Author Archives: Karina

No more ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’. Please.

Posted on by

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

For five seasons, TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras has been inviting viewers to ogle at little girls parading in inappropriate costumes, and encouraging the pageant Moms to exploit their daughters even more for behind-the-scenes exposure. The latest scandal involves a clip showing a three year old strutting her stuff in hooker boots, dressed as Vivian from Pretty Woman.

Is it time to call time on the show? One blog, Pigtailpals, called for its cancellation back in January:

“Toddlers & Tiaras” is a petri dish of sexualization. Little girls are taught, often times forced by their domineering mothers, to act coquettishly, learn suggestive dance routines, wear sexualized costumes and bathing suits, endure hours of hair and make-up, and are even put on restrictive diets in order to lose weight for competition. This is perverse. While TLC continues to air “Toddlers & Tiaras”, the network becomes an agent of this sexualization.

Open Letter to TLC: Cancel Toddlers & Tiaras – Pigtailpals.com

Reality TV has always thrived on the exploitation of its subjects, creating artificial conflict between friends, asking individuals to adopt a “villain” persona, re-editing situations so they fit producers’ proposed storylines. However, the reality format is now well into its second decade, and any adult who signs a release form for one of these shows should be aware of what they’re getting into. It’s a trade off, public exposure for cash. It’s a choice adults make.

Reality shows that revolve around non-consenting minors are a different matter. It’s bad enough that these two and three year olds are forced into the pageants in the first place (no one is giving any kind of informed consent at that age). However, a child beauty pageant used to be a one-off, ticketed event, with stage performances only committed to Mommy’s video camera, and some kind of oversight given to the people watching in the audience. Single men playing pocket billiards? Not welcome. A TV show is an entirely different matter, broadcasting these little girls into living rooms (1.3 million an episode), their sexualized performances preserved for all time in YouTube clips.

The American Psychological Association’s 2007 report on the Sexualization of Girls (here) always makes sobering reading. Sexualization is different to healthy sexuality, and occurs when

  • a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics;
  • a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy;
  • a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making;
  • and/orsexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.

The APA’s research suggests the consequences of sexualization in girls include

  • poor grades (“thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualized cultural ideals disrupted mental capacity”)
  • depression (“sexualization and objectification undermine confidence in and comfort with one’s own body, leading to a host of negative emotional consequences, such as shame, anxiety, and even self-disgust.”)
  • eating disorders

All this contributes to a cycle of low self-esteem where a girl values herself solely in terms of appearance and physical attractiveness, but, because she holds herself up to impossible and narrow ideals of attractiveness, she’s doomed to self-hatred. And it will only get worse as she ages.

The fact that child beauty pageants are even allowed to happen, let alone be the subject of primetime broadcasts on The Learning Channel, speaks to the morality of modern America. If this is how little girls are treated, and if this is how TV companies make money off them, think of the delights that are in store for them once they hit puberty and beyond.

Ephebiphobia and the West Memphis Three

Posted on by

Mugshots of the West Memphis Three

After 18 years in jail, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley have been released. While they were forced to submit guilty pleas, and accept a sentence of time already served, they are no longer moldering in prison (with Echols on Death Row) for a crime it has become clear (thanks to DNA evidence) they did not commit. They owe their freedom in no small part to documentary makers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, whose trio of Paradise Lost films argued long and hard for the boys’ innocence, and attracted moral and financial support for their cause from the likes of Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Natalie Maines.

The film-makers’ persistent questions (their first film came out in 1996) about the validity of the trial, the lack of physical evidence, and the insistence that the murders were part of ‘satanic cult’ activity kept Echols clear of a lethal injection, and also kept media interest in the case alive. Alongside social media efforts (such as Free The West Memphis Three and Facebook pages supporting the trio), the exposure provided by the documentaries meant that this case didn’t go away.

The Paradise Lost films are worth examining, not just for the light they shed on one particular miscarriage of justice, but for how they show young men being demonized for their choices in music, clothing, hairstyles and reading matter, and made into scapegoats for society’s ills.

‘Fear of youth’ is well documented (in institutional rules and government edicts), and is known as ephebiphobia. It has been part of our cultures for centuries. Young people (especially young men), thanks to their strength, energy and willingness to try new ideas, are seen as a destabilising force by those who are invested in the old order. As the oldsters are the ones with all the power, they often take brutal pre-emptive and/or retributive action against perceived threats from youth (see: the Lost Boys of the FLDS). Most moral panics revolve around an aspect of youth or street culture, as authorities are persuaded by public outcry to crack down on aberrant behavior primarily from young males.

The discovery of the bodies of three eight year old boys in Robin Hood Hills, West Memphis, in May 1993, led to a moral panic that was to set the ephebiphobic aesthetic of the decade. The horrific murders were immediately attributed to a ‘satanic cult’ believed to be operating in the area, and the name of a local teenager, Damien Echols, was mentioned as a possible perpetrator.

Damien attracted suspicion, not because he had a track record of violent criminal behavior (although local police had been trying to pin all manner of crimes on him) but because he was different. In this staunchly Baptist community he had sought spiritual answers elsewhere, through Buddhism, Catholicism and Wicca. He grew his hair long, listened to Metallica, read Stephen King novels. He had also been treated for depression, and habitually wore black, including a long black coat. The local community believed that these circumstances made the unhappy and isolated young man ‘sinister’, and so the witch hunt began.

Instead of reviewing evidence dispassionately (which might have led them to one of the stepfathers of the murdered boys), the local police decided that Damien was to blame, and set about gathering gossip and hearsay that, in their eyes, could prove their case in a court of law. When solid proof of Damien’s guilt was not forthcoming, they hauled in “witnesses” who, tempted by the $30,000 reward money on offer, were happy to make up any amount of lies about what they had seen and heard. They also corralled Jessie Misskelley, an acquaintance of Damien’s. Jessie was mentally disabled, with an IQ of 72, and eventually, after much prodding from police, came up with a confession that implicated himself, Damien, and another boy, Jason Baldwin, in the murders.

Despite the gaping holes in Jessie’s confession (which he later recanted), and the lack of any substantial evidence, the local media, police and community were insistent that the boys were guilty, that they were Satanists, and that the victims had been sacrificed as part of some crazed blood ritual. Christianity is a force to be reckoned with in West Memphis, and the locals found it easier to believe that Satan was working among them (via Damien) than to confront uncomfortable questions about child abuse within the victims’ families. The crime was firmly pinned on the ‘Others’, the young, disenfranchised outsiders. The kid who had dared to be different was sentenced to death.

Throwing three innocent kids in jail didn’t solve the wider issues. The alienation felt by young American males was still there, and became an increasing part of the cultural zeitgeist, their inarticulate anger explored in movies like The Basketball Diaries, and songs like Pearl Jam’s Jeremy.

Did the songs, movies and video games of the era create monsters, or just call them out of the dark?

Luke Woodham, Kip Kinkel, Michael Carneal, Jamie Rouse, Barry Loukaitis, Colt Todd, Andrew Wurst and Evan Ramsey were all aged between 14-16 when they opened fire on parents, teachers and classmates in small towns across America during a period of just over two years (February 1996-May 1998). However, before any of these boys brought a gun to school, or wrote a note, or built a bomb, or posted on an internet bulletin board, society was already afraid of them, thanks to the specters of the West Memphis Three. The school shooters simply bought into the idea that because they were different, they were doomed. Give a dog a bad name, and he might shoot himself.

The media jumped on their perceived common traits, depicting them as a homogenous group of depressive, bedroom-dwelling, video game obsessed, grunge or metalhead, friendless losers – younger brothers to Damien Echols – and, with a national Satanic panic out of the question desperately tried to link these disaffected killers to specific media texts, rather than say, the medication many of them were taking. These boys wore black, especially in the form of long coats, as a way of expressing their otherness amongst the colorful plaid and sweats of their peers. They came to signify a national malaise, an army of Others who could pop up, guns blazing, in any high school corridor near you.

By the end of the decade, thanks to the Internet, and to the murderous actions of Klebold and Harris in Columbine, this tribe of misfits acquired a label: the Trenchcoat Mafia. The stereotyping begun with Damien Echols was set in stone, and outsider equalled killer, to be isolated and ignored, despite the fact that many of the teens who adopted the attitude and uniform of the subculture had never even handled a gun.

It’s 2011. Now Echols, Baldwin and Misskelley are free men, perhaps we should look again at the prejudices that falsely convicted them? Is it possible for us to learn from the mistakes of the past? Now, instead of demons in dusters, we have hoodie horrors; the outer layer has changed but the inner bogeyman remains the same. Adolescent males are still being ostracized and criminalized by adult society. They are forced to the fringes, denied status, affection, hope for the future, paraded as straw dogs in movies like Eden Lake, Harry Brown, even The InBetweeners. Should we be surprised when they bite back, as in London and Philadelphia recently? Will we continue to substitute stereotyping for genuine understanding?

