergrrl.com/
http://www.calarts.edu/~xxchrom/
http://www.womensforum.com/
and films about and by women:
http://www.wmm.com/
http://www.reelwomen.org/
http://www.womedia.org/
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/WomensStudies/FilmReviews/
In summary, there is considerable interest in the influence of media representations of
women on cultural constructions of female identities. The following sites focus on critiquing
gendered media representations:
http://www.mergemag.org/
http://www.about-face.org/
http://www.genderequity.org/medialit/contents.html
http://www.mediaandwomen.org/
http://www.girlsinc.com/ic/page.php?id=3.1.12
http://www.mediascope.org/pubs/ibriefs/tsm.htm
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/cottingham/tournoframe.html?/collections/exhibits/cottingham/more-gender.html
Gender roles in Disney films
http://www.geocities.com/esleelay/f1_snow_white.html
And, Adbusters has included some spoofs on gender ads, for example, on thinness on an
Obsession ad.
http://adbusters.org/spoofads/fashion/obsession-w/
Chavanu, B. (1999). Seventeen, self-Image, and stereotypes. Rethinking schools, 14(2).
unit on advertising and media literacy
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/cgibin/hse/HomepageSearchEngine.cgi?url=http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/14_02/sev14
2.shtml;geturl=d+highlightmatches+gotofirstmatch;terms=media;enc=media;utf8=on;noparts#fir
stmatch
Espinosa, L. (2003). Seventh graders and sexism. Rethinking schools, 17(3).
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/cgibin/hse/HomepageSearchEngine.cgi?url=http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/17_03/seve1
73.shtml;geturl=d+highlightmatches+gotofirstmatch;terms=media;enc=media;utf8=on;noparts#fi
rstmatch
Media Awareness Project: Gender and Tobacco
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/elementary/tobacco/gender_and_tobacco.cfm
Unit: Alison Zimbalist and Javaid Khan, The New York Times lessons: Sex, Guise, and Video
Games: Assessing the Portrayal of Women in Video Games and Across Entertainment Media
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20030516friday.html
Masculinity. Masculinity is also represented in the media in terms of physical aggression,
toughness, competitiveness, and domination as portrayed in ads and stories in men’s magazines:
http://www.theory.org.uk/mensmags.htm
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol5.htm
These practices, as with representations of femininity, are culturally bound. They
evolved out of the rise of the middle-class in the late 1700s and early 1800s in which their was a
separation of work and “home” as distinct gendered realms (Nixon, 1997). Men began to
become active in men’s clubs, as well as religious organizations, service constituted in terms of a
discourse of moral commitment to service. And, with the rise of a business or industrial
economy, men devoted more time to their work outside of the home, creating a division
previously noted in which men constructed their identities around work and women, around the
home. Men also began to adopt more austere, “non-feminine” dress. Lace, which was
associated with masculinity in the 1500s and 1600s, was now considered to be a marker of
femininity.
More recent representations of masculinity emphasize the fixed nature of male identities
in which complexity, doubt, or alternative identities is portray as a negative:
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol7.htm
This is most evident in cross-gender/dressing films such as Some Like it Hot, Tootsie,
Mrs. Doubtfire, and others, which not only represent females in limited ways, but also assume
that adopting a feminine role is a violation of one’s basic, traditional male role. For example, in
the following trailer for Sorority Boys, the characters, pretending to be members of a sorority, are
shown as ultimately failing to adopt feminine roles given their innate masculinity:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/touchstone/sorority_boys.html
Another aspect of the representation of masculinity is how it is associated with physical
violence as an expression of “male outrage.” The video, Tough Guise, explores representations
of violence as constituted by the need to assert one’s masculine identity through bullying or
violence against women when challenged by others or the system:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderCulture/ToughGuise
Students could also analyze portrayals of male violence in advertisements (go to “media
violence” on the following site:
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/gender_portrayal/advertising_mal
e_violence.cfm
Media representations of masculinity could also be discussed in terms of violence to
women. For a discussion of how these representations influence perceptions of rape, see:
Rapping, E. (2000). The Politics of Representation:
Genre, Gender Violence and Justice. Genders, 32.
http://www.genders.org/g32/g32_rapping.html
Masculinity and sports. An analysis of sports programming sponsored by Children Now in
1999
http://www.childrennow.org/media/boystomen/report-sports.html
found that male adolescents are five times more likely to view sports programs on a regular basis
than female adolescents. Analysis of the representations of sports indicated the following
themes:
- Aggression and violence among men is depicted as exciting and rewarding behavior.
- Sports coverage emphasizes the notion that violence is to be expected.
Fights, near-fights, threats of fights or other violent actions are found in sports
coverage and often verbally framed in sarcastic language that suggests that this kind of
action is acceptable. This message was found most frequently on SportsCenter (10
times), followed by the NFL games (7 times), Major League Baseball games (2 times),
NBA games (2 times), and Extreme Sports (1 time).
- Athletes who are "playing with pain" or "giving up their body for the team" are often
portrayed as heroes.
This "playing with pain" theme was most common in the NFL games (15
instances), followed by Extreme Sports (12 instances), SportsCenter (9 instances), and
NBA games (6 instances).
- Commentators consistently use martial metaphors and language of war and weaponry to
describe sports action.
On an average of nearly five times per hour of sports commentary, announcers
describe action using terms such as "battle," "kill," "ammunition," "weapons,"
"professional sniper," "taking aim," "fighting," "shot in his arsenal," "reloading,"
"detonate," "squeezes the trigger," "exploded," "attack mode," "firing blanks," "blast,"
"explosion," "blitz," "point of attack," "lance through the heart," "gunning it," "battle
lines are drawn," and "shotgun." These war references were used most often in NBA
games (27 times), followed by NFL games (23 times), Wrestling (15 times),
SportsCenter (9 times), Major League Baseball games (6 times), and Extreme Sports (3
times).
- Sports commentators continually depict and replay incidents of athletes taking big hits
and engaging in reckless acts of speed and violent crashes.
- Games are often promoted by creating or inflating conflict between two star athletes.
Sports announcers often frame team games as individual one-on-one contests
between two well-known individual players. This theme was particularly prominent in
the NBA games, with 29 instances.
- Many sports programming commercials that boys watch play on male insecurities about
being "man" enough.
- Traditionally masculine images of speed, danger, and aggression are often used in the
sports programming commercials that boys watch.
This emphasis on physical display of male prowess is evident in the popularity of
professional wrestling with adolescent males, as examined in the video, Wrestling with Manhood
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaGenderCulture/WrestlingWithManhood
The highly gendered world of professional football is evident in the representation of
female cheerleaders, for example, the following from the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’s
Homepage.
http://www.dallascowboys.com/cgi-bin/Cowboys/cheerleaders/home.jsp
In the world of professional football, females are represented in terms of images of passive
femininity and sexuality—images opposed to the high level of activity associated with the male
players.
Men Can Stop Rape: explores alternative representations of masculinity
http://www.mencanstoprape.org/
Gays/lesbians. In examining gender representations, it is also important to consider the ways in
which gays and lesbians are represented in the media.
http://www.duke.edu/~sedgwic/WRITING/gender.htm
It has only been recently that gays and lesbians have even appeared in films, television
programs, and commercials; if they did appear in the past, they were stigmatized in negative
ways as highly effeminate or deviant. This began to change with the film, Philadelphia, with
Tom Hanks portraying a gay fighting AIDS and Ellen DeGeneres on her prime-time television
program.
The video, The Celluloid Closet, documents the ways in which Hollywood movies shifted
in its representations of homosexuality from helpless or tragic characters to more recent
characters in films such as The Boys in the Band and The Hunger are portrayed in more complex
ways. More recently, programs such as Will & Grace and Queer As Folk, and films such as The
Birdcage, have resulted in a shift in representations towards less stereotypical representations
(Wilke, 2002):
http://www.commercialcloset.org/cgi-bin/iowa/?page=column&record=58
While in recent years gay men have been desexualized in media, QAF [Queer as
Folk] has turned that around. "The thing Dan and I are most proud of (in the show) is
making gay men sexual," says Cowen. "I think this is very positive -- showing people
who aren't ashamed of their sexuality. It's the most political thing we're doing and the
most important thing for straight people to see."
Cowen observes that for gay acceptance in media, "We're exactly where we were
25 years ago for black people, like with Sanford & Son, Good Times and Diahann Carroll
in Julia (1968-71) -- the first sitcom starring a black woman. She was a saintly nurse, but
maybe we've skipped a step with QAF!"
It can be argued that advertising thrives on stereotypes such as the happy family,
annoying in-laws or lazy husbands, but they are not oppressed minorities. Eventually,
blacks and women in advertising have kept up with the times. Women today show up less
often on the hood of cars as behind the wheels, though they still regularly toil for
household cleaners, and blacks now appear in ads with such frequency that they represent
the "every man" or woman.
But what of gay men, lesbians, and transgenders? Advertising remain slow at
reflecting social change, thus homophobia and classic gay stereotypes continue to be
regularly used as a source of comedy. Lesbian representation is mostly limited to
embodying straight male fantasies -- after all, desire is the inspiration to buying most
everything, not reality. Transgenders continue to be misunderstood by society and
repeatedly appear as sexual tricksters of straight men or frightening monsters.
Another analysis of Will and Grace indicated that the gay characters are portrayed as
operating in realistic social contexts, while as the same time, they are having to still deal with
stereotypical perceptions that still persist in these contexts.
http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/talkingback/issue1/brandsma.htm
Despite these changes, analysis of primetime television programs for Fall, 2002 by the
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) found that:
The Fall 2002 season includes only seven lesbian and gay characters in primetime
–all of whom are white. There are nobisexual or transgender characters. Last year, 20
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters regularly appeared on network
television.
Visit http://www.glaad.org/eye/ontv/index.php for a complete list of the lesbian
and gay characters appearing on television, and a season-to-season comparison.
This fall, only six shows on network television feature lesbian and gay characters:
returning shows “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “ Dawson ’s Creek,” “ER,” “NYPD Blue”
and “Will & Grace”; and the new ABC drama “MDs.” Eleven shows with lesbian and
gay characters from the 2001-2002 season are not returning, including: “ Spin City ,”
“Felicity,” “Once and Again,” “The Ellen Show,” and “Dark Angel.” The only shows to
feature a bisexual and a transgender character – “That 80s Show” and “The Education of
Max Bickford,” respectively – were also canceled last season.
From a rhetorical/audience perspective, it is often the case that audiences’ homophobic
attitudes shape their responses to representations of gays and lesbians. In a study of the reactions
of six television viewers in their 20s to representations of gay issues on television, these viewers’
reactions varied considerably due to differences in their attitudes:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/mtw9402.html
For further reading on media representations of gays and lesbians, see The Columbia
Reader on Lesbians & Gay Men in Media, Society, and Politics (Gross, L., & Woods, J.),
Columbia University Press
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023110/0231104464.HTM
See also information about gays and lesbians in films;
http://search.aol.com/aolcom/browse?id=29584&source=subcats
and in commercials:
http://www2.commercialcloset.org/cgi-bin/iowa/index.html
Racial and ethic group representations. Students could also study the ways in which different
racial or ethnic groups are represented both in terms of the images portrayed and the discourses
of race constituting those representations (see Module 4 on discourses of race). A study by
Children Now http://www.childrennow.org/newsroom/news-01/pr-5-2-01.cfm
of the diversity of groups represented on the eight o’clock shows in 2001 when children are most
likely to be viewing indicated that:
- The 8 o’clock "family hour" is the least racially diverse hour on television. Only one in
eight (13%) of the programs broadcast during this hour have mixed opening credits casts.
By contrast, two thirds (67%) of programs during the ten o’clock hour, when the least
children are watching, have mixed opening credits cast.
- African Americans account for the majority of non-white prime time characters,
comprising 17%, followed by Asian Pacific Americans (3%), Latinos (2%) and Native
Americans (0.2%). In addition, the study found that most on-screen racial diversity
comes from the inclusion of non-recurring characters and that the number of diverse
programs decreases significantly when focusing on a show’s main characters only.
-Latino representation on prime time decreased from 3% of total characters last year to
2% this year. Asian Pacific American characters increased from 2% to 3%. By contrast,
Latinos and Asian Pacific Americans make up 12% and 3.6% respectively of the national
population, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
Another study of representations of different groups on prime-time television in Fall,
2002, found that the Latino population, now the second largest minority population in America,
was represented only 3 percent of the time, even though they make up 13 percent of the
population: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-06-24-Latinos-absent-in-TV_x.htm
The study also found that:
- whites accounted for 81 percent of screen time and 74 percent of all characters, though
they make up 69 percent of the nation's population.
- blacks accounted for 16 percent of all characters compared to their 12 percent share of
the population. However, much of this representation occurred on the seldom-watched
UPN network.
