HCRHS Media Lit

"In the tests carried out by Ofcom earlier this year, children were shown screenshots of Google search results for the term "trainers" and asked whether the results at the top of the page were either a) ads, b) the most relevant results, or c) the most popular results. Despite the fact that these topmost search results were outlined in an orange box and labelled with the word "Ad," they were only recognized as such by 31 percent of 12- to 15-year-olds and 16 percent of 8- to 11-year-olds. Other tests showed that one in five 12- to 15-year-olds (19 percent) believed that if a search engine listed particular information then it must be true, while just under half of children (46 percent) could say for sure that Google itself was funded by ads."

As your students skim the selections below, they might choose the two or three articles that interest them most, then answer some of these questions: What do these pieces have in common? What patterns do you notice? What do they say about the lives and roles of women and girls? About men and boys? How are ideas about gender changing? What do you think about those changes? What connections (PDF) can you make to one or more of the articles you chose and your own life? Why does any of this matter?"

"Hollywood tends to trot these stories out right around awards season, but really, how true are they? How true should they be? Asked what goes through her mind when she hears the phrase "Based on a true story," the response by Ann Hornaday, chief film critic for the Washington Post, was, "Hang on to your hat! "Generally if you see 'based on,' you tend to assume that the filmmaker is sending the signal that everything happened," she told Teichner. "When you see 'inspired by,' you get the signal that some more liberties are going to be taken.""

"In the stunning commercial you're about to see, we meet a woman who is responsible for raising her son, working a full-time job, and maintaining her home - while her husband is able to sit back and watch TV. #ShareTheLoad, created by the ad agency of BBDO's Mumbai, manages to turn an ordinary laundry detergent ad into a powerful statement about the double standards that exist between men and women."

"Junk attention is a "mental equivalent of obesity," says Matthew Crawford. He fears a "creeping saturation of life with hyperpalatable stimuli," as companies engineer experiences that only a "freak of self-control" could resist. They're like junk food's killer combo of sugar + fat + salt orchestrations."

How advertising promotes expensive drugs and treatments you may not need.

"Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior."

"The work is intended to inspire, but it also contains a handy piece of smart wisdom-to avoid the temptation to stop at either failure ... or success. "Neither success nor failure is permanent; they are themselves fleeting and transient. It's because the biggest mistake occurs when we stop at either of these points." "

We reviewed 503 of the most powerful people in American culture, government, education and business, and found that just 44 are minorities. Any list of the powerful is subjective, but the people here have an outsize influence on the nation's rules and culture."

"If you haven't watched the performance yet, please do. In it, the best rapper alive performs Alright and The Blacker The Berry, two standouts off his latest album, To Pimp A Butterfly. Well, yes, that's the basic narrative of what he did. It was more than that, though. It was a piece of performance art, a pyrotechnics show, and an outright challenge to white America: Watch this. People felt uncomfortable with Beyoncé having her dancers wear Black Panthers outfits? Lamar walked out in chains."

"In three large classes, men overrated the abilities of male students above equally talented and outspoken women."

"Nike terminated its endorsement contract with boxer Manny Pacquiao on Wednesday after he made derogatory remarks about same-sex couples."

"A new Snickers ad is being praised for featuring a model in a bikini who has been so badly retouched she looks deformed. The catch? She's on the back of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, one of many magazines capable of doing sometimes bizarre things to images under the pretense of making mostly women "look better.""

"#FreeKesha trends again as judge denies injunction today against record producer Kesha has accused of rape"

"Larry Margasak, a retired Associated Press reporter, examines the impact of fact-checking in the 2016 presidential race."

"Facts are always the backbone of the show, Oliver tells NPR's Kelly McEvers. After sorting through lots of pitches, stories are aggressively researched. "You can't build jokes on sand," Oliver says. "You can't be wrong about something - otherwise that joke just disintegrates. ... You try to be as rigorous as you can in terms of fact-checking because your responsibility is to make sure that your joke is structurally sound." That's a lesson Oliver says he learned while working as a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show. It was Oliver's stint in the host chair - while Jon Stewart was away for the summer - that was a trial run for Last Week Tonight. Oliver talks with McEvers about the kinds of topics he tackles on the show, casting dogs as Supreme Court justices, and his aspirations for next season."

"One day in February 2012, after Whitney Houston was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton, a man named Kevin Blatt checked into a room there. Blatt is a source for the celebrity news site TMZ. And at the Hilton, he forked out cash for photos of Houston's room service cart and of that bathtub. I got a whole pocket full of hundreds, he remembers. That's what makes the world go round - cash. That story is one of many unearthed by Nicholas Schmidle in his year-long investigation of TMZ. Schmidle writes about it in this week's New Yorker"

"These outlets, as usual,  omitted the rather awkward fact that this "ISIS plot" did not actually involve anyone in ISIS: At no point was there any material contact between anyone in ISIS and the Edmond cousins. There was, as the criminal complaint  lays out, lots of contact between the Edmond cousins and what they thought was ISIS, but at no point was there any contact with ISIS-the designated terror organization that the US is currently launching airstrikes against. This distinction may seem like semantics, but it's actually quite important when trying to accurately inform the public-only 40 percent of whom read past the headlines-about the reality of the ISIS threat vs. the fear-inducing media spectacle that so often inflates it."

To find out what the experts think, we typically rely on the news media. This creates a challenge for journalists: There are many issues on which a large majority of experts agree but a small number hold a dissenting view. Is it possible to give voice to experts on both sides - standard journalistic practice - without distorting the public's perception of the level of disagreement? This can be hard to do. Indeed, critics argue that journalists too often generate "false balance," creating an impression of disagreement when there is, in fact, a high level of consensus. One solution, adopted by news organizations such as the BBC, is "weight of evidence" reporting, in which the presentation of conflicting views is supplemented by an indication of where the bulk of expert opinion lies. But whether this is effective is a psychological question on which there has been little research. So recently, I conducted two experiments to find out; they are described in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Both studies suggest that "weight of evidence" reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus - even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception."