 I asked for critique (“a critical estimate or
discussion,” according to the dictionary)
 What I got from several of you: a synopsis.
That’s not enough.
 Relate the dramatic action in the episode to
real-life communication concepts and events.
 Tell me what this episode says about media
and culture
 Rossi states, “Appearance of something wrong
can ruin credibility.” This statement relates to the
real media because if they provide inaccurate
information, it could potentially be the downfall of
that newspaper or news station.
 This episode examines the blur between
relationships and professionalism … This
concept is actually still relevant to any news
source today. New York Times reporter Ray
Hernandez covers the U.S. Congress. It was
discovered that he was sleeping with the
communications director for Edolphus Towns, a
Democratic congressman from Brooklyn.
 Not the episode itself
 I didn’t take off this time if you did that
 But in the future, refer to my prompt from two
slides ago. It’s about relating the episode to
media issues.
 It’s 1,500 words. Not 1,200. Not 800. Anywhere
outside +/- 5% will receive 20 points off – one
letter grade.
 To conform with APA style, your paper must
include the following: title page, in-text citations,
reference list, page numbers in the upper right
corner, a “running head” and the title in the
header of every page.
 No footnotes or end notes.
 No abstract.
 No “I,” “me,” “us,” or other first-person pronouns
 A strong thesis will get you everywhere. Thesis
statements are almost always found at the end
of the first paragraph (the intro). The rest of your
paper should deal with your stated thesis.
 Cite early and often. If you go much more than a
paragraph without citing something, you should
be worried.
 Cite when you paraphrase. Cite when you quote.
 Don’t cite if it’s common knowledge.
CMAT 101
Prof. Jeremy Cox
 It’s based on a hypothesis and supported by EVIDENCE.
 In this way, it is not a guess, hunch, speculation or other
colloquial synonym.
 Theory is a set of assumptions, propositions, or accepted
facts that attempts to provide a plausible or rational
explanation of cause-and-effect (causal) relationships
among a group of observed phenomenon.
 The word’s origin (from the Greek thorós, a spectator),
stresses the fact that all theories are mental models of the
perceived reality. (Credit:
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/theory.html)
 Examples of theories: gravity, Einstein’s
relativity, evolution, plate tectonics, germ
theory of disease.
 Theories may be change, be improved upon,
be discarded in the face of overwhelming
evidence to the contrary (see heliocentric
universe).
 Theories, by definition, cannot be proven
(except in math). Improving on theories is
what science is all about.
... Is the synthesis of three different activities.
(see
http://www.euro.ubbcluj.ro/filosofii/fil/luhmann
_what_is_communication.pdf)
1. The selection of information
2. The selection of utterance of information
3. The selective understanding understanding
or misunderstanding of this utterance and
its information.
 Input: The intention to communicate, which makes up the
content of the message
 Sender: The sender encodes the message, arranging it
into sentences.
 Channel: Spoken words go through air. In mass media:
newspaper, pixels, television.
 Receiver: Decodes the message, translates it and receives
the...
 Output: The content decoded by the receiver.
 Code: Sender and receiver must have common ground in
their outputs and inputs to make communication work.
 Era of mass society theory (outdated)
 Era of limited effects perspective (outdated)
 Cultural theory era (contemporary)
 Era of the meaning-making perspective
(contemporary)
 The late 19th and early 20th century was a scary
time for traditionalists in Western society.
 Industrialization, migration from farms to cities,
new technologies such as radio and talkies were
upending the status quo.
 The theory: the media are corrupting influences
that undermine the social order and that
“average” people are defenseless against its
influences.
 “Average” = people who did not hold the
theorists’ superior tastes and values (Barran, p.
362)
 Journalism was sensational and simplistic
(this being the Yellow Journalism era),
catering to the basest of tastes.
 The success of propaganda efforts by
totalitarian governments in Europe,
particularly the Nazis, demonstrated media’s
powerful effect on the masses.
 Also known as the hypodermic needle theory
or magic bullet theory.
 Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Harvard
graduate and former socialist, was an
influential newspaperman and commentator.