This study points to the problem that certain groups are more likely to be represented on
certain networks, resulting in a segregation in terms of viewing audiences, such as whites not
viewing UPN shows.
TV networks "Family Hour" has least diverse prime time programming
http://www.childrennow.org/newsroom/news-01/pr-5-2-01.cfm
In the following video clip from Race, The Floating Signifier,
http://mediaed.org/videos/RaceDiversityAndRepresentation/RacetheFloatingSignifier
Stuart Hall critiques biological notions of race to argue that race is a social and cultural construct
that is continually changing across and within different cultures.
Central to the cultural construction of race is Gramsci’s theory of white hegemony
http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm
by which media representations serve to maintain and perpetuate a discourse of whiteness as the
desired norm, against which people of color are defined as “other”:
http://afrikan.net/hype/
http://www.utexas.edu/world/latinosandmedia/index.html
In the following video clip from the video, Cultural Criticism and Transformation,
http://mediaed.org/videos/RaceDiversityAndRepresentation/CulturalCriticismandTransformation
bell hooks examines the powerful white/capitalistic institutional forces and motives behind
representations of race as evident in the documentary, Hoop Dreams, the OJ Simpson case,
Madonna, Spike Lee, and Gangsta rap. As she notes, "The issue is not freeing ourselves from
representations. It's really about being enlightened witnesses when we watch representations."
Based on their extensive empirical research on the representations of Blacks in television
and films, Robert Entman and Andrew Rejecki (2000), argue that given the dominant discourse
of whiteness that frames representations of Blacks in terms of a hierarchy of power positioning
Blacks in a subordinate roles. They define what they describes as a bipolar portrayal of Blacks:
The predominate imagery of Blacks on television oscillates between the supremely
gifted, virtuous, and successful and the corrupt, criminal, and dangerous (with some
Black athletes a bit of both), much more so that it does with Whites. There is little in the
way of the merely ordinary, those examples that fail to register a blip on a cultural radar
screen calibrated to detect only the extremes. (p. 207)
They note that local news broadcasts frequently portray urban Blacks as more likely to
engage in criminal behavior than Whites. “Such depictions may increase Whites’ fears of
entering Black neighborhoods, as it reduces their sympathy for Blacks—who are in fact more
afflicted by violence and crime than most Whites” (p. 209). Given the lack of factual reporting
and contextualizing of larger issues on the news, they argue for the need for:
- providing accurate representation of knowable facts (like the size of the Black
population and the welfare budget).
-seeking to create dominant frames in the audience’s minds that are rooted in such facts,
or at least in consciously chosen and openly announced value commitments; that it,
selecting and highlighting and therefore popularizing understandings of social problems,
causes, and remedies based on what we know, not what we fear or unmindfully assume.
- providing self-critical material that offers context and clarifies the causes on the images
that appear. In this mode, the news would report that Black crime rates are much higher
than Whites, but that Racial difference disappears if we control for employment status.
(p. 217).
And, this clip from the video, On Orientalism,
http://mediaed.org/videos/RaceDiversityAndRepresentation/EdwardSaidOnOrientalism
Edward Said examines how media representations of Mid-eastern and Muslim worlds reflect
white, Western discourses positioning those worlds as an exotic, unfathomable “other.”
In the documentary video, Color Adjustment, portraying 40 years of a slow evolution of
representations of race on television, Marlon Riggs demonstrates how African Americans on
programs such as Amos and Andy, The Nat King Cole Show, I Spy, Julia, Good Times, Roots,
Frank's Place and The Cosby Show, were only portrayed in ways that did not threatened white
dominant discourses of race. These non-threatening representations are contrasted with more
challenging portrayals of the Civil Rights movements on the news and in programs such as Julia,
All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Hill Street Blues, and LA Law.
Professor Margaret Russell in an analysis of a 1980s movie, Soul Man, about a uppermiddle class white male who poses as a black applicant in order to obtain admission to Harvard
Law School.
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/russell15.htm
Russell notes that the film challenges affirmative action and race-based scholarships in
ways that appeal to what she defines as the “dominant stance” associated with the assumed
ideological stance of a white audience, a stance she traces back to a tradition of Hollywood films
beginning with Birth of a Nation. She concludes her study by contrasting films such as those by
Spike Lee that challenge this dominant white stance with films such as Soul Man:
In defending his film, Do the Right Thing (1989) against the criticism
that it might make mainstream white audiences feel uncomfortable, Spike Lee
asserted, "[T]hat's the way it is all the time for Black people." Lee's point
was that the dominant gaze still prevails; "uncomfortable" perspectives are
marginalized, criticized, or worst of all, simply ignored. A film such as Soul
Man, which capitalizes on an ostensibly alternative perspective to tell a tale
about contemporary race relations, is ultimately fatally flawed by the dominance of its vision. By exploiting the effect of racial stereotypes without
reminding the viewers of their continuing destructive force, Soul Man misses the
opportunity to make - either seriously or comically - a truly instructive
comment about the nature of racism in our society.
Christopher Miller, “The Representation of Black Males in Film”
http://www.pressroom.com/~afrimale/miller.htm
Similarly, analysis of representations of Native Americans in Hollywood films
http://www.cowboysindians.com/
reflect the ways in which Native Americans are portrayed in the Western genre as the deviant
“other” who attempted to block the white’s western expansion and exploitation of natural
resources in the American west.
For lessons on studying contemporary Native American experiences that counter
stereotypes about Native Americans:
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=347
Bret Enynon and Donna Thompson, American Social History Project: “Picturing a Nation:
Native Americans and Visual Representation”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/54/
A study by Children Now of Native American adolescents’ perceptions of the media
http://www.childrennow.org/media/nativeam/report.html
indicated that:
Most said that they did not see youth with whom they could identify and who were true
to life. Further, Native youth also stated that they do not see people of their own race. "I
don't see any Native Americans in the media," said a young Comanche boy from
Oklahoma City. When asked to identify Native Americans actors, a few children
answered, "Northern Exposure," or "There was an X-Files [episode] a couple of years
ago. . . ." This scarcity corresponds to many kids feeling "left out," and getting the
message that minorities "shouldn't be seen."
When Native American youth do see other Native Americans on television, they
experience a sense of pride. As one teen said, "If I see a Native person on the television
screen, I feel proud of them. I don't care what tribe they are, as long as they're Native
and making a difference." Another commented, "I feel kind of good . . . because, like
after so many shows about White people, Indians actually get a chance to be on TV. It
makes me happy. It shows we're getting somewhere."
On the rare occasions when Native youth do see their culture and race in the media, it is
often an unflattering picture. As one Oklahoma City adolescent asserted, "[Native
Americans] aren't highly respected. They're not often shown as the main character or the
heroine." A teenage girl from Seattle told us, "When you do see Native Americans on TV,
it's like movies about reservations or something like that. And they're all drunk and
beating up on each other. And they're poor."
Representations of Asian men and women
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Amydoc.html
http://members.tripod.com/shockme99/allymcbealbioling.html
reflect negative perceptions of Asians not trustworthy or mysterious.
Bibliography: UC Berkeley Library: African Americans in films
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/AfricanAmBib.html
Bibliography: UC Berkeley Library: Native Americans in films
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/IndigenousBib.html
Bibliography: UC Berkeley Library: Chicanos/Latinos in films
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/LatinoBib.html
Bibliography: UC Berkeley Library: Jews in films
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/JewishBib.html
For other related sites:
Xenophobia and portrayals of the other
http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/~tillneg8/xenomale/OSLO.html
National University course: Representation and Diversity in the Media
http://www3.nu.edu/schools/SOAS/DOWC/courses/COM360syllabus.html
University of Iowa Communications Studies site: representations of racial groups in the media:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/resources/GenderMedia/
http://www.uoregon.edu/~dmerskin/race.htm
lists of films organized according to racial representations:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/EthnicImagesVid.html
Analysis of representation of diversity in European media:
http://www.multicultural.net/
To recognize the degree to which mainstream news typically reflects a white, middleclass perspective, examine the following diversityinc.com site in which the news and current
events are presented from a more diverse perspective. How are the topics selected and analyses
employed different from typical mainstream news coverage?
http://www.diversityinc.com/index.cfm?watchname=goo-min
New York Times lesson: Elyse Fischer, “Sufferin' Stereotypes:
Examining Race and Ethnicity as Presented in Children's Media”
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20010604monday.html
New York Times lesson: Alison Zimbalist, Kelly Bird, and Jessica Levine, “TeleVisions of Race:
Examining the Portrayal of Race on Television”
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20000612monday.html
Class. Students could also examine representations of social class differences in the media as
based on prototypical notions of working versus middle versus upper-middle-class groups. One
analysis of class representations in the media
http://www.independentmedia.org/congress/1996/class.html
found that:
Class in the United States is still tied to the degree to which one controls the
means of production, but it is also about race, access to power, education and even one's
belief system.
The corporate media deals with class issues in ways that obscure their most
simple meaning. New advertising campaigns about "white trash chic" treat class as a
lifestyle choice, while economic coverage in newspaper business sections
unquestioningly parrots Greenspan's poison about inflation (wage increases) being the
bogeyman and the only response to falling unemployment being increased interest rates.
Editors and producers, both in the corporate media and in the alternative press,
fear class issues. The corporate media knows that to talk about class is to talk about
inequality, which is to discuss corporate oppression. But even alternative journalists,
steeped in the logic of journalism schools, seek out the highest officials for comment on
stories that "matter." Plain folk are used as props to support conventional wisdom.
As evident in the PBS documentary, People Like Us (see Module 4),
http://www.pbs.org/peoplelikeus/
people want to be perceived as “middle class” by adopting class markers of dress, language,
social practices. These class differences are represented on television in terms of a display of
upper-middle class status symbols in commercials for expensive cars
http://www.lexus.com/
http://www.mbusa.com/brand/index.jsp
http://www.cadillac.com/
or luxury cruises
http://www.royalcaribbean.com/asp/default.asp
http://hollandamerica.com/
In analyzing representations of class differences, it is useful to examine media texts
organized around class hierarchies—the PBS Masterpiece Theater, Upstairs, Downstairs; Robert
Altman’s film, Gosford Park, or Titanic portray the disparities in social practices and values
associated with different classes, often leading to conflicts.
One example of class tensions within the same text is the PBS Mystery series, The
Inspector Lynley Mysteries: A Great Deliverance, in which the detective, Inspector Thomas
Lynley, is upper class--the eighth Earl of Asherton, and his partner, Sergeant Barbara Havers, is
working class, and has a strong resentment about upper-class people. The program revolves
around conflicts in their relationships as they attempt to solve crimes; the series is based on the
Inspector Lynley Mysteries book series by Elizabeth George
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/george/
Upper middle-class characters that emerged in prime time shows in the 1980s such as
Dallas and Dynasty http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/socialclass/socialclass.htm
reflected an increasing sense of a new wealthy class during the Reagan and Thatcher era. Some
critics noted that the fact that these characters are often unhappy and conflicted was an attempt to
convey the message to less-well-off viewers that accumulating wealth does not necessarily result
in happiness—a message designed to placate concerns about not having wealth.
During that same period, the de-industrialization of the economy resulted in closures of
traditional manufacturing plants, particularly in England and Ireland. A series of films about
laid-off workers in these countries during that time--Brassed Off, Trainspotting, The Snapper,
The Van, and The Last Monty, all portray the plight, often framed in a comic mode, of male
workers who must find new kinds of employment that had little to with their familiar, traditional
skills. For example, in The Van, set in Dublin, two works attempt to set up a mobile fish and
chip restaurant, only to encounter a range of challenges. These films represent workers’ former
employers as well as the British government, as having little or no concern for their plight.
Other films about working-class characters in the 1990s include:
http://members.aol.com/lsmithdog/bottomdog/CHRONFIL.htm
The Big Night (1996; dir. Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott; cast: Stanley Tucci, Tony
Shalhoub, Isabella Rossellini; subj.: tale of two Italian-American brothers in Long Island
and their struggle to keep their little authentic restaurant and lives afloat)(cooks and
restaurant owners)
Spitfire Grill (1996; dir. Lee David Zlotoff ; cast: Alison Elliott, Ellen Burstyn, Will
Patton; subj.: young woman comes from prison to small town in Maine to begin life again
working in local diner; screenplay by Zlotoff) (diner cook)
Sling Blade (1996; dir. Billy Bob Thornton; cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam,
J.T. Walsh; subj. retarded adult man, Karl Childers, struggles in a small Southern town;
surprise low budgeted, independent film nominated for 1996 Oscar as Best Film)
(mechanic)
Fargo (1996; dir. Joel Coen; cast: Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve
Buscemi; subj.: murder and kidnap plot involving woman police detective and car
salesman, set in Fargo, North Dakota; script by Joel and Ethan Coen) (auto sales,
policewoman)
Secrets and Lies (1996-British; dir. Mike Leigh; cast: Brenda Blethyn, Marianne JeanBaptiste, Timothy Spall, Claire Rushrook; sugj.: slice of life of working class family
dealing with young Black woman's discovery of her white mother.
Hidden in America (1996; dir. Martin Bell; cast: Beau Bridges, Bruce Davison, Shelton
Dane, Jena Malone; displaced autoworker and family struggle to get by after wife dies,
sharp and poignant depiction of hidden poverty in America) (out of work laborer).
Good Will Hunting (1997; dir. Gus Van Sant; cast: Robin Williams, Matt Damon, Ben
Affleck, Minnie Driver; subj.: Rough Boston youth with genius for math shows up MIT
academics, wins girl, and gains confidence with counselor; written by Damon and
Affleck who received writing Oscars.) (academia)] (construction, janitor, community
college teacher).
Ulee's Gold (1997; dir. Vincent Nune; cast: Peter Fonda, Patricia Richardson, Jessica
Biel, Christine Dunford; subj.: beekeeper father brings dysfunctional family together
through hard work and struggles.)(bee keeping).
October Sky (1999; dir. Joe Johnson; cast Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, Laura Dern,
Natalie Canerday; subj.: based on autobiographical book by Homer H. Hickman, Jr., a
coal miner's son in West Virginia, who becomes inspired by launch of Stutnik satelite, an
against a life in the mines chooses to invent rockets with high school friends.(coal miners,
students, teachers).
Television programs during the as The Archie Bunker Show, Roseanne, The Simpsons,
and Married with Children, often portrayed working class characters as uneducated and racist.
For example, Roseanne and her husband are overweight, her husband drives a pick-up truck, and
their world is often highly conflicted, phenomena equated with being working-class. In contrast,
The Cosby Show, portrays an upper-middle class family as concerned with consumer purchases
and achievement.
The media rarely portrays the actual lives and experiences of working-class people, for
example, showing how they often have to hold several jobs to survive, the lack of affordable
housing and day care, and the decline in health-care benefits provided by employers. One study
found that in two years of PBS prime-time programming, 27 hours addressed the concerns and
lives of the working classes—compared with 253 hours that focused on the upper classes.
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/issues/stereotyping/whiteness_and_privilege/whiteness_working_class.cfm
And, portrayals of working-class television families perpetuate stereotypes of the
dysfunctional working-class family.
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/socialclass/socialclass.htm
Based on an analysis of two TV talk shows that portray working-class participants’
revelations about family conflicts and personal problems, Laura Grindstaff (2002) found that
while giving these participants voice to express their problems, this expression is controlled and
sensationalized in a manner that focuses on the dramatic, as opposed to larger institutional
explanations for these problems.
And, representations of “poor white trash” in media texts often serve to perpetuate myths
about the working class.
http://www.whitetrashworld.com
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/issues/00/03.10/view.wohlwend.html
See also trailers for the 2000 movie, Poor White Trash:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204350/
However, such a perspective fails to recognize the complex influences of class and race
on identity:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA97/price/film.htm
The view from inside the working class is much more complex. The working class white
is operating off his own cultural, family and individual biases; yet coupled with these are
the pervasive, historically assumed ideas that violence, racism and fundamentalism are
somehow inherent in his class. Even if one becomes aware of the layers of identification
applied to oneself, and most people do not, a battle against your own heritage is difficult
at best, and usually impossible. The class to which we are born, in which our family
circulates and our formative years are spent, is the guiding principle with which we view
other groups and their cultural beliefs within our life experience.
Films that show poor whites as violent people who attack wealthy citified whites allow
the rich to justify their treatment of "white trash" by portraying the poor whites as racist,
criminal and uneducated. This allows other typically marginalized groups to join upper
class whites against the "white trash". This justifies upper class stereotyping of poor
whites and serves to aid in relieving upper class white guilt over treatment of "others" in
the past.
The hatred and condescension of the poor seems to be the last available method of
prejudice in our society. Just as Americans have made an effort to educate, understand
and alter the treatment of marginalized groups and alternate cultures within our society,
we have held on to poor whites as a group to demean. Making assumptions about groups
of any sort on societal and biased definitions is flawed in any situation. As with other
groups, there must be an effort taken to use an open mind and individual code to ascribe
merit to those in our world.
Thomas Frank (2004) argues that mid-American working class people have bought into
the false binary of the “two Americas” promoted in the media—the “Red” (the “conservative”
central part of the country that voted for Bush in the 2000 election, and the “Blue,” the two
coasts who voted for Gore), a binary contradicted by Midwestern states that voted for Gore.
This binary leads to prototypical assumptions about people in the “Red” areas—that they hold
the bed-rock values of being humble, reverent, upbeat, loyal, and hard-working, a prototype set
against what is perceived to be the effete, intellectual, snobbish, morally-questionable, whitecollar worker who inhabit the “Blue” areas. Frank quotes Missouri farmer who described the
kind of work he does as “measured in bushels, pounds, shingles nailed, and bricks laid, rather
than in the fussy judgments that make up office employee reviews” (p. 39).
For Frank, the class divide is therefore one that has been framed around a discourse of
cultural difference revolving around notions of cultural authenticity in which working-class
people are portrayed as “basking in the easy solidarity of patriotism, hard work, and the universal
ability to identify soybeans in a field” (p. 40). The fact that class distinctions are framed in fasttrack capitalism in terms of cultural attitudes related to valued social practices serves as a means
of masking economic realities of small-family farmers and business owners who have been put
out of business by agribusiness conglomerates and corporations. “Deregulated capitalism is
what has allowed the Wal-Marts to crush local businesses across the Midwest and, even more
importantly, what has driven agriculture, the region’s raison d’etre, to a state of near-collapse”
(p. 46).
In his review of economic history, Richard Ohmann (2003) notes that a major shift in
economic policy occurred beginning in the 1970s from one of what David Harvey describes as a
stable “Fordism” to the instability of “flexible accumulation” through “new sections of
production, new ways of providing financial services, now markets, and, above all, greatly
intensified rations of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation” (Harvey, 1989,
p. 147). Ohmann notes that the “instability and excesses of this casino capitalism” (p. 33) has
resulted in a shift from stable, well-paying, long-term, full-time jobs with benefits (Ford believed
in paying workers so that they could afford his cars and decent housing) to “flex-time, part-time,
and temporary labor; subcontracting and out-sourcing; job sharing, home work, and piece work;
workfare and prison labor” (p. 34). This shift since the 1970s has resulted in a parallel shift way
from the New Deal politics of strong government support programs and government regulation
to a diminution of government support and deregulation, resulting in funding cuts for education,
job training, health care, social security, child-care, and housing, particularly for low-income
people.
Changes in the nature of work: film clips of working in the early 20th century:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/collections/atwork/atintro.html
These shifts have placed working-class people in a double-bind. On the one hand, the
transformation from manufacturing to “knowledge-economy” jobs entail increased higher
education beyond high school. However, cuts in state and federal spending due to tax cuts has
resulted in large increases in tuition in state colleges and universities.
These economic shifts and cultural messages influences working-class adolescents’
identity construction around class and race, leaving many of them confused about their social
status and economic future. They recognize that their class status has much to do with
differences in cultural capital available to their middle- and upper-middle-class peers to which
they may not have access. Yet, the popular media, particularly conservative radio talk shows,
continue to reify false binaries of low-income people’s “authenticity” associated with blue-collar
work as set against the “knowledge-economy” workers. These conservative messages
deliberately shift attention away from the larger economic forces of fast-track capitalism and
corporate control working against low-income people.
This suggests that some of the appeal of the conservative messages employs the
traditional “race-card” strategy of pitting low-income whites against low-income people of color.
In his documentation of the evolution of white privilege, David Roediger (2002) noted that in the
1800s, wealthy Whites provided poor Whites with small tokens of economic privilege and social
status that served to create an economic hierarchy that set low income Whites against Blacks.
And, given the rise of a post-Civil Rights racism since the 1970s, politicians continued to employ
the “race-card” appeal to attract white voters. Given the loss of well-paying jobs for low-income
Whites since the 1970s, working-class Whites have increasingly defined their class identity in
terms of racial polarization and resentment against Blacks and Latinos as scapegoat targets for
job losses, defining their sense of social superiority through “othering” Blacks and Latinos as
inferior. This othering takes the form of Whites distancing themselves from what they perceive
to be low-level “slave-labor” work done by Blacks and Latinos, and attempting to achieve what
they perceive as middle-class status in terms of not being or living near Blacks or Latinos.
For bell hooks (2000), all of this serves to divert white working-class people’s attention
away from an economic system that fails to provide well-paying employment:
Not even the economic crisis that is sorely impacting on their lives at home and at work
alerts them to the realities of predatory capitalism. Their lack of sympathy for the poor
unites them ideologically with greedy people of means who only have contempt for the
poor. Once poor can be represented as totally corrupt, as being always and only
morally bankrupt, it is possible for those with class privilege to eschew any responsibility
for poverty and the suffering it represents. (p. 69).
In summary, representations of gender, race, and class are often derived from institutional
forces that represent groups other than themselves using discourses and myths that serve to
maintain their own power and status in society.
For further reading about representations of gender, race, and class see the anthology,
Gender, Race And Class In Media: A Text Reader (Dines & Humez, eds.), which contains
numerous essays on the representations of gender, race, and class in the media.
William F. Munn, lesson plan: Class in the Media: Writing a Television Show
http://www.pbs.org/peoplelikeus/resources/lessonplans/media.html
Traci Gardner, Comic Makeovers: Examining Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Media
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view_printer_friendly.asp?id=207
Representations of Different Age Groups or Occupations
Media representations of different groups of people based on age (children, adolescents,
the elderly), or occupation often essentialize, generalize, or categorize people based on
stereotypical generalizations about individuals. It is assumed that certain prototypical images,
language use, or social practices of a group are represented in a single token representative
person—that a black gang member serves as a representative of all black adolescents.
Again, what is important is to help students to go beyond simply identifying the
stereotyping to determine the origins of these representations. One of the incentives to
essentialized, generalize or categorize people into groups is to create a hierarchy in which certain
groups are perceived as inferior scapegoats, as did Hitler with Jews during World War II.
Another incentive is to use these prototypes to ridicule or parody the shortcomings of a particular
group, for example, to create humor out of the stereotype itself.
Children/adolescents. Children are often portrayed in the media or films in negative or
stereotypical ways. For example, based on an analysis by British 18-year-olds of British
newspapers, students identified what they perceived to be seven stereotypes of children in the
media:
*
Kids as victims.
*
Cute kids sell newspapers.
*
Little devils.
*
Kids are brilliant.
*
Kids as accessories.
*
"Kids these days."
*
Brave little angels.
A study by Professor Katharine Heintz-Knowles for Children Now of the representation
of children on television
http://www.childrennow.org/media/mc95/content_study.html
found that children are often portrayed as motivated primarily by peer relationships, sports, and
romance, and least often by community, school-related, or religious issues. Children are also
rarely shown as coping with societal issues such as racism, substance abuse, public safety, or
homelessness or major family issues such as family crises, child abuse, domestic abuse, or
family values. And, about 70% of the children portrayed are engaged in pro-social actions such
as sharing, telling the truth in difficult situations, meeting their responsibilities, and helping
others of the time, while 40% are portrayed as engaged in anti-social actions, such as lying,
neglecting their responsibilities, or being aggressive either verbally or physically. Physical
aggression was portrayed as effective in meeting the child's goal most of the time, and deceitful
behavior is seen as effective nearly half of the time.
In this study, children of color were under-represented. 80% were white; 13.7% were
African-American, 4% were Asian-American, and only 2.1% were Hispanic/Latino, as compared
to the actual population percentages of 69% of children under 18 are white, 15% are AfricanAmerican, 3.3% are Asian-American, and 12.2% are Hispanic/Latino.
Another study for Children Now, on the types of issues covered by news about children
http://www.childrennow.org/newsroom/news-01/pr-10-23-01.cfm
indicated that the primary focus of the coverage was on crime and violence-about half of all
television news stories, and about 40% of all newspaper articles. Economic topics such as child
poverty, child care, and welfare accounted for only 4% of all news stories about children. Only
about a third of all stories dealt with public policy concerns associated with children.
Adolescents are often portrayed in being in a crisis state, without providing them with
tools for critically analyzing reasons for their problems. In the following three sites, David
Considine, argues that the media present adolescents with a lot of consumer options and
portrayals of substance abuse, but do not provide any critical analysis of these options/abuse or
strategies for coping with them:
http://www.ci.appstate.edu/programs/edmedia/medialit/ml_adolescents2.html
http://www.ci.appstate.edu/programs/edmedia/medialit/ml_adolescents3.html
http://www.ci.appstate.edu/programs/edmedia/medialit/ml_adolescents4.html
Children are also represented in television commercials in ways that socialize them to
become active consumers with defined needs for various consumer products at an early age:
http://www.med.sc.edu:1081/toys.htm
http://www.education-world.com/a_lesson/lesson158.shtml
New York Times lesson: Annissa Hambouz and Javaid Khan, “Media Babies: Considering the
Effects of Electronic Media on Infants and Toddlers”
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20031030thursday.html
Adolescents are also represented as members of prototypical groups—jocks, nerds,
druggie, brains, underdogs, athletes, etc. Students could identify the nature of these groups in
films and television programs and note the limitations of representations of these groups. For
example, the trailer for the film, The Goonies, contains a number of stereotypical group
representations:
http://us.imdb.com/Trailers?0089218&380&28
Film Education unit: Representations of Youth
http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/Representation/index.html
The elderly. At the other end of the spectrum, the elderly are often represented in equally limited
ways. A study sponsored by Children Now of prime time television programs in the Fall of
2000
http://WWW.Trinity.Edu/~mkearl/ger-tv.html
found that only 3% of the characters were 70 and older, and only 13% were fell between the ages
of 50 and 69, in contrast to the reality that 9% of the American population is over 70 and 28%
are over 50. There was also a gender bias; only 19% of women were over age 40.
In contrast, as the study found, web sites for AARP http://www.aarp.org/index.html
and for the National Council on Aging http://www.ncoa.org/ present the elderly in a very
different, more positive light.
http://www.geocities.com/lightgrrrrrl/
Sandy Landis conducted an analysis of media representations of the elderly in her CI5472
paper in Spring, 2002:
- In the May 21, 2002 issue of Family Circle, of the approximately 185 identifiable faces
in illustrations, 15, or 8%, were conceivably over 55 years of age. Of fifteen
representations, four were part of the same story, and seven, nearly half, were connected
with products or services to help with the “problems” of aging: arthritis, anemia,
incontinence, and wrinkles.
- Of the approximately 177 identifiable faces in the June, 2002, issue of Better Homes
and Gardens, 22, or 12% were feasibly over 55. Of these 22 “old” faces, three appeared
in a single movie ad, and five were advertising health products for the elderly.
- In the June 2002 issue of Good Housekeeping, of the approximately 159 identifiable
faces, only ten, or 6% were likely to be over 55. Of these ten older faces, three appeared
in one advertisement for an upcoming film release and four were advertising health
remedies for the aged.
- In the June 4, 2002 edition of Woman’s Day, 24 of 229 identifiable faces, or 10%, were
possibly over 55. Of these 24 older faces, ten appeared in a single photograph and five
were advertising health products for the elderly.
Landis analyzed the representations of the elderly in film and television and found that
they were highly one-dimensional in that any complexity of these characters were limited to one
or two particularly makers of aging:
- “Grumpy old man.” (Grumpy Old Men, Grumpier Old Men ,The Sunshine Boys, It’s a
Wonderful Life, On Golden Pond, King of the Hill, The Simpsons)
- “Feisty old woman.” (Tea with Mussolini, The Golden Girls)
- “Sickly old person.” (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Key Largo, It’s a
Wonderful Life, The Big Sleep, The Sunshine Boys)
- “Mentally deficient.” (The Simpsons. On Golden Pond, The Golden Girls, The Whales
of August)
- “Depressed or lonely.” (Fried Green Tomatoes, Enchanted April)
- “Having wisdom.” (Murder, She Wrote, the Miss Marple mysteries, Harold and Maude)
- “Busy body.” (Everybody Loves Raymond, Murder, She Wrote)
- “Having a second childhood.” (Cocoon, On Golden Pond, Arsenic and Old Lace)
One study by Meredith Tupper (1995) of the representation of the elderly in prime time
advertising http://www.geocities.com/lightgrrrrrl/
found that advertisers avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes of the sick, weak old person
stereotype, but elderly characters are still underrepresented relative to their percentages in the
population, particularly elderly characters of color:
No clear cut, definitive negative stereotypes of elderly people emerged from this study; in
fact, elderly characters did not appear in the anticipated commercial categories. For
example, elderly characters did not appear in roles for products such as arthritis
medication, denture care products, or skin wrinkle creams, nor did they appear in sick,
weak, fragile, or absent-minded roles.
It appears that the image of elderly people in prime time television commercials is less
negative than previously thought. Advertisers may have taken the cue from published
research and made an obvious effort to avoid perpetuating the sick, weak old person
stereotype. However, the effect of this has been to reduce the overall opportunities for
visibility of elderly characters.
For instance, Madison Avenue won't break the stereotype by routinely showing older
characters in positive situations, but it will make certain that older characters do not
appear in negative, stereotyped situations, either. As illustrated in the data from this and
other studies, elders are still significantly underrepresented in proportion to their true
occurrence within the U.S. population.
Occupations
Teachers. Shannon and Crawford (1998) identify a number of different representations of
teachers as “caretakers,” “jailer,” “savior,” “drillmaster,” “keepers of wisdom,”
“facilitator/guide-on-the-side,” “technician,” “agent of social change,” or “underpaid unionist,”
arguing that each of these representations portray only a limited, partial perspective on the
complex nature of teaching. For example, in the films—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, To Sir,
With Love, Up the Down Staircase, Dead Poet’s Society, Dangerous Minds, and Good Will
Hunting, teachers are portrayed as totally dedicated, loner saviors of students who fight against
the often repressive school to help their students. One limitation of this representation is that it
“ultimately robs teachers of a life outside and inside their work and separates them from the rest
of us who are charged with educating and socializing children” (Shannon & Crawford, 1998, p.
256).
For a unit on “Images of Learning” for studying representations of secondary teachers:
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/educational/lessons/secondary/stereotyping/images_of_learning_
sec.cfm
This lesson sites an article by Gavin Hainsworth (1998)
http://www.mediaawareness.ca/english/resources/educational/handouts/stereotyping/tinsel_town_teachers.cfm
who identified a number of features of teachers in the following films:
Good-bye, Mr. Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle (1955), To Sir, with Love (1967), The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie (1969), Teachers (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off (1986), The Principal (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), Lean on Me (1989), Dead Poets
Society (1989), Kindergarten Cop (1990), Dangerous Minds (1995), Mr. Holland’s Opus
(1995), The Substitute (1996), In & Out (1997), 187 (1997), Music of the Heart (2000), Pay it
Forward (2000), Finding Forrester (2001):
Screen teachers begin as youthful and idealistic. Most teacher films are variations on
the same story—beginning teachers launched feet first into the harsh reality of the new
school. They are naive, idealistic and completely unprepared for what faces them. As
Rick Dadier (Glenn Ford, Blackboard Jungle) states: “I want to teach. Most of us want to
do something creative—a painter, writer, or engineer. But I thought if I could help to
shape young minds, sort of sculpt young lives, that would be something.” After being
hired on the spot to teach a class of academy kids that had already dispatched five
substitutes, Dangerous Minds’ Michelle Pfeiffer’s character states, “I guess Ms.
Shephard’s lesson plans will be in her desk.” Their dreams may even include innocent
ambitions like Mr Chips’. “It means everything to be here, headmaster at Brookwood.
That's something to work for.” They believe that “students will raise to our expectations
and desire,” Jaime Escalante (Edward Olmos, Stand and Deliver).
Screen teachers get cynical advice instead of professional mentorship from their
colleagues. This fact is revealed in the staff room or first staff meeting scene. Mr. Chips
is told that “the boys are excited by fresh blood—mustn’t let them rag you—look out for
drawing pins and tacks on your desk,” and he is asked if he is athletically inclined, “not
that they ever become violent with weapons or anything.” A good model for the
stateroom cynic is Jim Murdock (Blackboard Jungle). He is introduced working out on a
punching bag, “getting into shape to defend myself for the fall term,” because his school
is “the garbage can of the education system. You take the worst kids of most of the other
schools, put them together here, and you get one big overflowing garbage can.” “You
can't teach logarithms to illiterates,” says one teacher in Stand and Deliver.
Screen teachers always get the worst class. This truism is timeless, from the balls of
paper flying (Good-bye, Mr. Chips, 1939), through leather-jacket boppers (Blackboard
Jungle, 1955), twisters and swingers (To Sir, with Love, 1967), to gangster rappers
(Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, The Substitute, The Principal)—all long after the
bell has rung. The desks are broken and vandalized, and the students are completely out
of control. They are going through the file cabinets and the teacher's desk (The
Substitute). There aren't enough seats (Stand and Deliver), which only partially explains
why couples are sharing desks (Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, Dangerous
Minds, Teachers, The Principal). Any attempt to teach the first class is shouted down by
the students who throw baseballs (Blackboard Jungle), beer cans (The Substitute), or
books (To Sir, with Love, Stand and Deliver, 187). The bell to end classes always rings a
few minutes after the one to begin, leaving classroom and lesson in tatters.
Screen teachers can count on little or no support from the principal. If anyone is of less
help to the screen teacher than his/ her class or colleagues, it is the screen principal.
Principals are insulated within their office from the reality of the classroom and are
incompetent, indifferent, or intimidating. Principal Eugene Horne (Teachers) runs back
into his office when he sees two teachers fighting over the mimeograph machine, and he
knows neither who does the schools filing nor where the files are kept. Principal Warneke
(Blackboard Jungle) is more concerned with the softness of teacher Dadier’s voice than
with the false allegations of teacher racism in his class or the repeated weapons
infractions or the attempted rape of a staff member. “There is no discipline problem here,
Mr. Dadier, not as long as I am principal here,” he says. A death threat against a teacher
is swept under the carpet by Principal Claude Rolle (The Substitute) because without
proof of a direct threat, he'd “have a lawsuit on his hands.” Where screen principals use
discipline, they go to sociopathic extremes. Principals Joe Clark (Lean on Me), and Rick
Latimer (James Belushi, The Principal) patrol their hallways with baseball bats (that they
are often called upon to use) as well as other management tools like verbal intimidation
and threats used on students and staff alike. It is no accident that Rick Latimer is
promoted to principal of his inner-city school after taking a baseball bat to his ex-wife’s
sports car—he has what it takes to turn a school around
Screen teachers face an increasingly violent school environment in which they themselves
must become violent to succeed. Mr. Dadier (Blackboard Jungle, 1955) fights attacks by
his students in the alley and in his classroom, and he prevents a teacher rape in the
library. Principal Rick Latimer (The Principal, 1987) not only has to fight an attack by
five students in his library (whom he throws out the window), but breaks up a teacher
rape by riding his Harley (labeled El Principal) to the rescue down the hallway. With bike
and bat, he takes down the crack dealers around his school and engages in a battle to the
death. The Substitute (1996) takes on KOD (The Kings of Destruction), Miami's top
gang, to avenge the intimidation of his teacher girlfriend, but to do so requires all of his
mercenary training and the members of his paramilitary squad. The KOD are led by the
schools principal, Mr. Rolle, who is using the school for a drug transit point. Principal
Rolle shoots down students and teachers alike, saying to one young teacher, “I'm just
doing you a favour” as he shoots him in the back. A final showdown with automatic
weapons, grenades and bazookas is needed at the school to clean it up. The two
remaining mercenaries resolve never to work at a school again.
For further reading on media representations of teachers:
Dalton, M. (2004). The Hollywood curriculum: Teachers in the movies. New York: Peter Lang.
Giroux, H. & Simon, R. (1989). Popular culture, schooling, and everyday life. New York:
Bergin & Garvey.
Joseph, P., & Burnaford, G. (Eds.). (1993). Images of school teachers in twentieth-century
America: Paragons, polarities, complexities. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Keroes, J. (1999). Tales out of school: Longing, and the teacher in fiction and film.
Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Weber, S., & Mitchell, C. (1995). That's funny, You don't look like a teacher!: Interrogating
images and identity in popular culture. New York: Routledge.
Students. Students are also represented in often stereotypical ways in either pro-or anti-school.
And, news coverage of issues such as testing and accountability often represent teachers and
students as “failing” or lacking motivation in schools, representations that do not account for a
range of different aspects influencing student performance. For example, a study of media
coverage of testing in North Carolina found that issues of testing were portrayed in onedimensional ways:
http://edtech.connect.msu.edu/searchaera2002/viewproposaltext.asp?propID=1086
Coaches. Coaches, as is the case with teachers, are often represented in films such as Hoosiers,
Rocky/Rocky II, The Karate Kid, Cutting Edge, The Mighty Ducks, Hoop Dreams, or Vision
Quest, as a driven, hard-line, authoritarian, who tries to discipline players, and is obsessed with
winning at all costs, or as a compassionate, caring mentor (Crowe, 1998).
Lawyers. Lawyers are frequently portrayed in films
http://mentalsoup.net/jelkins/coursefilms.shtml
such as A Civil Action, A Few Good Men, Amistad, Before and After, Class Action,
Erin Brockovich, Guilty as Sin, Music Box, My Cousin Vinny, Philadelphia, Primal Fear,
Snow Falling on Cedars, The Castle, The Client, The Devil's Advocate, The Rainmaker,
The Sweet Hereafter, The Winslow Boy, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Time to Kill, Body Heat,
Bonfire of the Vanities, Presumed Innocent, The Firm, Dead Man Walking, Ghosts of
Mississippi, Rules of Engagement, The Shawshank Redemption as using the law to fight the
traditional establishment or status quo in ways that serve clients whose rights or civil liberties
have been violated or denied. However, in other cases, lawyers are portrayed as representing
corporate interests against such clients.
Women lawyers are less frequent than male lawyers, but they are portrayed as assuming
important roles in defending women’s rights and civil liberties:
http://mentalsoup.net/jelkins/women.shtml
Portrayals of television lawyers on Law & Order, Ally McBeal, The Practice, This Life
often dramatize the role of lawyers as engaged in dramatic criminal court room practices, a
representation that does not capture some of the less dramatic roles involved in practicing the
law.
Police/criminals . Police and criminals have populated many prime-time detective/crime
television programs such as Law & Order, Blue Heelers, NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the
Street, Blue Murder, or Silent Witness. Criminal are often portrayed in films such as Lock, Stock
and Two Smoking Barrels, Heat, The Godfather, Chopper, Bonnie and Clyde, Sexy Beast or on
television in The Sopranos, as engaged in practices that violate social norms in ways that are
appealing to viewers, but still represent illegal practices. Similarly, there is a fascination with
portrayals of serial killers in films such as Silence of the Lambs; Natural Born Killers; Summer of
Sam; Manhunter; Seven; American Psycho; The Talented Mr Ripley; Copycat; Hannibal.
Students could examine the ways in which the roles of the law enforcer and the law
violator are often dramatized in ways that blur the distinction between the two. The police may
resort to the same violent means to stop a criminal and the criminal may employ detective work
to allude the police. Both may subscribe to the same cynical attitude regarding the level of
institutional corruption.
Representations of crime or criminals are often constituted by discourses of race in which
criminals are often shown as African American males. Crime is often associated with racial
stereotypes, assuming that, for example, black males are continually perpetuating crime. The
following video clip from Framing an Execution explores issues around Mumia Abu-Jamal, a
journalist on Pennsylvania's death row in connection with the death of a police office:
http://www.mediaed.org/videos/MediaRaceAndRepresentation/FraminganExecution
Doctors/health issues. Doctors have also frequently appeared in prime-time medical drama
shows such as Casualty, Chicago Hope, City of Angels, Crossing Jordan, Diagnosis Murder,
Doc, Dr. Quinn - Medicine Woman, Emergency!, ER, Gideon's Crossing, Holby City, L. A.
Doctors, Peak Practice, St. Elsewhere, and Strong Medicine. On these shows, they are often
represented as, similar to the representations of teachers, as saviors or miracle workers who pull
through in the end to cure a patient. As the same time, their own emotional or personal lives
become involved in their work, adding to the dramatic elements of these programs.
Doctors or reporters posing as “medical experts” are also represented on television news
are providing medical advice or summaries of current medical research. These representations,
which have received increased attention on television news, reflect an increased attention to
health issues by the viewing public. In some cases, however, the information provided may be
superficial, or, as in the case with some Internet sites, misleading or inaccurate. For example,
one study of the media representation of breast and bottle feeding (Henderson, Kitzinger, &
Green, 2000), found that breastfeeding was often portrayed as embarrassing, difficult or funny,
while bottle feeding is presented as the normal and socially acceptable.
Students could examine how a particular medical or health issue is represented on dramas
or the news in terms of the complexity or accuracy of the representation.
Institutions
The media also represents various institutions such as the family or governments in ways
that reflect certain cultural and ideological perspectives.
Families. Television families have been represented in different ways across different decades
since World War II. While television families of the 1950s were portrayed as patriarchic
institutions guided by a omniscient, wise father, programs in the 1990s such as The Simpsons,
Home Improvement, Brother’s Keeper, and King of the Hill portrayed fathers as bungling and
ineffectual. There is also a shift in the role of the mother to someone who is more independent
and assertive.
Some “reality television” shows such as the 1900 House, Frontier House, and Colonial
House on PBS, and The Osbournes on MTV http://www.mtv.com/onair/osbournes/
portray conflicts and experiences of families in unusual contexts that challenge family unity.
One key aspect of media representations of the family has been the representations of the
breakdown of the family as due to factors such as unmarried couples or dependency on
government support systems. These representations could be examined in light of alternative
perspectives such as that provided by the Council on Contemporary Families
http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/
in a report, Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy, by Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre, that
critiques the promotion of marriage as a requirement for receiving support:
- Although poor families are just as likely as others to consider marriage an ideal
arrangement for raising children, economic hardships such as unemployment, low wages
and poverty make it less likely that the hope of marriage can be realized. Economic
stability, and not pre-marital counseling, would play a critical role in allowing for healthy
marriages for families in these circumstances.
- Despite significant increases in their hours of work, single parents have not experienced
an improvement in economic conditions, in part because of the high cost of child care.
Much of non-marital childbirth cohort is comprised of cohabiting couples, not single
women living without a partner. Welfare reform itself has encouraged this trend,
increasing economic stress on parents and creating a need to share financial resources,
often with partners who are unwilling or unlikely to marry.
- Hypothetical notions of reducing poverty by promoting the marriage of poor women so
that parents can combine incomes are unlikely to be borne out. Employed men and
women are much more likely to marry partners who themselves have good employment
prospects. Individuals with the most economic barriers such as low educational
attainment, a history of incarceration, or substance abuse, are the least likely to marry.
Marriage stability is also difficult to attain under the stresses of poverty.
- The effect of creating a marriage bonus under TANF would be to impose a "nonmarriage" penalty that would disproportionately impact African-Americans. Programs
designed to encourage marriage should be directed at all families and not just the poor.
They would more appropriately be built into public and private health insurance
coverage, for example, and should focus on a range of family relationships and not just
marriage.
Urban, suburban, rural communities. Urban, suburban, rural communities are often represented
in the media in ways that fail to portray the complexities of these communities. For example,
urban communities or neighborhoods are often portrayed, particularly in television news or
crime shows, as crime-ridden or poverty-stricken, without providing addition contextual
information about the causes of these phenomenon: high unemployment, lack of government
support, or lack of affordable housing. Students could contrast these representations with more
realistic portrayals of contemporary urban worlds in films like Do the Right Thing or Boyz N The
Hood, or documentaries portraying urban worlds:
http://www.frif.com/subjects/urban_st.html
Urban worlds are often very much in transition, particularly in terms of the influx of new
immigrant populations who attempt to settle in urban areas. While television news often
portrays stereotyped perspectives of these immigrants, the Soul of Los Angeles Project
sponsored by the Center for Religion and Civic Education used images to portray a different
portrayal of these immigrants in Los Angeles:
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/religion_online/commonground/
Betti-Sue Hertz and Lydia Yee Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/magazine/bronx.html
My History is Your History: studies of Chicago neighborhoods
http://www.chicagohs.org/DGBPhotoEssay/mhyh.html
Street-Level Youth Media: Chicago youth study their neighborhoods
http://streetlevel.iit.edu/
Webquest: studying an urban neighborhood
http://www.whitney.org/jacoblawrence/resources/webqst_neighborhood_6.html
Radical Urban Theory
http://www.rut.com/
Metropolis Magazine
http://www.metropolismag.com/
The Citistates Group
http://www.citistates.com/
Suburbia is often represented as the idealized, pastoral, tree-lined contrast with urban
worlds. However, these representations fail to capture the variations across and within suburbia,
particularly the fact that many inner-ring suburbs are struggling. Students could examine how
the media represents suburbia in terms of a discourse of “whiteness” as enclaves of “white lives”
with little or no diversity. As Matthew Durington argues
http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~ruby/aaa/matt.html
the portrayal of suburbia as a race-neutral, homogeneous culture could be equated with the
absence of diversity:
This history is reflected in popular culture such as television and film that represented the
suburb as a white space. While the number of films and television shows that have served
this purpose is too many to describe in this paper, both praise-songs of the suburb and
critiques of it continually affirmate its existence as white space. We are not allowed to
witness the contemporary multicultural suburb for what it is. As Silverstone points out,
"the institutionalization of television rested on the "ordinariness" of suburban life in
shows like "Leave it to Beaver" and had the effect of equating the suburb with whiteness
(Silverstone 1997).
This historical representation of the suburb in popular culture established the suburb as
homogenous, white and hence, with an absence of identity. The labeling of whiteness as
an absent identity or a colorless void is highly problematic, because this way of thinking
only naturalizes racism and power (Fusco 1994, hooks 1995). A body of work has
emerged in recent years investigating the notion of "whiteness" in a more critical fashion,
but outside of anthropology this analysis continues to trivialize whiteness through various
cultural reads of films or haphazard linkages to larger social issues and trends.
Although the setting for these accounts of whiteness is often the suburb, a comprehensive
ethnographic analysis of how the suburb is created materially and how white identity is
formed and projected symbolically among its inhabitants is still lacking. This requires a
research methodology that contextualizes the material development of the suburb, the
way that the suburb has been represented in popular culture historically, and the means
by which both of these influence identity formation in this environment.
Representations of suburbia also emphasize elements of open space, a representation that
fails to address issues of sprawl and zoning, issues associated with the destruction of farm land,
environmental degradation, increased congestion, and blighted development. For courses on
surburbia, see the following syllabi:
Judy Gill, Dickenson College:
http://www.dickinson.edu/~gill/images/suburbs.pdf
John Archer, University of Minnesota:
http://cscl.cla.umn.edu/courses/5256/suburbia.html
Steve Macek, Mall of America, Gale Encyclopedia of Popular Culture
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/g1epc/tov/2419100755/p1/article.jhtml
Lots of links on topics related to suburbia:
http://cscl.cla.umn.edu/courses/5256/links.html
Lesson plan: Sprawl: The National and Local Situation
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/12/g912/sprawlnational.html
Many small, rural towns are having difficulty coping with the loss of jobs, the decline of
family farming, and the lack of younger people to support an elderly population.
Representations of rural/small-town communities in films such as The Last Picture Show,
Whatever Happened to Gilbert Grape, Unforgiven, In the Bedroom, and Brother’s Keeper
examine issues such as the conflict between the value of familiar, supportive community ties and
the remoteness, provinciality, and lack of anonymity.
Representations of rural American in the news also paints a relatively stereotypical
portrayal of the issues facing rural America. A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs
and funded by the W.W. Kellogg Foundation examined coverage in 337 stories in major national
newspapers and television networks news over a six-month period from January 1, 2002 to June
30, 2002. 75% of the stories focused on crime. Few stories dealt with issues of agriculture,
despite the major problems facing family farmers. “One out of ten stories that framed rural
America as an economically challenged or socially marginal environment” (p. 2).
Many of the stories, primarily in newspapers, but not television, examined the increasing
urbanization of rural areas through sprawl, but often in terms of rural areas’ resistance to change.
The report notes that:
This news agenda often left implicit the substantive characteristics attached to rural
conditions or lifestyles. In keeping with this emphasis on urbanization, change was often
equated with loss. Most sources who expressed opinions either opposed changes in their
communities or accepted them as inevitable, and almost all predictions of the future were
negative or fearful. (p. 2).
The report noted that rural America was therefore portrayed:
….as a vestige of our past facing an uncertain future, a place being buffeted by its close
encounters with the physical and cultural mainstream of
contemporary urban society. It was not associated with agriculture so much
as open space and the real or imagined qualities of small town living. The
coverage was largely episodic, failing to contextualize events in terms of the broader
qualities or issues associated with rural life. As portrayed in the media, rural America is a
nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t learn
enough to decide whether you wanted to live there. (p. 3).
W. W. Kellogg Foundation Study: Perceptions of Rural America in the Media
http://www.wkkf.org/pubs/FoodRur/MediaCoverage_00253_03795.pdf.
Another key institution shaping rural life is the Wal-Mart discount store. Wal-Mart often
moves to a rural area and uses low prices to undercut stores in small towns, resulting in these
stores closing. They can do this through their low wages paid to largely part-time workers. The
also use advertising campaigns to promote themselves as supporting local communities through
charitable programs and providing jobs in high unemployment areas.
http://www.walmart.com/
Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town: PBS documentary about the experience of a small
Virginia town coping with plans for the development of a new Wal-Mart.
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/
Jim Hightower, “How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World”
http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=12962
Wal-Mart Myths and Realities
http://www.flagstaffactivist.org/campaigns/walmyths.html
Wal-Mart Watch
http://www.walmartwatch.com/
To portray their own representations of these places or spaces, students could create their
own photographic or video representations, producing a montage of images that serve to either
challenge or reaffirm certain prototypical representations of these worlds. For example, in the
Street as Method project, students engaged in writing activities about specific aspects of their
cities. Students were asked to note instances of decline or growth, as well as public places in the
cities and how they functioned to foster a sense of community.
http://www.xcp.bfn.org/streetasmethod1.html
Rachel Klein and Javaid Khan, The New York Times lessons: Reality Film: Creating
Documentaries About Students' Everyday Lives
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20040213friday.html
Rachel Klein and Tanya Chin, Sacred Space: Learning About and Creating Meaningful Public
Spaces (“In this lesson, students consider the two finalists in the Lower Manhattan Development
Corporation's contest for architectural designs for the site of the World Trade Center. Students
then create their own designs for a meaningful public space, then critique each other's designs.”)
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20030207friday.html
Virtual field trips: online explorations of places
Students can engage in studies of place through virtual tours of places. For a book
chapter on setting up and conducting virtual tour, see Bellan & Scheurman, 2001. They discuss
conducting a virtual field trip to Ft. Snelling, Minneapolis, MN:
http://www.mnhs.org/places/sites/hfs/tour/tour.html
Urban Field Trip: Lincoln, Nebraska’s Historic Haymarket
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/gnelson/haymarket.html
2003 Geology Field Trip, Baraboo, Wisconsin
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Geosciences/baraboo_trip_album/index.htm
Virtual tours of lots of sites
http://www.theteachersguide.com/virtualtours.html
Virtual tours: Chicago
http://www.chicagotraveler.com/chicago_virtual_tours.htm
Further reading about place/space in the media:
Bale, John. "Virtual Fandoms; Futurescapes of Football."
http://www.efdeportes.com/efd10/jbale.htm
Carney, G. (Ed.) (1995). Fast Food, Stock Cars, and Rock-n-Roll: Place and Space in
American Pop Culture. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Couldry, N. & McCarthy, A. (Eds.) (2003). MediaSpace: Place, scale and culture in a media
age. New York: Routledge.
Fraim, John. "Battle of Symbols: Space vs. Place"
http://www.symbolism.org/writing/books/bs/place/
Gauntlett, D. (1997). Video Critical: Children, the Environment and Media Power. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Hochman, J. (1998). Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory. Boise:
University of Idaho Press.
Ingram, D. (2000). Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter:
University of Exeter Press.
Lauter, P. (2001). From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American
Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.
MacDonald, S. (2001). The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about
Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Martin, D. G. (2000). Constructing place: Cultural hegemonies and media images of an innercity neighborhood. Urban Geography 21(5), 380-405.
Morley, D. (2000). Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge.
O'Neill, E. "The Dichotomy of Place and Non-Place in You've Got Mail."
http://www.brynmawr.edu/hart/oneill/299/g_1.pdf
Owens, L. (1997). Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press.
Rosembaum, J. (1995). Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Zonn, L. (Ed). (2000). Place Images in the Media: A Geographical Appraisal. New York:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Links related to studying place/space
Megasite: lots of links on place/space
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~janzb/place/geography.htm
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (extensive bibliography):
http://english.ohio-state.edu/organizations/asle/
Center for American Places
http://www.americanplaces.org/intro.html
City Lore; Placematters
http://www.placematters.net/
Sense of Place
http://www.carts.org/
Place Matters Project
http://www.placematters.net/
Literature and Place site
http://www.literatureandplace.org.uk/project.htm/project.htm
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
http://www.asle.umn.edu/
ARC Place Research Network
http://www.utas.edu.au/placenet/
Pedagogy of Place Guide
www.uky.edu/RGS/AppalCenter/publications/ docs/Pedagogy-of-Place.pdf
Geo-literacy: Forging New Ground
http://glef.org/php/article.php?id=Art_1042&key=037
Document Durham: Neighborhood Projects
http://cds.aas.duke.edu/docprojects/durham/ek_powe.html
Exploring Your Community (grades 6-8)
http://school.discovery.com/lessonplans/programs/harlemdiary/
Lesson Plans: Studying Places/Spaces
Sacred Space: Learning About and Creating Meaningful Public Spaces
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20030207friday.html
Perception of Place
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/04/g912/place.html
The Evolution of Cultural Landscape
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/06/g912/cultural.html
Explore the Spatial Patterns of Your Hometown
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/03/g68/hometown.html
Cultural Symbols and the Characteristics of Place
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/06/g68/symbols.html
School Space: An Analysis of Map Perceptions
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/02/g68/space.html
There's No Place Like Home: Examining Tourism and Cultural Opportunities in Your State
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20011105monday.html?pagewanted=all
Places in the West
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/places/
Spaces and Places (younger students)
http://www.getty.edu/artsednet/resources/Sampler/b.html
War. Media representations of war are often mediated by how those in power want the public to
perceive a war. Governments may use propaganda techniques to sway the public to support
war, as was the case with anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi propaganda films during World War II.
However, the realities of war can often challenge official government versions, as was the case
in the Vietnam War, in which television pictures of the grim aspects of war influenced public
policy about that war.
While Mathew Brady’s photos of the Civil War portrayed the realities of that war, some
of the first motion pictures of a war occurred with the Spanish American War:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/collections/saw/sawintro.html
During the Gulf War, war was represented as what Garber, Matlock, and Walkowitz
(1993) describe as a “media spectacle”—a nonstop, dramatic portrayal of bombs hitting targets
and troops moving about in the dessert. This more anesthetic portrayal of war without shots of
dying soldiers and civilians served to position audiences in a more detached stance than was the
case with the Vietnam War. More, the dramatic “spectacle” element of the portrayal framed war
more in terms of a dramatic conflict between good versus evil. And, as with the case with other
“media spectacles,” these portrayals served to benefit the ratings of cable network news such as
CNN.
Douglas Kellner, “Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle”
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/medculturespectacle.html
In some cases, as in the Bosnian War, the media represents war in terms of conflicts
evolving out of long-term ethnic/racial or religious hatred, representations that ignore the
institutional or political agendas of certain actors (Allen & Seaton, 1999).
Then, during the Iraq War, to counter-act charges of media control and censorship during
the Gulf War, the U.S. military employed “embedded reporters.” However, these “embedded
reporters” could then themselves be controlled by the unit commanders in which they served, as
opposed to independent reporters who were not controlled by the military.
Douglas Kellner, “The Persian Gulf TV War Revisited”
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/gulfwarrevisited.htm
Media representations and the Iraq War
http://eserver.org/bs/63/rahimi.html
Iraq Journal: alternative, human images of the Iraq War
http://www.iraqjournal.org/photo/index.html
Polly Kellogg, Drawing on History to Challenge the War, Rethinking Schools
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/cgibin/hse/HomepageSearchEngine.cgi?url=http://www.rethinkingschools.org/war/ideas/draw173.
shtml;geturl=d+highlightmatches+gotofirstmatch;terms=media;enc=media;utf8=on;noparts#fi
rstmatch
Thus, a major part of waging contemporary war involves managing the public relations
and media representations of a war in ways that serve governments’ interests, as opposed to
informing the public about interests and perspectives that challenge governments’ interests
(Thussu & Freedman, 2003).
Donna Spalding Andréolle, Media Representations of "the Story of 9-11"
and the Reconstruction of the American Cultural Imagination
http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic23/andrea/3_2003.html
And, different films represent war in different ways, with some glorifying war in terms of
“winning great victories,” and others portraying more realistic aspects of war in terms of the
grim realities of death and destruction.
Monbiot, G. (2002). Both saviour and victim: Black Hawk Down creates a new and dangerous
myth of American nationhood,” The Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,641062,00.html
Christopher Wisniewski, “The Spectacular War”
http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2002-09-17-spectacularwar.shtml
An extensive filmography of war films
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Warfilm.html#Propaganda
Instructional unit: Images at War (Civil War and World War II)
http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=273
Film Education: History and Film: representations of World War II
http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/concept/film-hist/docs/hist3.html
Film Education: Violence within Context & Genre
http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/Censorship/main_2.html
Exploring The Sound of Music (exploring the role of Maria von Trapp in World War II)
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/content/2491/
Political media representations. Political parties, think tanks, and interest groups use the media
to promote their agendas. They represent their candidates and policies through television ads,
press releases, and promotional materials in ways that will appeal to and gain the identification
of their targeted constituencies. They use discourses and cultural models that not only appeal to
these constituencies, but to also create new ways of framing public policy. For example,
conservative and neo-liberal politicians have employed a discourse of an intrusive, bloated “big
government” to justify reductions in taxes and in government social services. These discourse
and cultural models draw on narrative versions of history to portray the role of the government in
quite different ways. Fred Block (2002) describes the narrative employed by conservatives
beginning with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s:
The United States was once a great nation with people who lived by a moral creed that
that emphasized piety, hard work, thrift, sexual restraint and self-reliance, but there came
a time in the 1960s when we abandoned those values. We came instead to rely on big
government to solve our problems, to imagine that abortion, homosexuality and the
pursuit of sexual pleasure were OK, and to believe that God had died and that religion
should play no role in our public life. According to this narrative, only a systematic
effort to restore the old values—to reduce the role of government, lower taxes, restore the
central role of religion and piety in public life, and renew our commitment to sexual
restraint and traditional morality (p. 20).
This narrative is supported by a strict-father morality—the belief that people behave only
when they fear serious sanctions…. As a political doctrine, it translates into support for
capital punishment and other tough anticrime measures, opposition to welfare spending,
reduced government taxation and economic regulation, and finally, a strong national
defense so that any enemies can be punished appropriately (p. 20).
Block describes an alternative liberal narrative as reflecting a different version of the
same events:
Starting with the New Deal and continuing into the 1960s, Americans realized that to
have prosperity, they needed to place restraints on the pursuit of self-interest. The lesson
of the stock-market boom in the 1920s and the crash and Depression that followed could
not be clearer. When the market is left unregulated and the zealous pursuit of selfinterest is elevated over everything, the results are catastrophic. But as memories of the
1930s faded, conservative intellectuals sought to expunge these important lessons from
out collective memory. Religious and economic conservatives together sold Americans
the snake oil remedy of untrammeled free markets and the glorification of “greed is
good.” Since Americans are a decent people, this dismal brew of bad morals and bad
economics had little immediate effective. But over twenty-five years, the consequence
has been a collapse of our business morality (p. 21).
Students could examine these political cultural models or discourses as evident in
representations of social issues by both conservatives and liberals on web sites for the:
Christian Coalition:
http://www.cc.org/
Republican Party;
http://www.rnc.org/
Democratic Party:
http://www.democrats.org/
Green Party:
http://www.greenpartyus.org/
Media and American Democracy Program: Analyzing television political ads
http://www.med.sc.edu:1081/tvspots.htm
George Mason University: research links for analyzing media coverage of politics
http://mason.gmu.edu/~skeeter/resource.htm#Research%20Methods%20and%20Data%20Sites
Project Vote Smart: polling data links for analyzing public political opinion
http://www.vote-smart.org/resource_political_resources.php?category=Polling%20Sources
A leading media critic, Noam Chomsky, argues that because much of the mainstream
media is owned by corporate conglomerates (see Module 10), the media’s representations of
political issues often reflects these corporate interests (Chomsky, 2002), excluding concerns of
those with less economic power. For example, issues of welfare reform are framed in negative
terms of people’s unfortunate dependency on the government, reflecting corporations
unwillingness to pay taxes to support such programs, while corporation tax subsidy programs
receive little attention (Chomsky, 2002).
Chomsky Archives
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm
Journalists who are frustrated with their difficulty in reporting certain aspects of the news
often turn to Blogs to share their “insider” perspectives on news events, reflecting a different
representation of those events than found in official new sources. Students could go onto Blogs
operated by or that include journalists to gain their perspective on the news.
Webquest: Judith Cramer, Teachers College, Columbia University: To Blog or Not to Blog
http://www.columbia.edu/~jc1427/BlogQuest.html
Webquests/units on politics and the media:
Webquest: Sociology Bytes Politics (it's 2060 and the old political parties have been replaced.
The forces driving the new political parties come from different schools of sociological thought.
You, the experts in sociological theory, have been selected by the three party candidates to
generate their press releases as they relate to the major topics of the day.)
http://coe.west.asu.edu/students/rkamper/intro.htm
Webquest: Joe Braunwarth, News Media Webquest
http://www.grossmont.edu/joe.braunwarth/POSC120/120assts/mediaprobs.htm
Webquest: Cynthia Kirkeby, Watergate: The Role of Press in Politics
http://www.classbrain.com/artmovies/publish/article_10.shtml
Unit: Rachel Klein and Javaid Khan, The New York Times lessons: Tabloid Traditions:
Examining the Relationship Between Supermarket Tabloids and United States History
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20030822friday.html
For further reading on politics and the media:
Adler, R. (2001). Canaries in the mineshaft: Essays on politics and media. Boston: St. Martin’s
Press.
Bennett, W. L., & Entman, R. (Eds.). (2000). Mediated politics: Communication in the future of
democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, R. (2000). The press and American politics: The new mediator. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
Fallows, J. (1997). Breaking the news: How the media undermine American democracy. New
York: Vintage.
Giroux, H. (2002). Breaking in to the movies: Film and the culture of politics. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Goldstein, K., & Strach, P. (2003). The medium and the message: Television advertising and
American elections. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Graver, D. (2001). Mass Media and American Politics. New York: CQ Press.
Jamieson, K., & Campbell, K. (2000). The interplay of influence: News, advertising, politics,
and the mass media. New York: Wadsworth.
Kolko, B. (Ed.). (2003). Virtual publics: Policy and community in an electronic age. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Kuypers, J. (2002). Press bias and politics: How the media frame controversial issues. New
York: Praeger.
McChesney, R. (1998). Rich media, Poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times.
Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Sachlebe, M., Yenerall, K., & Schultz, D. (Eds.). (2004). Seeing the bigger picture:
Understanding politics through film & television. New York: Peter Lang.
Stempel, G. (2003). Media and politics in America: A reference handbook. New York:
ABC/CLIO.
Street, J. (2001). Mass media, politics and democracy. New York: Palgrave.
Summary
In summary, by examining media representations, students are learning to interrogate the
ways in which the media constructs versions of reality that shape their lives and identities. In
doing so, they are learning to recognize the power of media representations to go beyond simply
mirroring cultural practices to actually create cultural practices and ways of thinking, just as
“reality TV” has created a new, mediated-form of “reality.” By critiquing the functions of these
representations as reflecting certain economic and ideological agendas, students may then learn
how media institutions attempt to shape public policy (see also the role of think-tanks in Module
10). And, by creating their own alternative representations through media productions, students
explore alternative, transformative ways of perceiving the world.
Instructional Activity
Teachers could create a webquest based on analysis of media representation of a
particular phenomena, group, world, institution, or profession.
1. Select a particular phenomena, group, world, institution, or profession.
2. Find some websites with material containing examples of images, sound/music,
intertextuality, language, and techniques that serve to represent this phenomena, group,
world, institution, or profession in a certain manner.
3. Determine what you want your students to learn from some activities designed to foster
their critical analysis of the media representations of this phenomena, group, world,
institution, or profession.
4. Write out a list of guided activities that will help students learn to critically analyze the
ways in which the media represents this phenomena, group, world, institution, or
profession.
5. Using Filamentality, Trackstar, or some other webquest-design tool, develop a webquest
For further reading on media representations:
Alvermann, D.E., Moon, J.S., & Hagood, M.C. (1999). Popular culture in the classroom:
Teaching and researching critical media literacy. Newark, DE: International Reading
Association.
Andersen, R., & Strate, L. (Eds.). (2000). Critical studies in media commercialism. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Beynon, J. (2002). Masculinities and culture. London: Open University Press.
Bernardi, D. (Ed.) (1996). The birth of Whiteness: Race and the emergence of U.S. cinema.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Branston, G., & Stafford, R. (2003). The media student's book. New York: Routledge.
Buckley, C., & Fawcett, H. (2002). Fashioning the feminine: Representation and women's
fashion from the Fin De Si·cle to the present. New York: I.B. Tauris.
Burt, R. (Ed.). (2002). Shakespeare after mass media. New York: Palgrave.
Chermak, S., Bailey, F., & Brown, M. (2003). Media representations of September 11. New
York: Praeger.
Clark, L. (2003). From angels to aliens: Teenagers, the media, and the supernatural. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Considine, D.M., & Haley, G.E. (1999). Visual messages: Integrating imagery into instruction
(2nd ed.). Englewood, CO: Teacher Ideas Press.
Curran, J., & Gurevitch, M. (Eds.). (2000). Mass media and society. London: Arnold.
De Graff, J, Wann, D., Naylor, T., Horsey, D. (2002).
Affluenza: The all-consuming epidemic. New York: Berrett-Koehler.
Denzin, N. (2002). Reading race : Hollywood and the cinema of racial violence. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Dyson, A.H. (1997). Writing superheroes: Contemporary childhood, popular culture and
classroom literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
Frank, T. (1998). The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip
consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Frank, T. (2001). One market under God: Extreme capitalism, market populism, and the end of
economic democracy. New York: Anchor.
Gal, S., & Kligman, G. (Eds.). (2000). Reproducing gender. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Ginsburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., & Larkin, B. (Eds.). (2003). Media worlds: Anthropology on
new terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Outlaw culture: Resisting representations. New York: Routledge.
Kellner, D. (1999). Media Literacies and Critical Pedagogy in a Multicultural Society
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/newDK/medlit.htm
Klein, N. (2002). No logo: No space, no choice, no jobs. New York: Picador.
Mason, P. (Ed.) (2004). Criminal visions: Media representations of crime and justice. New
York: Millan Publishing.
McLaron, P., Hammer, R., Sholle, D., & Reilly, S. (1995). Rethinking media literacy: A critical
pedagogy of representation. New York: Peter Lang.
Mirzoeff, N. (2002). The visual culture reader. New York: Routledge.
Morley, D. (2000). Home territories: Media, mobility and identity. New York: Routledge.
Perrine, T. (1997). Film and the nuclear age: Representing cultural anxiety. New York:
Garland.
Quart, A. (2003). Branded: The buying and selling of teenagers. New York: Perseus.
Roediger, D. (1999). The wages of Whiteness: Race and the making of the American working
class. New York: Verso.
Said, E. (1997). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts determine how we see the rest
of the world. New York: Vintage.
Semali, L. (Ed.). (2002). Transmediation in the classroom: A semiotics-based media literacy
framework. New York: Teachers College Press.
Spretnak, C. (1997). The resurgence of the real: body, nature, and place in a hypermodern
world. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley
Steinberg. S., & Kincheloe, J. (Eds.). (1997). Kinderculture: The corporate construction of
childhood. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Torres, S. (2003). Black, white, and in color: Television and Black civil rights. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Whannel, G. (2001). Media sport stars: Masculinities and moralities. New York: Routledge.
Williams, L. (2002). Playing the race card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to
O. J. Simpson. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, L. (1999). The wired church: Making media ministry. New York: Abington.
References
Allen, T. & Seaton, J. (Eds.). (1999). The media of conflict: War reporting and representations
of ethnic violence. New York: Zed Books
Beach, R., & Myers, J. (2001). Inquiry-based English instruction: Engaging students in
literature and life. New York: Teachers College Press.
Bellah, R. et al. (1996). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bellan, J., & Scheurman, G. (2001). Actual and virtual reality: Making the most of field trips.
Stevens, R. (Ed.). (2001). Homespun: Teaching local history in grades 6-12. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Block, F. (2002). The right’s moral trouble. The Nation, 275(10), 20-22.
Christenson, P., & Roberts, D. (1998). It’s not only rock and roll: Popular music in the lives of
adolescents. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Chomsky, N. (2002). Media control: The spectacular achievements of propaganda. New
York: Seven Stories Press
Crowe, C. (1994). The coach in YA literature: Mentor or dementor. ALAN Review, 22, 47-50.
Entman, R., & Rejecki, A. (2000). The Black image in the White mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Frank, T. (2004). Lie down for America: How the Republican Party sows ruin on the Great
Plains. Harper’s Magazine, 308(1847), 33-48.
Garber, M., Matlock, J., & Walkowitz, R. (Eds.). (1993). Media spectacles. New York:
Routledge.
Gee, J. P. (2001). Reading as situated language: A sociocognitive perspective. Journal of
Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 44, 714-725.
Hainsworth, G. (1998). Tinsel Town Teachers. Teacher.
Hall, S., ed. (1997). Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
hooks, bell. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters. New York: Routledge.
Gray, H. (1997). Watching race: Television and the struggle for "Blackness." Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Grindstaff, L. (2002). The money shot: Trash, class, and the making of TV talk shows. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
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Teaching Activities: Media Representations (developed by students in CI5472, Spring, 2004)
Tom Deshotels and Josh Wetjen
One possibility to encourage critical analysis of media in students is to have students produce an
ad or short scene that portrays a social group in typical or atypical ways. You would need
cameras available in class for student groups wanting to make a short film. What colors would
they use? What camera angles would they shoot from? What relationship will subjects in the shot
have to one another? How would they position different people in the ad? When students become
responsible for portraying a certain group in a certain way through media, they will inevitably
have to ask themselves how to communicate that information. When they inquire about these
techniques they will gain understanding about media production and reflection of social
identities. The teacher could assign stereotypical roles of people groups to different student work
who would have to produce a media artifact for class affecting the assigned stereotypical
reading.
Beth O'Hara and Mary Hagen
In studying media representations in my high school class, I would get the students thinking
about how they are represented by reading portions of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak,
specifically the paragraph that reads:
"We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste,
Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians,
Goths, Shredders."
I would ask them to look at the various social divisions that their particular high school places
them in, tell them of the divisions in my high school, eons ago: Brains, Jocks, Nerds,
Cheerleaders, Potheads, Lushes, Populars. We could discuss if those divisions were hard and fast
or if there was room for movement from group to group, if they liked being in those groups, what
they gained from membership in one or the other. And then we would move to viewing and
discussing how teenagers are represented in the media, in movies such as The Breakfast Club,
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, in television shows such as Boston Public, Joan of Arcadia, and MTV,
and in advertisements, magazines, and on the web. I would have the students split into groups to
study a particular way in which they are represented, ask them to challenge those representations,
give reasons why those representations may or may not be accurate, have them act out what they
have found. We could expand the study to other aspects of their high school lives, look at
teachers, principals, secretaries, lunchroom and janitorial staff, bus drivers, coaches, parents and
how they are represented, how they are "supposed" to be.
Erin Warren and Erin Grahmann
The main idea behind this set of activities is to examine the ways in which "bosses" (i.e.
authority in the workplace) are portrayed in media--TV and movies specifically. We chose five
(but feel free to pick more, less, or different ones): Mr. Burns from the Simpsons, Jack Gallo
from Just Shoot Me, Mr. Lumbergh from Office Space, Mr. Peterman from Seinfeld, and Mr.
Strickland from King of the Hill.
Start by showing clips of these bosses in action to set the stage. Form groups based on interest.
The groups analyze salient characteristics and representations of these different bosses. Each
group roleplays these bosses using their findings. Groups split and students reflect in a
journal/freewrite about a real boss they have known. The activities culminate in a discussion
comparing students' real bosses to the media representations. What are the similarities?
Differences? Were student responses influenced by the media examples? How so? To the point:
is your bias informed by media? How about a feminist lens: why are these bosses all wealthy
white men?
Reid Westrem and Brock Dubbels
In Chapter Two of Seeing and Believing, Krueger and Christel mention the use of
photojournalism in the classroom. Here's a sketch of a teaching activity that would blend
photojournalism and media representations. Consider the "Politician" or "Presidential Candidate"
as represented in news photographs. There will be plenty of opportunity to do so this campaign
season. In class, students could discuss their associations with this type and describe the sort of
campaign photographs they would expect to see in newspapers during the campaign.
At home they would browse news websites for political photographs -- individual newspapers
such as the StarTribune and The New York Times typically have links on their homepages either
to special campaign pages or to daily photo collections. Also, the Associated Press website
would be an excellent source for news photographs. In fact, the AP wire would show what most
editors can choose from in producing the next day's paper. Each student should print a few
campaign photos and present them with commentary in small groups the next day. What images
are being portrayed? How? What character traits are communicated? What are the candidates
doing? What are they wearing? Are the photos seemingly "candid" and natural or do they seem
to be staged "photo opportunities" -- and is it possible to tell? With whom are they pictured?
How are the photos framed? Is there any evidence of bias? For example, is one candidate shown
consistently as "friendly" or "strong," while another is shown as "goofy" or "awkward" or
"angry" or "unpresidential" ... and what is "presidential" anyway? (A body-language analyst
recently claimed that Gov. Dean was often shown looking angry, while Sen. Edwards has been
portrayed looking friendly. Is it the man or the photograph?)
Next, students should track the photos chosen by different newspapers (StarTribune,
PioneerPress, USA Today, NY Times). Do they find any patterns? Obvioiusly, satirists such as
Jay Leno and the Saturday Night Live news anchors pick the photos of candidates that make
them look stupid -- but are newspapers ever guilty of doing this? One can't fairly judge editorial
decisions unless one knows what the possible choices were, and thanks to the internet the
average person now has quite a bit of access to that larger pool of photos (and news stories).
Kevin Lally
There may be several ways to approach this thread. The most ready would be to have the
students compile lists of associations to different target audiences (adult female, white upper
class, etc). They would then study various (it could be any really) media to find their personal
stereotypes played out in the shows and advertising. The students could also search for media
figures that do not fall into their stereotypical categories and attempt to discover why. The
conversation must then flow into the source of our stereotypes and how they can be manipulative
and potentially damaging. The students must be able to consider this topic fully and maturely,
which in my experience leaves grades 7, 8, 11, 12 and above. It would perhaps be best suited to a
college pop culture class.
Adam Banse and Dan Gough: Media Awareness: Cartoons -- The British guy and the California kid
We would have our class look at the representation of race and gender in cartoons and comic
strips. Dan and I remember racist images of Native Americans, Blacks and Asians in cartoons we
saw as kids and while they are not as overt in today's animated media they are still present (for
example, the misogyny in Beetle Bailey and Blondie, for example).
Then (we're getting ambitious here), we would have them look at cartoons and comic strips from
other countries, such as Japan, France, Great Britain and Mexico, and look for ways in which
these cultures show representations of race and gender.
Rebecca Robertson and Louise Covert
“Examining media representations involves identifying the specific ways in which media uses images,
language, and techniques to construct a version of reality associated with a particular phenomena, gro
world, institution, or profession? (CI 5472 course module 5).”
We decided to apply this to her 8th grade students’ exploration of Romeo and Juliet (both as a
written and film text).
We chose to ask students to more deliberately look at the socio-economic background of each
family (Montague and Capulet). The 8th grade students were asked to:
- Identify indicators of each family’s social status and wealth as such is evident in both the text
and film.
- Speculate in what ways the social and economic status of these families bears on how the
characters are portrayed, the plot unfolds, and the setting, for instance.
Here are some examples of the kinds of questions students were asked to think [and write] about,
pair with one other student and talk about, and then come together as a larger group and discuss
(the “Think, Pair, Share” process for metacognition).
After reading Act I of the play and seeing several scenes from the film, you now know a lot
about both the Capulet and the Montague families.
Respond to the following questions:
1. Based on the play, how do you know that the Capulets and the Montagues are wealthy? Give
some examples from the text to support your answer.
2. Based on the film, how do you know that the Capulets and the Montagues are wealthy? Give
some examples to support your answer.
3. How would the story be different if they were not wealthy? How does family wealth change
the outcome of a person?s life?
4. How do you think the wealth of these two families affects the ways that the parents and
Romeo and Juliet interact and treat one another?
Here are some of the responses from student writing/discussion:
In response to evidence of wealth from the text, many students noticed these characteristics that
they associate with socio/economic status:
- The two families had servants.
- Characters were called ?Lord and Lady.?
- The way the characters spoke,
- The description of the Capulet?s party.
- The two families had such hostility between them that it must be over money.
In response to evidence of wealth from the film, they had more specific examples:
- The limousines, the fancy weapons (?with their names engraved on them?), The clothing that
the characters wear,
- The two tall buildings with the family names on top of them (in the new version of the film),
- The Capulet mansion at the party.
The third question had some interesting responses, too. When asked about how wealth changes
the story, or changes a person’s life, they came up with the following responses:
- The story would not have happened if they weren’t wealthy, because parents wouldn’t be as
concerned about who their children were marrying, they would just want their children to be
happy.
- And finally, Prince Escalus probably let them go, giving them another warning after their street
brawls, because they were wealthy.
From here, it is interesting to explore some of the assumptions about wealth and influence and
how the film reinforces Western values and beliefs about money, power, and its connection to
social status.
One can assess the kinds of observations and understanding that students have about the text’s
context, characters, plot, and culture from their responses.
One can learn more about his/her students’ conceptualizations of socio/economic differences at
this time in their lives.
One can learn more about his/her students’ values and beliefs surrounding these aspects of
contemporary culture as well as students’ views of the text’s cultural perspective.
Jessica Dockter and Rachel Godlewski
We like the idea of having students first analyze their own stereotypes of certain groups, and
then asking them to analyze where their own assumptions may have come from. For example,
you could ask students to list adjectives to describe athletes. Strong, determined, competitive,
etc. Then, you could have students place their words into gendered categories -- are some words
used more often to describe men or women? An interesting discussion could follow about why
adjectives to describe athletes are particularly male words. Then, you could have the students
look at ads that feature male and female athletes. Ask: How do they differ? How are they
similar? Do you find gendered words (again, list the adjectives)? How do these words help sell
athletic products? What assumptions do the ads rely upon? What representations are left out (can
you be feminine and an athlete)? Which ads go against stereotypes to sell their products -- like
the Just Do It ads for women.
It might also be interesting to look at where the ads are coming from (which magazines have
more stereotypical ads and which have more ads going against the gendered view of athletes).
Students could discuss how the intended audience helps to perpetuate or change the stereotypes.
(It's possible that sports magazines marketed for women would either try to encourage women to
adopt adjectives that have generally been used for men, or would challenge the stereotypes.)
Finally, students could create their own athletic ads based on the ideas discussed. Their ads may
include those representations that have been overlooked or may go against the stereotypes
perpetuated in the ads shared in class.
Jennifer Larson
My idea relates to the film October Sky, which I show to my classes in the unit where we study
archetypes. I’m interested in having students look at the “master narrative” for children in the
film, who live in a coal mining town and the “master narrative” that other children follow—that
of progress and working hard to get to college to be whatever they want to be.
Before watching the film I would like students to brainstorm their own master narratives: what
life plans are generally laid out for them and how those plans will become real (that is, what
resources are at their or their parents? disposal that allow those plans to be realized). We’ll also
discuss the freedom they feel they may or may not have to work against those plans—in other
words, can they reject the master narrative? Why would they want to? Why wouldn’t they? Why
would they be able to? Why wouldn’t they?
Next we’ll watch the film. I’ll assign each student to try to define the master narrative for
students in the town of Coalwood and assign different pairs to watch for how particular students
follow or reject the master narrative, using the same questions we discussed for the students
themselves. We will discuss the findings of each pair after the film.
My goal is not to show students how much harder these children of blue collar workers have it
than my students do, who are generally middle class offspring of white collar workers. I want
students to recognize how hard it is for anyone to reject the master narrative that society writes
for them and to identify what allowed these children (who didn’t have financial resources) to do
so.
Meghan Scott and Megan Dwyer-Gaffey
Teaching Media Representations of Sexual Orientation
We would do a unit on “The Other” in our society, which includes racial, religious, gender, and
sexual preference minorities. During the portion on sexual preference, we will begin by
discussing stereotypes of GLBT and straight people. We will talk about how language constructs
the different stereotypes and how they inform our ideas about what sexual orientation is.
We will show different advertising and media examples of these stereotypes, then ask the
students to bring in clips of TV shows or movies that portray the stereotypes or challenges to the
stereotypes that we have been learning about, and we will discuss each clip.
Adrien Everest
My class would do a session on Media Representations of Gender, specifically the advertising
that affects high school youth. I would show various video clips from Killing Us Softly (1,2,3)
which mainly show modern female representations in comparison to male representations.
An activity that I would like my class to do is compare these differing gender representations for
their ages. They could use clips from tv shows or movies to make an Imovie/slideshow; or they
could cut out clips of advertisements in youth centered magazines: YM, Seventeen, Teen, Teen
People. In a collage they could show the different aspects that men and women hold in
advertising. They could make their own decision on the representation of gender in these
advertisements. By combining only the media's representation of gender, students could see what
the media is trying to make them feel and how they should react to that with their own thoughts.
Amy Gustafson and Kathy Connors
We think that in studying media representations of social worlds, focusing on the family could
give way to many different activities. WE believe that it would be beneficial to bring in many
different representations of "the family" in order to see how the family is represented across
time. These texts could include episodes of television shows such as All in the Family, The
Simpsons, Married with Children, Little House on the Prairie, The Donna Reed Show, The Dick
Van Dyke sShow, The Munsters, etc. You could also bring in photographs of the family in order
to see how each member is positioned in the photograph.
After viewing these different texts, it would be valuable to discuss the representations of family
across time. Have the representations changed? If so, how? Are they truly different or has little
progress been made?
One activity that could add onto this discussion is to have your students make a representation of
their family. They could use cutouts of different television show characters to portray each
family member. They could bring in actual photographs of their family and write descriptions of
each of the family members. They could discuss how the roles of their family members change
when they find themselves in different situations.
Katrina Thomson and Jennie Viland
Magazine ads provide a great opportunity for students to critically analyze media
representations. In our activity, we would provide students with a range of magazine ads, some
specifically targeted at males, and some at female audiences. As much as possible, we would
choose ads that are for similar products, and have students look at how products are represented
for their different audiences. For example, how are cars sold differently to women vs. men?
What assumptions do these ads make about their audiences and how do they position the reader
to respond to the message? How do these ads contribute to the construction of the target
audience's beliefs and attitudes towards their "need" or desire for these products? As a final
exercise, have students individually, or in pairs, manipulate the language or approach in their ad
to "sell" the same product to an audience of the opposite sex from that intended in the original.
Kari Gladen and Katie Schultz
We would divide the class into groups of 3-4 and have them look at how they (teenagers) are
represented in the different types of media: TV, movies, music, magazines, etc. Each group
would then choose one media type to focus on and work to produce a critical media analysis
"station" presenting their findings. These stations would be viewed by their classmates in a
poster session. After viewing all of the stations, we could, as a class or in small groups, discuss
what these representations mean to them and to the formation of their identity.
Kimberly Sy and Tammy McCartney
After studying different representations of different groups of people or phenomena (women,
men, adolescents), students might further their inquiry by finding out where certain
representations are most prevalent. In other words, students can examine which audiences tend to
see which representations.
1. Pick a group (ex-women) and list some common representations portrayed in the media (exhomemaker, sexual object).
2. Choose several magazines intended for different audiences (Good Housekeeping,
Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic Monthly).
3. Have students leaf through the magazine and keep a running tally of how many times the
group is represented in each of the ways.
4. Discuss why certain audiences are targeted through showing them in terms of predominantly
one image of a group.
5. Choose another group and go through the same magazines. What is the effect of a combination of ce
representations for a variety of groups? (For example, women portrayed provocatively while men are
portrayed dominantly)
Jodi Laframboise and Lindsay Kroog
Teaching critical analysis as a unit, I am thinking of breaking it down into different mini-lessons.
One lesson might feature on-line advertisements. The culminating activity, once having exposed
the students to the purpose and reason of being critical thinkers of media, would have students
create PowerPoint/Keynote presentations featuring 5 ad's they have selected having strong
messages. The students would identify what type of discourse/message is present, adding their
personal opinion regarding the ad's effectiveness. This could extend to magazine, television, and
newspaper advertisements, not to mention television shows and movies.
Dixie Boschee and Anne Holmgren
Students work in teams. Each team selects a media representation they want to investigate (e.g.,
race, teens, class, gender, occupations, families, mothers, fathers, etc.). Each group will need to
determine how this type is portrayed in the following formats: (2) films, (2) television shows, (2)
television or radio commercials, (3 total) magazines, newspapers, web sites or books, and (1)
song/music video. The teams then need to determine how accurate the representations are and
who/what are un-represented in them. They can convey this information in a formal essay or
through a PowerPoint presentation.
Mary Hagen and Beth O’Hara
An idea for incorporating film study into the language arts classroom would be to extend the
concept of characterization through the use of film or television. Students already are able to
identify five basic elements to characterization such as what the character looks like, what they
say and how they say it, what others think of them, how they act, and what they like and dislike.
Characterization could be extended by the use of film clips to study how characters are portrayed
using such elements as sound, color, light, and positioning. After careful class examination
students could bring in short 3-5 min. clips to share with the class. Also an option would be to
pass out stereo type characters on index cards to small groups and have them find characters
from different TV shows and movies that portray these types of characters and identify how the
lighting, color, positioning, and sound adds to our impressions of their character and the
differences between them.
Scott Devens
Here's a teaching activity that I still remember from my freshman English composition class at
Winona State University. I'm sharing as I find it an interesting example of integrating media
studies with language arts/writing studies.
As I recall, the assignment was pretty straightforward: pick any advertisement out of a magazine
and then write a five-page paper analyzing the ad. Now, the instructor's main objective was to
assess and teach writing, but I still remember some of the comments she wrote regarding the
thoughts I had expressed in my analysis. (I had chosen an add from an airline company
romanticizing travel and the notion of "going back home" to get in touch with your roots.) Also
easy for instructor to get a sense of which students had developed "voice" in their writing as
assignment involved expressing opinions about media messages.