HCRHS Media Lit

"Below are some ideas, lessons, and resources to use in the classroom. You'll want to adapt them to suit your needs or cater them to meet the ability level of your students."

""A man with a conviction is a hard man to change," Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in When Prophecy Fails, their 1957 book about this study. "Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before." This doubling down in the face of conflicting evidence is a way of reducing the discomfort of dissonance, and is part of a set of behaviors known in the psychology literature as "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is how people convince themselves or remain convinced of what they want to believe-they seek out agreeable information and learn it more easily; and they avoid, ignore, devalue, forget, or argue against information that contradicts their beliefs."

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"Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton."

"The videos demonstrate the process of facilitating group learning about media literacy. Students are prompted to think critically about all media messages by asking questions such as: * Who produced this media message, and for what purpose? * Is the information credible, how would you know? * What techniques were used to communicate this message? * Who might be the target audience? * Who might benefit or be harmed by this message? * How might other people interpret this message differently? As shown in the videos, teachers respond with evidence-based prompts such as: "What makes you say that and where is that shown in the document?" These literacy principles are often preceded by content questions that encourage students to analyze media documents, including: * What are the main messages here about… (fill in the blank)? * What bias or point of view do you see here? * What information is left out of this message and why? Project Look Sharp developed these materials after assessing how some teachers present media documents to illustrate key points rather than to engage students. The videos include running annotations that explain how to conduct discussions about media messages using the constructivist methodology. Teachers will learn how to shift their practices from predominantly delivering facts to engaging students in rigorous analysis, application of key knowledge, and reflection on their understanding of the mediated world they live in."

"Nearly 30 years before President Trump's press gaggle last Friday, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman authored '"Manufacturing Consent", a book that radically redefined mass media's relationship with the state.  Now, in the age of fake news and alt facts, Democracy Now! co-founder Amy Goodman and animator Pierangelo Pirak have teamed up to give new life to the world renowned linguist and media analyst's famed work. "

"Last month, a headline at Paste Magazine asked: "Did Neil Postman Predict the Rise of Trump and Fake News?" Sign up to the new-look Media Briefing: bigger, better, brighter Read more Colleagues and former students of my father, who taught at New York University for more than 40 years and who died in 2003, would now and then email or Facebook message me, after the latest Trumpian theatrics, wondering, "What would Neil think?" or noting glumly, "Your dad nailed it." The central argument of Amusing Ourselves is simple: there were two landmark dystopian novels written by brilliant British cultural critics - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell - and we Americans had mistakenly feared and obsessed over the vision portrayed in the latter book (an information-censoring, movement-restricting, individuality-emaciating state) rather than the former (a technology-sedating, consumption-engorging, instant-gratifying bubble)."

"That itch to glance at our phone is a natural reaction to apps and websites engineered to get us scrolling as frequently as possible. The attention economy, which showers profits on companies that seize our focus, has kicked off what Harris calls a "race to the bottom of the brain stem." "You could say that it's my responsibility" to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, he explains, "but that's not acknowledging that there's a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain." In short, we've lost control of our relationship with technology because technology has become better at controlling us."

"Donald Trump is a media virus, in the truest sense of the term. I should know. I'm the guy who came up with the notion of a "viral media" back in 1994 when I coined the term for my book Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. Back then, I was using the expression less as a metaphor than as functional description for the way ideas could spread in our newly interactive mediaspace, which suddenly included fax machines, camcorders, cable TV, email, and a budding World Wide Web. The message in our media come to us packaged as Trojan horses. They enter our homes in one form, but behave in a very different way than we expect once they are inside. This is not so much a conspiracy against the viewing public as it is a method for getting the mainstream media to unwittingly promote countercultural agendas that can actually empower the individuals who are exposed to them. One of the first examples: A black man gets beaten by white cops in 1991 Los Angeles. The event is captured on a camcorder, and the infamous "Rodney King tape" spreads across the world via cable news, overnight."

"Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive"

"In order to deconstruct the image, let's focus on three key elements (leaving aside the placement of the 'M' in 'Time' that makes it look like Trump has red horns): the color, the pose, and the chair:"

"Will Smith from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was my first American friend. Ours was an unlikely friendship: a shy Indian kid, fresh off the boat, with big glasses and a thick accent, and a high school b-ball player from West Philadelphia, chillin' out maxin' and relaxin' all cool. And yet, I was with Will all the way, unnerved when he accidentally gave Carlton speed, shaken when he got shot in Season 5, and deeply embarrassed every time he wiped out in front of Veronica. Psychologists say it's not uncommon to think of fictional characters as your friends. They call these attachments parasocial relationships, and a growing body of research suggests there may be more to these connections than we realize. It turns out that as we grow emotionally attached to characters who are part of a minority group, our prejudices tend to recede."

"An introductory assignment may ask students to think about representations of different social groups in the fictional TV shows, films and books that have shaped their lives. For example, at the beginning of the semester, I will give students an assignment titled "The Stories in Your Life" with the following list, and ask them to think of characters from these social groups that are represented in their favorite stories (this list of groups corresponds with the chapters in the textbook Diversity in U.S. Mass Media): African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans, teenagers, elderly people, people with disabilities, wealthy people, impoverished people, LGBTQ, and women. When we come together as a class and discuss their lists, the students have typically made some startling yet obvious discoveries: there may be no characters in a certain group, or the characters might be one-dimensional stereotypes. They quickly have those lightbulb moments that will open their minds to deeper discussions about underrepresentation and misrepresentation in entertainment media. They often realize that more often than not, the stories in their lives ask them to identify with white males. This introductory step in media literacy education gives students the reflective and analytical tools to examine what media tells them about themselves and others."

" Postman's early books were mostly about education; he was critical of the shallow and unchanging nature of public education, back then. He went on to write a handful of other books and articles, after "Amusing," a series of warnings on how technology was steamrolling concepts we once revered as pillars of democracy: Critical thought. Civil discourse. Public institutions. Democratic equality in education. Thoughtful, incremental change. Respect for history. Postman died in 2003, just as NCLB and the technocratic accountability movement were rolling across the country, denigrating teachers' hard-won judgment and experience in favor of standardized data. Consider:"

"Social media stars are earning big money for pitching products in short, often silly, postings seen by millions of followers. Bill Whitaker reports on this new trend in advertising"

"Fact is, there really is no such thing as "the media." It's an invention, a tool, an all-purpose smear by people who can't be bothered to make distinctions. Consider: There are hundreds of broadcast and cable TV networks, a thousand or so local TV stations, a few thousand magazines and newspapers, several thousand radio stations and roughly a gazillion websites, blogs, newsletters and podcasts. There's also Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and who knows what new digital thing. All of these, collectively, now constitute the media."

"Inspired by the acclaimed book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt takes audiences on a satirically comedic, yet illuminating ride into the heart of conjuring American spin.  Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver-tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities - yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats ranging from toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals to climate change."

"Hobert's dreams include starting a lifestyle brand, but he wants to build his credibility first. A few years ago, his instinct may have been to start a blog. But Hobert says he loves to talk and was never the best writer, so a different medium has more appeal: a personal podcast. With his Purpose in the Youth podcast, he hopes to tell the stories of people who have found what they are passionate about. He was preparing to launch the first episode this week. The timing couldn't be better for new grads like Hobert to get in on the podcast craze. Twenty-one percent of Americans age 12 or older say they have listened to a podcast in the past month. That's a 17 percent increase in the last year and a 75 percent increase since 2013."

"Bad news for shoppers who rely on web reviews: New research has demolished the illusion that star ratings realistically reflect product quality. "Average user ratings are only slightly better than a coin toss" in helping you make a decision, says Bart de Langhe, who teaches marketing at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His analysis of 1,272 products on Amazon found a "very low correlation" between ratings and quality. One reason for the disconnect: Fake user reviews. To crack down, Amazon has initiated three lawsuits over the past 15 months, most recently targeting companies that sell positive reviews to vendors. Both Amazon and Yelp also say they use algorithms to filter out suspicious posts-although some still slip through, says Boston University's Georgios Zervas, who has studied Yelp user reviews. He estimates that about one in four submitted reviews are fakes. To avoid getting duped, experts suggest a skeptical approach."