Living in a Media World

If you listen to media criticism for long, you will hear a pair of words used over and over again: they and them. It is easy to take potshots at some anonymous bogeymen—they—who embody all evil. I even engaged in it at the beginning of this section series of posts with the title “The Seven Secrets About the Media ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know 2.0.”

So who are they? 

No one. 

Everyone. 

A nonspecific other we want to blame. 

Anytime I used they in a news story, my high school journalism teacher would ask who “they” were. And that’s what you need to ask whenever you hear criticism of the media. It isn’t that the criticism is not accurate. It very well may be. But it probably applies to a specific media outlet, a specific journalist, a certain song, or a particular movie. But we can make few generalizations about an industry so diverse that it includes everything from a giant corporation spending a reported $1 billion to produce Avengers: Infinity War and its Avengers: Endgame sequel to young people posting photos and messages on Snapchat.  There are a lot of media out there, but no unified them.

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Going online used to mean going someplace where there was a computer plugged into an Ethernet cable, but increasingly, going online now means pulling out your mobile device. And in many parts of the world, the mobile internet is the only internet.

Recent data from the Pew Research Center show that, as of 2018, 95 percent of American adults have a mobile phone and 77 percent of us own smartphones. That’s up from 35 percent just seven years earlier. When we just look at young adults, ages 18–29, 100 percent of them have mobile phones, and 94 percent have smartphones. That stereotypical image of young people always having their nose in their phone does have some basis in fact. If we look at it from the point of view of the media providers, we see that 45 percent of U.S. adults often get news from a mobile device compared to 36 percent who often get news from their desktop computer or laptop.

Another way to get a feel for the growing impact of mobile media is to look at the size of the audience for various channels. Those that allow people to express themselves publically through their mobile devices have much bigger audiences than those that call for passive consumption. So Facebook has an audience of 2 billion, YouTube has 1.5 billion, and the Super Bowl (on television) has an audience of 119 million. Think about it—the Super Bowl has just over 5 percent of the audience size of Facebook.

If you look outside the United States, the use of mobile media becomes even more significant. Among refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, mobile media are the only media people have access to. During the Arab Spring movement in Egypt in 2011, much of the news coming out of the country was by way of mobile phones.

Computers and laptops are still important tools for going online, but with the growing power, size, and availability

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No matter what media you are using—whether it be a legacy newspaper or television station or a social media channel like Facebook—you are always interacting with it at a social level—whether it be face-to-face, with friends on Facebook, or with the entire world via Twitter.

Take, as an example, when your author went to hear President Obama speak at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) campus. I got the expected reactions from friends to the selfie of my wife and me standing in line to enter the arena. I also shared news on Twitter about the president’s visit from social media guru Dr. Jeremy Lipschultz. And while I was on Dr. Lipschultz’s Twitter page, Omaha World-Herald weather reporter Nancy Gaarder tweeted out a photo of me at work. Now, in this case, Gaarder and I were interacting because she was sitting behind me and we got to talking face-to-face. But this was only the first of many social interactions for the day based on news being shared socially.

As everyone in the arena waited for the president to appear, I tweeted out a photo of the press corps area on the floor of the arena, along with the hashtag #POTUSatUNO, one of several in use at the event. Before long I picked up a response from Marjorie Sturgeon, a multimedia journalist for Omaha’s Action 3 News, who noted she could see herself in my photo.

Meanwhile, I was sharing news from the Omaha World-Herald, UNO student journalists, and other observers. Media recall research tells us that one of the best predictors of the news we will remember is the news we talk about. Thus the news we share socially will become the news that matters most to us.

When important news breaks, it’s likely we’ll hear about it first through social media. When a mass shooter killed at least fifty-eight people and left more than five hundred people injured in Las Vegas in October 2017, there were lots of contradictory stories circulating on Twitter and other social media. But with all the reports circulating, it could be hard to tell which stories should be believed. New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Casey McDermott noted that NPR included the following statement at the bottom of its web stories about the shooting:

This is a developing story. Some things that get reported by the media will later turn out to be wrong. We will focus on reports from police officials and other authorities, credible news outlets and reporters who are at the scene. We will update as the situation develops.

NPR’s media news show On the Media has a guide for consumers dealing with breaking news that was shared widely on social media at the time of the shooting. Here’s an example of it from Matthew Gertz of the watchdog group Media Matters:

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Secret 4 is a little different than the oft-repeated slogan, “Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.” Instead, it says that media face the same issues over and over again as technologies change and new people come into the business.

