The media also represents various institutions such as the family or governments in ways that reflect certain cultural and ideological perspectives.

Families

Television families have been represented in different ways across different decades since World War II. While television families of the 1950s were portrayed as patriarchic institutions guided by a omniscient, wise father, programs in the 1990s such as The Simpsons, Home Improvement, Brother’s Keeper, and King of the Hill portrayed fathers as bungling and ineffectual. There is also a shift in the role of the mother to someone who is more independent and assertive.

Some “reality television” shows such as the 1900 House, Frontier House, and Colonial House on PBS, and The Osbournes on MTV portray conflicts and experiences of families in unusual contexts that challenge family unity.

One key aspect of media representations of the family has been the representations of the breakdown of the family as due to factors such as unmarried couples or dependency on government support systems. These representations could be examined in light of alternative perspectives such as that provided by the Council on Contemporary Families in a report, Marriage, Poverty, and Public Policy, by Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre, that critiques the promotion of marriage as a requirement for receiving support:

• Although poor families are just as likely as others to consider marriage an ideal arrangement for raising children, economic hardships such as unemployment, low wages and poverty make it less likely that the hope of marriage can be realized. Economic stability, and not pre-marital counseling, would play a critical role in allowing for healthy marriages for families in these circumstances.

• Despite significant increases in their hours of work, single parents have not experienced an improvement in economic conditions, in part because of the high cost of child care. Much of non-marital childbirth cohort is comprised of cohabiting couples, not single women living without a partner. Welfare reform itself has encouraged this trend, increasing economic stress on parents and creating a need to share financial resources, often with partners who are unwilling or unlikely to marry.

• Hypothetical notions of reducing poverty by promoting the marriage of poor women so that parents can combine incomes are unlikely to be borne out. Employed men and women are much more likely to marry partners who themselves have good employment prospects. Individuals with the most economic barriers such as low educational attainment, a history of incarceration, or substance abuse, are the least likely to marry. Marriage stability is also difficult to attain under the stresses of poverty.

• The effect of creating a marriage bonus under TANF would be to impose a “non-marriage” penalty that would disproportionately impact African-Americans. Programs designed to encourage marriage should be directed at all families and not just the poor. They would more appropriately be built into public and private health insurance coverage, for example, and should focus on a range of family relationships and not just marriage.
  

Urban, suburban, rural communities

Urban, suburban, rural communities are often represented in the media in ways that fail to portray the complexities of these communities. For example, urban communities or neighborhoods are often portrayed, particularly in television news or crime shows, as crime-ridden or poverty-stricken, without providing addition contextual information about the causes of these phenomenon: high unemployment, lack of government support, or lack of affordable housing. Students could contrast these representations with more realistic portrayals of contemporary urban worlds in films like Do the Right Thing or Boyz N The Hood, or documentaries portraying urban worlds.

Urban worlds are often very much in transition, particularly in terms of the influx of new immigrant populations who attempt to settle in urban areas. While television news often portrays stereotyped perspectives of these immigrants, the Soul of Los Angeles Project sponsored by the Center for Religion and Civic Education used images to portray a different portrayal of these immigrants in Los Angeles.

Betti-Sue Hertz and Lydia Yee Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960

My History is Your History: studies of Chicago neighborhoods

Street-Level Youth Media: Chicago youth study their neighborhoods

Webquest: studying an urban neighborhood

Radical Urban Theory

Metropolis Magazine

The Citistates Group

Suburbia is often represented as the idealized, pastoral, tree-lined contrast with urban worlds. However, these representations fail to capture the variations across and within suburbia, particularly the fact that many inner-ring suburbs are struggling. Students could examine how the media represents suburbia in terms of a discourse of “whiteness” as enclaves of “white lives” with little or no diversity. As Matthew Durington argues the portrayal of suburbia as a race-neutral, homogeneous culture could be equated with the absence of diversity:

This history is reflected in popular culture such as television and film that represented the suburb as a white space. While the number of films and television shows that have served this purpose is too many to describe in this paper, both praise-songs of the suburb and critiques of it continually affirmate its existence as white space. We are not allowed to witness the contemporary multicultural suburb for what it is. As Silverstone points out, "the institutionalization of television rested on the "ordinariness" of suburban life in shows like "Leave it to Beaver" and had the effect of equating the suburb with whiteness (Silverstone 1997).

This historical representation of the suburb in popular culture established the suburb as homogenous, white and hence, with an absence of identity. The labeling of whiteness as an absent identity or a colorless void is highly problematic, because this way of thinking only naturalizes racism and power (Fusco 1994, hooks 1995). A body of work has emerged in recent years investigating the notion of "whiteness" in a more critical fashion, but outside of anthropology this analysis continues to trivialize whiteness through various cultural reads of films or haphazard linkages to larger social issues and trends.

Although the setting for these accounts of whiteness is often the suburb, a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of how the suburb is created materially and how white identity is formed and projected symbolically among its inhabitants is still lacking. This requires a research methodology that contextualizes the material development of the suburb, the way that the suburb has been represented in popular culture historically, and the means by which both of these influence identity formation in this environment.

Representations of suburbia also emphasize elements of open space, a representation that fails to address issues of sprawl and zoning, issues associated with the destruction of farm land, environmental degradation, increased congestion, and blighted development. For courses on surburbia, see the following syllabi:

Judy Gill, Dickenson College

John Archer, University of Minnesota

Steve Macek, Mall of America, Gale Encyclopedia of Popular Culture

Lots of links on topics related to suburbia

Lesson plan: Sprawl: The National and Local Situation

Many small, rural towns are having difficulty coping with the loss of jobs, the decline of family farming, and the lack of younger people to support an elderly population. Representations of rural/small-town communities in films such as The Last Picture Show, Whatever Happened to Gilbert Grape, Unforgiven, In the Bedroom, and Brother’s Keeper examine issues such as the conflict between the value of familiar, supportive community ties and the remoteness, provinciality, and lack of anonymity.

Representations of rural American in the news also paints a relatively stereotypical portrayal of the issues facing rural America. A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs and funded by the W.W. Kellogg Foundation examined coverage in 337 stories in major national newspapers and television networks news over a six-month period from January 1, 2002 to June 30, 2002. 75% of the stories focused on crime. Few stories dealt with issues of agriculture, despite the major problems facing family farmers. “One out of ten stories that framed rural America as an economically challenged or socially marginal environment” (p. 2).

Many of the stories, primarily in newspapers, but not television, examined the increasing urbanization of rural areas through sprawl, but often in terms of rural areas’ resistance to change. The report notes that:

This news agenda often left implicit the substantive characteristics attached to rural conditions or lifestyles. In keeping with this emphasis on urbanization, change was often equated with loss. Most sources who expressed opinions either opposed changes in their communities or accepted them as inevitable, and almost all predictions of the future were negative or fearful. (p. 2).

The report noted that rural America was therefore portrayed:
….as a vestige of our past facing an uncertain future, a place being buffeted by its close encounters with the physical and cultural mainstream of contemporary urban society. It was not associated with agriculture so much as open space and the real or imagined qualities of small town living. The coverage was largely episodic, failing to contextualize events in terms of the broader qualities or issues associated with rural life. As portrayed in the media, rural America is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t learn enough to decide whether you wanted to live there. (p. 3).

W. W. Kellogg Foundation Study: Perceptions of Rural America in the Media

Another key institution shaping rural life is the Wal-Mart discount store. Wal-Mart often moves to a rural area and uses low prices to undercut stores in small towns, resulting in these stores closing. They can do this through their low wages paid to largely part-time workers. The also use advertising campaigns to promote themselves as supporting local communities through charitable programs and providing jobs in high unemployment areas.

Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town: PBS documentary about the experience of a small Virginia town coping with plans for the development of a new Wal-Mart.