The West Memphis Three – Comprehensive case history from TruTV Crime Library
Who Are The Trenchcoat Mafia– BBC archive from April 21st, 1999, which shows how quickly the media jumped on the term.

The Blame Game #londonriots

Posted on by

Double Decker Bus Aflame #LondonRiots on TwitpicAs London battens down the hatches for another night of lawlessness, the media bristles with pointed fingers. Who is to blame?!? The liberal bleating of the broadsheets (police brutality! cutbacks!) is counterbalanced by the fizzing outrage of the Daily Mail, which, in a single news event, has all its scapegoats (kids, chavs, immigrants, hoodies, poor people, benefit cheats etc) in a row. It’s the same old same old, the class war dialectic rehashed from the 1980s.

However, this is 2011, the era of citizen journalism. In addition to the shock and scaremongering gushing from the mouths of traditional media outlets, individuals get to say their pieces too. Those caught in the thick of it are blogging, tweeting, posting images, videos, getting their personal view of events out there. The unifying characteristic of these unmediated posts is anger. Lots of it, directed against many different targets. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ explanation for the violence. We’ll never get one. What is emerging is a picture of a country in crisis, with deep gulfs scored between the haves and have-nots, the empowered and the disenfranchised, those inside the gates, and those waving flaming torches outside the walls.

Much has been made of the apolitical, seemingly purposeless background to these riots: the crowd weren’t demanding access to food, shelter, medication, clean water, a vote in an upcoming election. The rioters were those who had the first three levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs nailed (Food, Shelter, Family), unlike many of their counterparts across the globe. So why were they rioting?

The top two levels of Maslow’s triangle are self-esteem, and self-actualisation, qualities in short supply in many of the UK’s inner city communities. Unfortunately, when the usual routes to self-respect (education, job, community service) are blocked or devalued, the easiest way to get to the top of the triangle is to smash and grab. Low self-esteem? Join your rampaging mates and prove you can loot and burn with the best of them – infamy leads to glory. Unable to realise your potential through lack of opportunity? Simply steal the consumer goods you would have bought with your wages.

This much is clear: frustrated citizens of a First World country have taken to the streets, bypassing the democratic process, eschewing law and order, and ignoring the social codes that usually prevent neighbour from turning on neighbour in the pursuit of individual wants.

So, whose fault is it?

Every individual who made the decision to join a mob, throw a brick, light a match, break a window or steal a trophy is culpable and criminal. These are bad decisions. The people making them are thinking only in terms of short term gratification and emotional release and not about the consequences of their actions on the community in which they live. This Hackney grandmother sums it up:

Richard Littlejohn in the Daily Mail expresses the same disgust. Could he be going soft in his old age?

This wasn’t a spontaneous uprising of dissent from the downtrodden masses, it was shopping with violence…This wasn’t a political protest, or a demonstration against oppression, it was a grotesque manifestation of our shallow, instant gratification, I-want-it-and-I-want-it-now consumerist society, coupled with an extreme explosion of the kind of casual violence which scars our town and city centres across Britain every weekend.

Despite Littlejohn’s anti-consumerist sentiments, the online editors of the Mail apparently have no sense of irony. As usual, their sidebar is filled with images of bikini babes, tittle tattle about Kate Middleton and J.Lo, and glorification of reality TV stars. The Daily Mail is all about celebrating consumerism and celebrity culture, propagating images of impossible body shapes and lifestyles, devaluing ordinary achievement and encouraging constant, unhealthy, upward comparison. No wonder frustrated DM readers seized their only opportunity to “get some London”.

Littlejohn gets back on track later in his article. He blames those he designates as ‘youths’, with the implication that most of them are black. When in doubt, turn to the usual easy stereotypes:

There’s resentment among the ‘youths’ against those who are perceived to have got on in life. Look no further than the Tweet from one of the looters which read: ‘F*** the electronics, them Turkish jewellers needed to get robbed.’

Unemployment is a problem, largely because so many of the poor, misunderstood ‘youths’ prefer to live on benefits and the proceeds of gang crime rather than seek gainful employment.

While they are posing for ‘gangsta’ photos on Facebook, most of the low-paid, but essential, jobs are filled by hard-working recent arrivals.