The fight between today’s recording companies and file sharers has its roots in the battle between music publishers and the distributors of player piano rolls in the early 1900s. The player piano was one of the first technologies for reproducing musical performances. Piano roll publishers would buy a single copy of a piece of sheet music and hire a skilled pianist to have his or her performance recorded as a series of holes punched in a paper roll. That roll (and the performance) could then be reproduced and sold to anyone who owned a player piano without further payment to the music’s original publisher. 

Then, in 1984, Sony successfully defended itself against a lawsuit from Universal Studios by arguing that it had a right to sell VCRs to the public because there were legitimate, legal uses for the technology. Universal had protested the sales because the video recorders could be used to duplicate its movies. Before long, the studios quit trying to ban the VCR and started selling videocassettes of movies directly to consumers at reasonable prices. All of a sudden, the studios had a major new source of revenue. 

This can also be seen with the repeated fears of new media technologies emerging over the years. In the 1930s, there was fear that watching movies, especially gangster pictures, would lead to precocious sexual behavior, delinquency, lower standards and ideals, and poor physical and emotional health. The 1940s brought concern about how people would react to radio programs, particularly soap operas. Comic books came under attack in the 1950s. The notion that comic books were dangerous was popularized by a book titled Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham. Wertham also testified before Congress that violent and explicit comic books were a cause of teenage delinquency and sexual behavior. The industry responded to the criticism by forming the Comics Code Authority and ceasing publication of popular crime and horror comics such as Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science.

The 1980s and 1990s saw controversies over offensive rap and rock lyrics.  These controversies reflected widespread concern about bad language and hidden messages in songs. In 2009, pop star Britney Spears had a not-so-hidden allusion to the “F word” in her song “If U Seek Amy.” If you speak the title aloud, it sounds like you are spelling out F, U, . . . well, you get the picture. Critics were, of course, shocked and dismayed at this example of a pop star lowering public taste.

Of course, Spears didn’t really create her naughty little lyric on her own. Aside from a host of rock and blues singers who have used similar lines, Slate writer Jesse Sheidlower notes that James Joyce used the same basic line in Ulysses, when he has a group of women sing:

If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.

A careful reading of the third line will let you find a second hidden obscenity as well. 

Numerous media critics and scholars have argued that television and movies present a distorted view of the world, making it look like a much more violent and dangerous place than it is. More recently, mobile devices have been blamed for a range of social ills, from car accidents caused by distracted drivers to promiscuity caused by sexually explicit mobile phone text and photo messages.

Why has there been such long-running, repeated concern about the possible effects of the media? Media sociologist Charles R. Wright says that people want to be able to solve social ills, and it is easier to believe that poverty, crime, and drug abuse are caused by media coverage than to acknowledge that their causes are complex and not fully understood. 

Writing in 1948, sociologists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld identified four major aspects of public concern about the media:

• Concern that because the media are everywhere, they might be able to control and manipulate people. This is a large part of the legacy of fear.
• Fear that those in power will use the media to reinforce the existing social structure and discourage social criticism. When critics express concern about who owns and runs the media, this is what they are worried about.
• The belief that mass entertainment is a waste of time that detracts from more useful activities.

When your mother told you to turn off the television set and go outside, this was her concern!

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The mass media, both news and entertainment, are frequently accused of trying to put forward an extremist agenda of violence, permissiveness, homosexuality, drug use, edgy fashion, and non-mainstream values.

People in the media business, be they entertainers or journalists, respond with the argument that they are just “keeping it real,” portraying the world as it is by showing aspects of society that some people want to pretend don’t exist. They have no agenda, the argument goes; they just want to portray reality.

Now it is true that much of what the media portray that upsets people is real. On the other hand, it is a bit disingenuous to argue that movie directors and musicians are not trying for shock value when they use offensive language or portray stylized violence combined with graphic sexuality. Think back to any of a number of recent horror movies. We all know that teenagers routinely get slashed to ribbons by a psycho killer just after having sex, right? Clearly, movie producers are trying to attract an audience by providing content that is outside of the mainstream.

The problem with the argument between “keeping it real” and “extremist agenda” is that it misses what is actually happening. There can be no question that audiences go after media content that is outside of the mainstream. By the same token, the more non-mainstream content is presented, the more ordinary it seems to become. This is what is meant by Secret 3—one of the mass media’s biggest effects on everyday life is to take culture from the margins of society and make it into part of the mainstream, or center. This process can move people, ideas, and even individual words from small communities into mass society.