Jim Hightower, “How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World”

Wal-Mart Myths and Realities

Wal-Mart Watch

To portray their own representations of these places or spaces, students could create their own photographic or video representations, producing a montage of images that serve to either challenge or reaffirm certain prototypical representations of these worlds. For example, in the
Street as Method project, students engaged in writing activities about specific aspects of their cities. Students were asked to note instances of decline or growth, as well as public places in the cities and how they functioned to foster a sense of community.

Rachel Klein and Javaid Khan, The New York Times lessons: Reality Film: Creating Documentaries About Students' Everyday Lives

Rachel Klein and Tanya Chin, Sacred Space: Learning About and Creating Meaningful Public Spaces (“In this lesson, students consider the two finalists in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's contest for architectural designs for the site of the World Trade Center. Students then create their own designs for a meaningful public space, then critique each other's designs.”)

Virtual field trips: online explorations of places

Students can engage in studies of place through virtual tours of places. For a book chapter on setting up and conducting virtual tour, see Bellan & Scheurman, 2001. They discuss conducting a virtual field trip to Ft. Snelling, Minneapolis, MN.

Urban Field Trip: Lincoln, Nebraska’s Historic Haymarket

2003 Geology Field Trip, Baraboo, Wisconsin

Virtual tours of lots of sites

Virtual tours: Chicago

Further reading about place/space in the media

Bale, John. "Virtual Fandoms; Futurescapes of Football."

Carney, G. (Ed.) (1995). Fast Food, Stock Cars, and Rock-n-Roll: Place and Space in American Pop Culture. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Couldry, N. & McCarthy, A. (Eds.) (2003). MediaSpace: Place, scale and culture in a media age. New York: Routledge.

Fraim, John. "Battle of Symbols: Space vs. Place"

Gauntlett, D. (1997). Video Critical: Children, the Environment and Media Power. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Hochman, J. (1998). Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory. Boise: University of Idaho Press.

Ingram, D. (2000). Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Lauter, P. (2001). From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, & American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press.

MacDonald, S. (2001). The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martin, D. G. (2000). Constructing place: Cultural hegemonies and media images of an inner-city neighborhood. Urban Geography 21(5), 380-405.

Morley, D. (2000). Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge.

O'Neill, E. "The Dichotomy of Place and Non-Place in You've Got Mail."

Owens, L. (1997). Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Rosembaum, J. (1995). Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zonn, L. (Ed). (2000). Place Images in the Media: A Geographical Appraisal. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Links related to studying place/space

Megasite: lots of links on place/space

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment: extensive bibliography

Center for American Places

City Lore; Placematters

Sense of Place

Place Matters Project

Literature and Place site

Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment

ARC Place Research Network

Pedagogy of Place Guide

Geo-literacy: Forging New Ground

Document Durham: Neighborhood Projects

Exploring Your Community (grades 6-8)

Lesson Plans: Studying Places/Spaces

Sacred Space: Learning About and Creating Meaningful Public Spaces

Perception of Place

The Evolution of Cultural Landscape

Explore the Spatial Patterns of Your Hometown

Cultural Symbols and the Characteristics of Place

School Space: An Analysis of Map Perceptions

There's No Place Like Home: Examining Tourism and Cultural Opportunities in Your State

Places in the West

Spaces and Places (younger students)

War

Media representations of war are often mediated by how those in power want the public to perceive a war. Governments may use propaganda techniques to sway the public to support war, as was the case with anti-Nazi and pro-Nazi propaganda films during World War II. However, the realities of war can often challenge official government versions, as was the case in the Vietnam War, in which television pictures of the grim aspects of war influenced public policy about that war.

While Mathew Brady’s photos of the Civil War portrayed the realities of that war, some of the first motion pictures of a war occurred with the Spanish American War.

During the Gulf War, war was represented as what Garber, Matlock, and Walkowitz (1993) describe as a “media spectacle”—a nonstop, dramatic portrayal of bombs hitting targets and troops moving about in the dessert. This more anesthetic portrayal of war without shots of dying soldiers and civilians served to position audiences in a more detached stance than was the case with the Vietnam War. More, the dramatic “spectacle” element of the portrayal framed war more in terms of a dramatic conflict between good versus evil. And, as with the case with other “media spectacles,” these portrayals served to benefit the ratings of cable network news such as CNN.

