I have been busy planning my year 13 lesson on how the media constructs crime and deviance, looking at moral panics, sensationalised headlines, the misuse of quotes. All interesting stuff but it actually made me feel sad and got me reflecting on how much I use the media and its distorted views.
The media is seen by many as the most important agency (after the family) for socialisation. Whilst I think there is a place for cbeebies, and the morals and lessons it teaches preschoolers the print media seems to distort reality.
Take the recent riots in our cities, the 24 hour coverage on sky, the sensational stories and constant coverage helped spread the notion of violence to other cities. The news reports even gave impressionable youngsters the vocabulary to say it was a stance against poverty. It wasn’t by the way as many many families in poverty did not get involved and many that were involved were not in absolute poverty.
The media painted a picture of broken Britain, a society that was lawless, feral and lacking any community. However I have found that community is still strong, but with a sense of irony, another form of media illustrates both the good and bad.
Social media and its online communities offers support and help to others in similar situations. There are numerous parenting forums where experiences are shared. I have been amazed by the generosity of ‘virtual friends’ in some of these forums. For example I need a special car seat for Erin and another family having twice been through spica casts have just given me a carseat that is suitable. I will do the same when we’ve finished this journey but wow what generosity!
Community is not dead, it may have just changed its identity a little. So whilst at the start of this post I was concerned about how the media has influenced us- there are definately postitives to new types of media. In fact it gives me an idea for some post grad research, maybe I should do my masters afterall…..
One Response
Interesting question, but it’s important to remember that ‘the media’ did not emerge to necessarily help society develop, but to report on what was happening, and as it emerged as a business, to sell copies/advertising/audiences on how they reported what was happening.
I wrote a while ago about the idea of Journalism as Impartial, not Neutral ( http://thewayoftheweb.net/2011/07/great-journalism-impartial-but-not-neutral/ ), and I do think that there are many examples of great journalism and reporting that exist, many of which do appear in mainstream media – the issue is that often these are in-depth reports which take time and effort, and often don’t result in simple attention-grabbing headlines, because they tend to reflect the complexity of life, rather than a soundbite which can compete in an era when our attentions are being distracted by information overload.
There are some efforts to change this, and there are some blogs and websites which are more devoted to a less crowd-pleasing approach, but whether they can find enough money to sustain themselves is debatable.
In the case of the riots, I don’t entirely blame individual reporters – there were some doing really interesting work on the ground with only a mobile phone to report on what was happening, or you can check out someone like Andy Carvin on Twitter, aggregating everything that is coming out of the Middle East. But much of the reporting and initial analysis betrayed the fact that the presenters/journalists initially wheeled out didn’t know enough about the subject matter to identify people speaking, and often betrayed their partiality and bias in the way they approached interviews and experts, and that’s how they let everyone down.
The benefit of self-publishing, and more important, the methods for people to discover new sources, means that hopefully quality can rise – the problem being that many people only consume the media to reinforce their own existing perspectives, and therefore settle for something which shouts the same things they believe most loudly.