 Main work: “Public Opinion.” (1922)
“I argue that representative government ...
cannot be worked successfully ... unless there
is an independent expert organization for
making the unseen facts intelligible to those
who have to make the decisions ... [thus]
allow[ing] us to escape from the intolerable
and unworkable fiction that each of us must
acquire a competent opinion about all public
affairs.”
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBUKRAE
2O9c
 It was a grand theory, one designed to
explain all aspects in a given phenomenon.
 Not based on rigorous study.
 People do make consumption choices and
interpret media content.
 Some media effects were good.
 Traced to one day in history: the night before
Halloween 1938
 The night of Orson Wells’ broadcast of “The
War of the Worlds.”
 1 million people were frightened enough to
take some action. Proof of mass society
theory?
 Not really. Another 5 million people who
heard it did nothing.
 Paul Lazarsfeld
(1901-1976), Austrianborn sociologist.
 Using advances in
survey research,
polling and other
social scientific
techniques, he applies
research to his theory.
 Ideas “flow” from mass media to opinion
leaders and from them to a wider population.
 Unlike the direct impact of the hypodermic
needle, Lazarsfeld posited a human
intermediary.
 Opinion leaders are people with most access
to the media (the head of the family, your
boss, your mayor) who explain and diffuse
the content to others.
 Unavailable at the time of the theory’s
creation in 1940, television gave everyone a
relatively equal opportunity to consume
media firsthand.
 We still count of friends and others to share
mass media with us (“Have you seen the
new ‘Transformers’ movie? It sucked!”), but
their role isn’t nearly as central to the
communication process as it was back in the
day.
 Dissonance theory: when confronted by
new or conflicting information, people
experience a kind of mental discomfort
(dissonance), causing them to consciously or
subconsciously work to limit or reduce that
discomfort. (Limited because of the filtering.)
 People do that in three ways
1. Selective exposure (skip over FOX News)
2. Selective retention (quickly forgetting FN)
3. Selective perception (“FN is full of liars!”)
 Posits that media may not tell us what to
think, but it tells us what to think about.
 Involves how much space or time is devoted
to the issue and placement in the broadcast
or page. An A1 story is more important than
one on A26.
 In this way, agenda-setting is related to the
gatekeeping function of media – its power
to select what it deems “news” and filter out
all that isn’t up to snuff.
 Media tend to “herd” around major stories.
 So, it’s one thing for a major paper to have
coverage of an event on its front page, but if
most other papers – big and small – do it too,
you have a whole nation looking at the same
agenda.
Republican Super Tuesday coverage:
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=DC_W
P&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=1
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=DE_NJ
&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=1
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=AL_TN
&ref_pge=gal&b_pge=1
 We’re back to powerful effects.
 Television grew in popularity and impact in the
1960s, coinciding with a time of great social
change – racial strife, increasing coarseness of
political rhetoric, the so-called sexual revolution.
 Limited effects seemed kind of limited.
 Cultural theories assume that our experience
with reality is an ongoing social construction.
Audiences actively process the information,
reshape it and store only what serves their
needs.
 Posits that “media operate primarily to justify
and support the status quo at the expense of
ordinary people.”
 Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
 Hey, who let that guy in here?!
1. A “Leftist” orientation
2. Wants to throw the bums out
3. Elites control the media
 Focuses on how economic and other
influences shape, distort and bias news
coverage.
 Media members become enculturated into
news production (a.k.a. “professionalization)
1) Personalized news: stories revolve around
people, which may be interesting but
reduces important issues to soap opera-level
that ban be easily dismissed.
 How this convention drove but ultimately
undercut one of the biggest projects in my
life: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/201101-30/story/hope-raising-our-children-amidstresses-life
2) News must have drama, especially on
television.
 How about a dramatization to illustrate this
point? Volunteers to help read?
 http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/99anewswatch.p
html
 News is fragmented.
 TV spots are short. Most newspapers have
only a small amount of space to tell a story.
 Result: The reader/viewer gets only a small
part of the story, and what’s usually missing
is the context.
 News is “normalized.”
 Media tend to follow newswriting conventions
that necessarily overlook certain angles.
 Example: reporting on human-made disasters.
Media focus on what officials say. In a plane
crash, that would be the FAA’s actions to
investigate, find the black box, keep the scene
clear, etc.
 It says, “What happened here is bad, but
authorities are sorting it out.”