Douglas Kellner, “Media Culture and the Triumph of the Spectacle”

In some cases, as in the Bosnian War, the media represents war in terms of conflicts evolving out of long-term ethnic/racial or religious hatred, representations that ignore the institutional or political agendas of certain actors (Allen & Seaton, 1999).

Then, during the Iraq War, to counter-act charges of media control and censorship during the Gulf War, the U.S. military employed “embedded reporters.” However, these “embedded reporters” could then themselves be controlled by the unit commanders in which they served, as opposed to independent reporters who were not controlled by the military.

Douglas Kellner, “The Persian Gulf TV War Revisited”

Media representations and the Iraq War

Iraq Journal: alternative, human images of the Iraq War

Polly Kellogg, Drawing on History to Challenge the War, Rethinking Schools

Thus, a major part of waging contemporary war involves managing the public relations and media representations of a war in ways that serve governments’ interests, as opposed to informing the public about interests and perspectives that challenge governments’ interests (Thussu & Freedman, 2003).

Donna Spalding Andréolle, Media Representations of "the Story of 9-11"
and the Reconstruction of the American Cultural Imagination

And, different films represent war in different ways, with some glorifying war in terms of “winning great victories,” and others portraying more realistic aspects of war in terms of the grim realities of death and destruction.

Monbiot, G. (2002). Both saviour and victim: Black Hawk Down creates a new and dangerous myth of American nationhood,” The Guardian

Christopher Wisniewski, “The Spectacular War”

An extensive filmography of war films

Instructional unit: Images at War (Civil War and World War II)

Film Education: History and Film: representations of World War II

Film Education: Violence within Context & Genre

Exploring The Sound of Music (exploring the role of Maria von Trapp in World War II)

Political media representations

Political parties, think tanks, and interest groups use the media to promote their agendas. They represent their candidates and policies through television ads, press releases, and promotional materials in ways that will appeal to and gain the identification of their targeted constituencies. They use discourses and cultural models that not only appeal to these constituencies, but to also create new ways of framing public policy. For example, conservative and neo-liberal politicians have employed a discourse of an intrusive, bloated “big government” to justify reductions in taxes and in government social services. These discourse and cultural models draw on narrative versions of history to portray the role of the government in quite different ways. Fred Block (2002) describes the narrative employed by conservatives beginning with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s:

The United States was once a great nation with people who lived by a moral creed that that emphasized piety, hard work, thrift, sexual restraint and self-reliance, but there came a time in the 1960s when we abandoned those values. We came instead to rely on big
government to solve our problems, to imagine that abortion, homosexuality and the pursuit of sexual pleasure were OK, and to believe that God had died and that religion should play no role in our public life. According to this narrative, only a systematic effort to restore the old values—to reduce the role of government, lower taxes, restore the central role of religion and piety in public life, and renew our commitment to sexual restraint and traditional morality (p. 20).

This narrative is supported by a strict-father morality—the belief that people behave only when they fear serious sanctions…. As a political doctrine, it translates into support for capital punishment and other tough anticrime measures, opposition to welfare spending, reduced government taxation and economic regulation, and finally, a strong national defense so that any enemies can be punished appropriately (p. 20).

Block describes an alternative liberal narrative as reflecting a different version of the same events:

Starting with the New Deal and continuing into the 1960s, Americans realized that to have prosperity, they needed to place restraints on the pursuit of self-interest. The lesson of the stock-market boom in the 1920s and the crash and Depression that followed could not be clearer. When the market is left unregulated and the zealous pursuit of self-interest is elevated over everything, the results are catastrophic. But as memories of the 1930s faded, conservative intellectuals sought to expunge these important lessons from out collective memory. Religious and economic conservatives together sold Americans the snake oil remedy of untrammeled free markets and the glorification of “greed is good.” Since Americans are a decent people, this dismal brew of bad morals and bad economics had little immediate effective. But over twenty-five years, the consequence has been a collapse of our business morality (p. 21).

