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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 seriously or thoughtfully analyzed precisely because there is too much to keep up with. A further point emerges over the course of the text, which is that because some dissemination of information emanates from sources that are unreliable, either because of bad faith or mere incompetence, not all media are equally trustworthy. In a sense, seeing is not believing for all too many mass-media presentations. That informs the authors' concept of "previewability," the n...

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Media, Messages, Men: Critical Review. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:52, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000610.html