Media, Messages, Men: Critical Review

The introduction of Media, Messages, and Men: New Perspectives in Communication makes clear that the text is not intended to replicate the mission of typical college-level journalism textbooks, which is to instruct aspiring journalists in the techniques of reportage and the editorial process. Rather, their avowed purpose is to discuss principles of the discourse of media and raise what come down to the ethical and moral implications of the uses to which mass media are put. It unpacks the finished product of the media-generation effort and seeks to supply a measure of media savvy to the student and consumer of media artifacts.

In constructing the text of Media, Messages, and Men: New Perspectives in Communication, Merrill and Lowenstein, who at the time of writing were professors of communication and journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia (a noted journalism school), more or less alternate chapters to build their critique of the extraordinary power of the mass media--for them television, radio, magazines, books, and newspapers--to have an impact on the perceptions and behavior of the American people. They sound a note of alarm in the influence of mass media that are all out of proportion to their relatively small size, in terms of numbers of practitioners. Indeed, in the first chapter, one of the major themes is that the culture is being inundated and bombarded with too much information, most of which cannot be absorbed and much of which cannot be s

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Oprah's butler lost her lucky socks in the laundry. Another example might be a short TV spot that has the local newscaster saying, "Your child at risk of disease in preschool? Film at eleven." The actual story, of course, could be about anything from the necessity of washing hands after potty-time to an epidemic of spinal meningitis; the principle of previewability remains. There are, of course, more pernicious examples from historical fact: One is reminded of the famous Nazi film The Eternal Jew, which proclaims an attitude and agenda that seek to dehumanize one particular group of human beings and inflame the hateful passions of another. A related example is the very well-made and world-historical film Triumph of the Will, manifestly having the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games as its subject but in fact being a latent paean to the Reich as irresistible force and immovable object. The challenge to recipients of communications, as Lowenstein and Merrill characterize instances of media product, would be the ability to dispassionately decode the latent content of a report, whether as an instance of total invention on one hand or errant race hatred on the other. A whole range of examples could be marshaled to illustrate t

Category: Literature - M