Daily Mail

Littlejohn doesn’t seem to take into account that, with jobs scarce or non-existent, and the £30/week Education Maintenance Allowance scrapped from September, inner-city teens are all out of ‘gainful employment’ options. Still, at least he’s started referring to immigrants as “hard-working recent arrivals”(!!!).

It’s left to a 24 year old blogger to provide the most honest and clear-sighted assessment of the situation, describing it as “viral civil unrest”. I encourage you to read Laurie’s post in its entirety:

Panic On The Streets of London – Penny Red

Many commentators, especially those who experience inner city blight on a daily basis, have noted that these riots were horrifying, but not shocking. West Indian writer and Croydon resident Darcus Howe was interviewed by the BBC, and asked for his thoughts on the inevitability of events. It’s unlikely, as the poster says, that the BBC will re-broadcast the clip, as the 68 year old broadcaster and columnist had to take the presenter to task on the racist assumptions behind her questions.

The riots, and their representation, expose a near pre-Revolutionary gap between the Establishment and the masses. While ordinary people suffer from the effects of cutbacks in everything from policing to health services, the Prime Minister holidays in Tuscany. As the price of higher education spirals more and more out of the reach of ordinary families, Russell Group universities cherry-pick the best students from private schools, and those without GCSEs or training are condemned to the proverbial scrapheap – and castigated for fighting back. Individuals are jailed for drug addiction, while multinational corporations and banks flaunt regulations for decades and escape with a slap on the wrist (and a hefty bailout).

Those who’ve gained a modicum of self-esteem by carrying home a stolen trophy TV this weekend may find the laugh’s on them. They’ll be stuck watching repeats of Made In Chelsea, The Only Way Is Essex, Geordie Shore and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, a series of constant reminders that hard work doesn’t pay, the only way up is celebrity (not education), and that happiness resides in having the right handbag. No matter how much you try, you can’t loot an entire lifestyle.

If all that upward comparison does your head in, there’s always Jeremy Kyle, reinforcing a stream of negative stereotypes about ‘the underclass’ (or Littlejohn’s ‘youths’). The media is a mirror, and these riots have proved what an ugly, funhouse image it projects. Broken Britain: business as usual.

“This Summer”, “Epic Battle”,”A Love That Will Stand the Test Of Time” etc: the art of the movie trailer

Posted on by

Thanks to YouTube, movie trailers are no longer ephemera, glimpsed on TV over a couple of weeks then relegated to the Special Features section on the eventual DVD release. Trailers have always been a cornerstone of any movie marketing campaign, but now they’re analysed, angsted over and recut almost as much as the movie they’re promoting. Trailers for a tentpole release start appearing online up to a year before the actual movie appears, and now they stay online, forever a testament to what the studio hoped people would think the movie was about.

The Independent profiles the format today:

The trailer came into being in 1913 when the Loews Cinemas company created one for the musical, The Pleasure Seekers, which was playing on Broadway. But the early days of trailers were usually maladroit and audiences immediately knew they were being sold something. The Bishop’s Wife in 1947 gave a knowing nod to such tactics with a self-referencing trailer staring David Niven and Cary Grant on their way to film a promo for the movie.

Until the 1950s, American trailers were produced by the National Screen Service, although some directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford liked to produce their own. In the 1960s film directors took a keener interest, leading to more stylish trailers. Plot spoilers in trailers still existed into the 1970s although trailers were less brash than today. “This is Universal’s extraordinary motion picture version of Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, Jaws,” intoned the gentle voiceover on a trailer for Speilberg’s shark fest which, during its three minutes, showed so much footage and dialogue, it was akin to an abridged version of the film.

By the 1980s, trailers were more vague and teasing. Today, producers of trailers understand they are not selling a narrative but an abstract representation of one. They tend to make films seem like an offering (“the producers of Film X bring you…”) and they stick to strict time limits of two minutes and 30 seconds as laid down by the Motion Picture Association of America.

While a good trailer can make a bad film seem awesome (at least until the first audiences start tweeting their opinions on their way out of the theater), a bad trailer can be an expensive mistake that takes many months to put right in terms of advance word.

And of course, there’s a well-established set of clichés…

The science of the trailer– The Independent

L’Oréal Ads banned in UK: “Too Airbrushed”

Posted on by

A LibDem MP, Jo Swinson, succeeded in getting ads featuring Christy Turlington and Julia Roberts banned on the grounds that they didn’t represent how real women look.

Swinson lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority that the ads represented a “false impression of beauty”.

