Discussion:
· How is the life of Britney Spears represented in the media through the years? What about the ups and the downs? The good vs. the bad times?
· What is representation?
o Definition:
§ “The construction in the mass media on aspects of reality such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other concepts.”
o These representations can be done in speech, writing, stills or moving images.
o How someone is portrayed in the media can affect how people think about him or her.
o Positive portrayal can bring benefits but negative portrayal can cause great harm.
o The media build up celebrities with lots of positive coverage.
o It also has the tendency to knock them: down again when they are caught doing something wrong or because they are out of favor
1. Representing social groups
2. Representing social issues
· What is normal?
o Gender?
o Race?
o Physical Abilities?
§ Beliefs?
§ Religion?
§ Ethnic origin?
§ Location?
§ Sexual Orientation?
Representing social groups
· The media represents social groups in many different ways.
· Sometimes fairly and sometimes not.
· The only way to know how unfair such representations are is to belong to such a group, or to know someone very well who does.
· There is a tendency that people develop attitudes to others through what they see, read and hear in the media
· That is why representation is an important issue for media studies and for media producers
· In many ways, attitudes towards women and ethnic minorities have improved a lot in the past 20 – 30 years.
· Women are not long depicted as housewives…
· No long acceptable to make fun of people just because of the ethnic origins.
Selection and Representation
· You could argue that people are only newsworthy when their lives are disrupted by some very dramatic change to their circumstances – such as when disaster strikes.
· Editors and media producers choose their stories they cover and the material they use to illustrate them.
· It is rare for them to choose ‘good’ news stories from certain parts of the world.
· These are now laws preventing discrimination against people on racial or gender ground, as well as because of any disability they may have
· These are there so that people can have equal opportunities in life-and not discriminated against simply because they come from a minority.
Balance and Bias
· Misrepresenting of issues is not a good thing – which unfortunately – still happens sometimes
· Thus an aspect of regulation that applies to broadcast media (radio and TV) is Impartiality
· This means that media should report issues in a balanced way and must not be biased in any way.
· Unlike broadcast media, the press and multimedia sectors are not regulated in this respect at all
· The owners of newspapers and magazines can decide to use them to support political parties if they wish, and nobody can prevent them from doing so.
Definitions
· Balance is giving equal emphasis to all sides of an argument, so no one side has an advantage over the others
· Bias is slanting the coverage of an argument in order to give one or more sides an advantage over other sides.
· Impartiality is being unbiased
· Propoganda is material designed to persuade people that one or more sides of an argument are correct. This often involves slanting the truth, or selecting only information that promotes on particular cause. Propaganda is often regarded as being misleading or dishonest.
Social issues in the Media
o Stereotypes
o Ethnic groups
o Minors
o Generation gaps
o Discrimination
o Sexual orientation
o Minorities
o Gambling
o Smoking
o Politics
o Privacy
o Violence
o Religion
o Alcohol
No comments:
Post a Comment