We can see this happening in several ways. Take the 1975 cult movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show that tells the story of a gay male transvestite (Dr. Frank-N-Furter) who is building a muscle-bound boyfriend (Rocky) for himself when a newly engaged straight couple show up at his castle’s doorstep seeking shelter from a storm. While the movie found success as a midnight movie in the counterculture community, it took years to move from being considered a flop to being a cult classic.

But in recent years Rocky Horror has moved from being a midnight movie to being a core element of popular culture. 

The Fox Broadcasting show Glee did a Halloween episode in 2010 where the kids in the show’s glee club produced The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a high school musical. But the Glee version had actress Amber Riley playing the part of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, while the part of Rocky was still played by a male actor, Chord Overstreet. Thus, the central plotline went from gay to straight. The Glee version also had Frank-N-Furter singing about being from “Sensational, Transylvania” instead of “Transsexual, Transylvania.” With these changes, The Rocky Horror Glee Show became a perfect example of Secret 3.

Rocky Horror started out as a camp musical in the 1970s that found enormous success in the counterculture community. But Glee sanitized it from a celebration of cross-dressing gay culture into a mass-market story of straight people playing with gay themes. In 2016, Fox Broadcasting showed a full remake of Rocky Horror that aired in October featuring trans actress Laverne Cox (of Orange Is the New Black fame) as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Hollywood Reporter reviewer Daniel Finberg noted in 2016 that the show is no longer shocking in that “one of the most unorthodox characters in the history of musicals has become oddly conventional.” 

An alternative approach is to look at how the media accelerate the adoption of activist language into the mainstream. Take the medical term intact dilation and extraction, which describes a controversial type of late-term abortion. A search of the LexisNexis news database shows that newspapers used the medical term only five times over a six-month period. On the other hand, partial-birth abortion, the term for the procedure used by abortion opponents, was used in more than 125 stories during the same time period. Opponents even got the term used in the title of a bill passed by Congress that outlawed the procedure, thus moving the phrase into the mainstream through repeated publication of the bill’s name.

This process is not a product of a liberal or conservative bias by the news media. It’s simply a consequence of the repeated use of the term in the press.

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We often hear charges related to perceived sins of the so-called mainstream media. But who exactly are these mainstream media? For some, the MSM are the heavyweights of journalism, especially the television broadcast networks and the major newspapers, such as the New York Timesor the Washington Post. For others, the MSM are the giant corporations that run many of our media outlets. 

New York University journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen says that the term MSM is often used to refer to media we just don’t like—a “them.”  It isn’t always clear who constitutes the MSM, but in general we can consider them to be the old-line legacy media—the big-business newspapers, magazines, and television.

But are these old media more in the mainstream than our alternative media? Look at talk radio. Afternoon talk radio is dominated by conservative political talk show hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Limbaugh, in particular, is fond of complaining about how the MSM don’t “get it.” But how mainstream are the MSM? In April 2018, Fox News averaged 2.4 million viewers in prime time, MSNBC 2 million, and CNN about 1 million. 

With all the talk of cable news, it’s easy to forget that the legacy broadcast networks have significant audiences as well: ABC with 9.4 million viewers, NBC with 8.9 million, and CBS with 6.9 million, as of the first three months of 2018. (The Fox broadcast network does not have a network evening news broadcast.)  The Rush Limbaugh Show, on the other hand, averages 14 million listeners a week, and Fox host Sean Hannity’s radio show draws about 13.5 million listeners per week.  (Note that television audiences and radio audiences are measured differently.) 

So which is more mainstream? A popular afternoon radio show with a large daily audience or a television news program with a somewhat smaller audience?

And then there is video game streamer Daniel Middleton, aka DanTDM, who has nearly 17 million followers and more than 11 billion (that’s billion with a b) views on YouTube, streaming Minecraft and other video games. What could possibly be more mainstream than 17 million viewers and 11 billion views?  Again, these numbers are not directly comparable with television ratings—they are much, much bigger. Overall, YouTube claims to have more than 1.5 billion monthly users. Most videos don’t get a particularly large viewership, but the combined total is massive. 

So it is largely meaningless to describe one medium as mainstream and another as nonmainstream. They are all significant presences in our world. Can we distinguish between old and new media? Perhaps. Can we argue that our alternative sources of news and entertainment are any less significant than the traditional ones? Absolutely not.

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