In response, L’Oréal, which has had ads featuring eyelashes banned in the past,

provided the ASA with pictures of both women “on the red carpet” to show that they were naturally beautiful, admitted that digital post-production techniques had been used on Roberts but maintained that the changes were not “directly relevant” and that the ad was an “aspirational picture”.

Contractual restrictions (i.e. Julia’s people said “no”) meant the ASA were not permitted to see the untouched images used in the ad.

Despite this, Swinson was satisfied with the ban, saying

“Pictures of flawless skin and super-slim bodies are all around, but they don’t reflect reality,” … Excessive airbrushing and digital manipulation techniques have become the norm, but both Christy Turlington and Julia Roberts are naturally beautiful women who don’t need retouching to look great. This ban sends a powerful message to advertisers – let’s get back to reality.”

L’Oréal Julia Roberts Ad banned – Guardian

“Marvels & Monsters”: NY exhibition on Asian stereotypes in comicbooks

Posted on by

Yellow Claw comicbook coverA fascinating new exhibition at NYU explores how representations of Asians in comicbooks from 1942-1986 can be grouped into eight archetypes: the Alien, the Brute, the Lotus Blossom, the Guru, the Brain, the Kamikaze, the Temptress and the Manipulator.

Cultural studies scholar and author, William F. Wu, offered his personal comic collection as the basis for the exhibition, which purports to show “how images that began as racist and xenophobic propaganda during times of war and nativist unrest have coalesced into archetypes that in many ways still define America’s perception of Asians today” (Exhibition Guide). Asians working within the comicbook industry have been invited to comment on how the images and narratives affected them, growing up, and their general perceptions of Asian identity.

The co-curator, Jeff Yang, describes the exhibition as

“more than just a comics collection; it’s a historical document and one that covers a period of history that in some respects can be considered to be during the specific period in which the Asian-American identity was forged.

“All of the key elements and factors that shaped who we are as a people occurred during this time – Pearl Harbor, internment, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the rise of immigration, the building of ethnic enclaves, the beginning of the Asian-American rights movement, the rise of Japan and later China. What (Wu) did was collect images shaped by political forces, and to tell this story is to tell a narrative of how America has viewed Asians.”

America has long had a collective anxiety about Asians as ‘the Other’, from the Chinese immigrants forced into hard labor and ghettos in the 19th century to the current political drumbeats about the ‘menace’ of China’s economic rise. These comic book archetypes have both shaped and been influenced by that anxiety. This kind of stilted, repetitive representation does all kinds of damage, especially as comics are read predominantly by children. Non-Asian readers, usually without much or any exposure to actual Asian Americans, conclude that this is what all Asians are like. Asian readers absorb the images, which are usually negative, as part of their identity.

Greg Pak, a writer for Marvel Comics, says this in his exhibition sidebar:

“I just want (Asian-American characters) to be human. Because humans are flawed and crazy and capable of amazing acts of heroism and terrible acts of villainy I wouldn’t get hung up about seeing Asian tyrants or gangsters or femme fatales or martial artists if they were all different and individual and human. What I get angry about is that there are a million ways to write an Asian martial artist, so why is it that we keep on seeing the same darned one?”

Daniel Kim, co-curator, says

“As I was working on this exhibition, I came to the fascinating and horrifying realization that I had read a lot of these comics as a kid, and had either not noticed or minimized the way in which Asian characters were portrayed… That’s how pop culture works. You’re caught up in the entertainment and the pleasure of it. When I think back to my 8-year-old self, I retroactively worry for him. I wonder what this will do to him, what role it will play in developing my self-identity and the identity of all Asian boys who grew up reading comic books in America.”

Asia In American Eyes – China Daily
MARVELS AND MONSTERS: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986 – NYU Fales Library, until August 19

Death of the Movie Superhero?

Posted on by

For a while now superhero movies have been a valuable cash cow for the studios, supplying familiar stories with built in brand recognition and a global audience. However, it turns out that audiences can’t be fed entirely on a diet of rehashed comic books, largely because they all start to look the same. And we’ve seen a glut of them this year, with less than spectacular box office results once you factor in production and P&A costs.

Deadline comments on media analyst Vasily Karasyov’s report this morning:

The analyst says that the boom in superhero movies began around 2000 as computer generated imagery (CGI) made it easier for filmmakers to credibly show action that defies the laws of physics. Virtually all of the most popular films of the last decade couldn’t have been made without CGI. Within that group Karasyov counts 16 superhero films, not counting sequels, resulting in four franchises: Fox’s X-Men, Sony’s Spider-Man, Warner Bros’ Batman, and Paramount’s Iron Man. Yet nothing has taken off since Iron Man came out in 2008, he says, largely because studios have already tapped their hottest properties. “As film studios dig deeper into catalogues for characters for new films, we think the chances of finding a break out property are diminishing fast” — even though the films still come with high production costs.

Harry Potter is done. Twilight has the two final instalments already in the can. Where should Hollywood studios look for the next lucrative franchise?

Studios Should Prepare for the Death of Superheroes– Deadline

Convergence No More?

Posted on by

The News International scandal has provoked plenty of – rather belated – discussion on how global media ownership has become concentrated into the hands of a few (media convergence). Rupert Murdoch seems to have regarded his corporation as being above the law, and more powerful than national governments, but, up until this point, no one has challenged his right to own so much of the media that no one felt comfortable speaking against him.

Former Newspaper editor Bruce Guthrie outlines the impact Murdoch-driven convergence had in his native Australia. Murdoch owns 70% of all newspapers Down Under. This means that if, like Bruce Guthrie, you are involved in a court case against Murdoch’s News Limited, the outcome of the case is unlikely to receive much press attention, even if it involves the CEO spending a day lying in the witness box:

The judge in the case had this to say about the News Limited CEO: “There were aspects about his evidence which lead me to be cautious about accepting a number of critical features of it.”

Of course, no readers of News Limited papers ever got to read the judge’s comments or similar ones he made about other News witnesses. They simply chose not to report his misgivings. Fairfax did, though. And the ABC. But almost 70 per cent of Australia’s major newspapers didn’t.

That’s the thing about having such enormous media power – you can pretty much create your own reality. It requires a great sense of responsibility, but clearly News Corporation, in Britain at least, has failed that test.

For years, governments have stood by and watched large media conglomerates gobble up smaller companies so they could create their own reality, and write their own cheques. Despite its profits in the UK, News International made judicious use of offshore havens in order to avoid paying the full whack of taxes – this is despite (or perhaps because of) the influence Murdoch so clearly enjoyed having over the leadership of successive UK governments. In the US, Fox News sets many political agendas despite, again, News Corp paying anything like their full obligation of taxes on US profits. Representation without taxation.

The current, ever-burgeoning scandal has achieved what no amount of hand-wringing on the part of legislators and media commentators could do: it’s blown open the pretence that it was OK to have a single corrupt corporate culture set the national media agenda. Politicians are elected and accountable; hundreds of them rose and fell while Murdoch remained remote and untouchable, but just as influential. Not any more.

As News International crumbles under pressure from shareholders and governments alike, a lot of pertinent questions are being asked about media ownership. Why haven’t these questions been asked before? Why haven’t the public seemed to care that so much power and influence was concentrated into the hands of an unelected, unaccountable few? Well, they obviously didn’t take Media Studies at school.

The Manifesto For Media Education has this to say:

What is being exposed here the fact that one man and his family, has dominated UK Media, moulding it, and so society with it, into a shape that suited their needs. Whether this is how celebrities or royalty are seen, how politicians should be treated, how sections of the society are represented or how we should see the nation as whole. All this has a very visible, tangible and actual affect on the way we perceive, behave and respond. If we accept this process happens and if we don’t equip young people with the tools to deconstruct their experience, to look behind the representations and the stories, then there is the risk that the media will remain too influential.

That’s why Media Studies is so vital – it’s about creating the understanding that EVERYTHING in the media is constructed and so has the finger/thought prints of those constructed all over it. So asking WHY are things being constructed in certain ways is essential – otherwise naturalised American-Australian families with crap glasses get to shape how WE perceive the world.

Rupert’s Gorilla Tactics – Sydney Morning Herald
Hacking Scandal Shows Why Media Education Is So Essential– Manifesto For Media Studies

NOTW Investigative Journalism

Posted on by

The Hollywood Reporter has this bemused account of a US journalist’s experiences as celebrity-bait for the News of the World:

Early on, the job entailed transcribing audiotapes that sleazy women made of footballers with whom they had sex. The girls would set up famous players, then sell them out to the paper in order to get some cash and fame. The recordings usually consisted of extended, loud orgasms; I would swear they were faking it as I transcribed the grunts and groans for my editors.

I was soon switched over to harder reporting, and my next assignment took me to Brighton, where I was instructed very specifically to catch Mike Tyson in a cocaine orgy. