Introduction to Media Studies Len Masterman, Teaching the Media

Why study the media? The high rate of media consumption and the saturation of contemporary societies by the media The ideological importance of the media, and their influence as consciousness industries The growth in the management and manufacture of information, and its dissemination by the media

Why study the media? 4. The increasing penetration of media into our central democratic processes 5. The increasing importance of visual communication and information in all areas 6. The importance of educating students to meet the demands of the future 7. The fast-growing national and international pressures to privatise information

The media as consciousness industry The media as consciousness industry: shaping our perceptions and ideas about who we are, what we want, which groups we belong to. The commercial mass media: not news backed up by advertisements; „the commercial mass media are advertisements which carry news, features and entertainment in order to capture audiences for advertisers”

The media as consciousness industry „The prime item on the agenda of consciousness industry is producing people… who are ready to support a particular policy, rather than some other policy” „Control over the means of informing people is the basis of political (and commercial) power”; Alfred Sauvy: „the power to build television stations is like the medieval power to build castles along the Rhine”

The media: creating a story „The media tell us what is important and what is trivial by what they take note of and what they ignore, by what is amplified and what is muted or omitted” This questions many people’s common-sense understanding of the media as largely unproblematic purveyors of experience

The media: creating a story Stuart Hall: „The line between preferred and excluded explanations and rationales, between permitted and deviant behaviours, between the „meaningless” and „meaningful”… is ceaselessly drawn and re-drawn According to this approach: the media (represenation) create reality (diff. from simply saying that they lie), does not reflect reality; based on the principle of selection, and putting pieces together, they create a narrative, which viewers interpret. Stuart Hall, Representation

Objectivity Nonetheless, concepts of impartiality and objectivity are (or should be) central to the philosophy of broadcasting institutions. Best way to avoid the accusation of partiality: reflecting on the position one speaks from, the culture and institutions one is embedded in Donna Haraway: objectivity is situated knowledges. i.e.: 1. you have to be self-reflexive, conscious of your own position. 2. you have to acknowledge the existence of other knowledges (using the word in the plural deliberately)

Media studies in secondary schools Wider implications of the importance of the field: the majority of young adults rate television and the Internet as their most important sources of information. They need to be educated to be critical of the images they see; to decipher the ideologies behind „At present schools largely continue to produce pupils who are likely to carry with them for the rest of their lives either a quite unwarranted faith in the integrity of media images and represenations, or an equally dangerous, undifferentiated scepticism which sees the media as sources of all evil”

Ideally: Information should be: Freely available to those who need it (rather than to those who can afford to pay for it) Openly accessible to all (rather than controlled) Generally available as a public service (rather than restricted at the discretion of the large institutions who produce or buy it) Distributed through educational institutions which are acountable to the public (rather than institutions which are accountable to the market place)