Students could examine these political cultural models or discourses as evident in representations of social issues by both conservatives and liberals on web sites for the:

Christian Coalition

Republican Party

Democratic Party

Green Party

Media and American Democracy Program: Analyzing television political ads

George Mason University: research links for analyzing media coverage of politics

Project Vote Smart: polling data links for analyzing public political opinion

A leading media critic, Noam Chomsky, argues that because much of the mainstream media is owned by corporate conglomerates (see Module 10), the media’s representations of political issues often reflects these corporate interests (Chomsky, 2002), excluding concerns of those with less economic power. For example, issues of welfare reform are framed in negative terms of people’s unfortunate dependency on the government, reflecting corporations unwillingness to pay taxes to support such programs, while corporation tax subsidy programs receive little attention (Chomsky, 2002).

Chomsky Archives

Journalists who are frustrated with their difficulty in reporting certain aspects of the news often turn to Blogs to share their “insider” perspectives on news events, reflecting a different representation of those events than found in official new sources. Students could go onto Blogs operated by or that include journalists to gain their perspective on the news.

Webquest: Judith Cramer, Teachers College, Columbia University: To Blog or Not to Blog

Webquests/units on politics and the media

Webquest: Sociology Bytes Politics (it's 2060 and the old political parties have been replaced. The forces driving the new political parties come from different schools of sociological thought. You, the experts in sociological theory, have been selected by the three party candidates to generate their press releases as they relate to the major topics of the day.)

Webquest: Joe Braunwarth, News Media Webquest

Webquest: Cynthia Kirkeby, Watergate: The Role of Press in Politics

Unit: Rachel Klein and Javaid Khan, The New York Times lessons: Tabloid Traditions: Examining the Relationship Between Supermarket Tabloids and United States History

For further reading on politics and the media

Bennett, W. L., & Entman, R. (Eds.). (2000). Mediated politics: Communication in the future of democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, R. (2000). The press and American politics: The new mediator. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Giroux, H. (2002). Breaking in to the movies: Film and the culture of politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Goldstein, K., & Strach, P. (2003). The medium and the message: Television advertising and American elections. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Graver, D. (2001). Mass Media and American Politics. New York: CQ Press.

Jamieson, K., & Campbell, K. (2000). The interplay of influence: News, advertising, politics, and the mass media. New York: Wadsworth.

Kolko, B. (Ed.). (2003). Virtual publics: Policy and community in an electronic age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kuypers, J. (2002). Press bias and politics: How the media frame controversial issues. New York: Praeger.

McChesney, R. (1998). Rich media, Poor democracy: Communication politics in dubious times. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Sachlebe, M., Yenerall, K., & Schultz, D. (Eds.). (2004). Seeing the bigger picture: Understanding politics through film & television. New York: Peter Lang.

Stempel, G. (2003). Media and politics in America: A reference handbook. New York: ABC/CLIO.

Street, J. (2001). Mass media, politics and democracy. New York: Palgrave.

Summary

In summary, by examining media representations, students are learning to interrogate the ways in which the media constructs versions of reality that shape their lives and identities. In doing so, they are learning to recognize the power of media representations to go beyond simply mirroring cultural practices to actually create cultural practices and ways of thinking, just as “reality TV” has created a new, mediated-form of “reality.” By critiquing the functions of these representations as reflecting certain economic and ideological agendas, students may then learn how media institutions attempt to shape public policy (see also the role of think-tanks in Module 10). And, by creating their own alternative representations through media productions, students explore alternative, transformative ways of perceiving the world.

Module 5: Word document

What are Media Representations?

Why Study Media Representations?

Studying Media Representations

Methods for Analyzing Media Representations

Representation and Censorship

Representations and Public Relations / Promotions

Studying Representations of Social Types or Groups

Representations of Femininity

Masculinity

Masculinity and Sports

Gays / Lesbians

Racial and Ethnic Groups

Class

Representations of Different Age Groups or Occupations

Occupations

Institutions

Instructional Activity

References

Teaching Activities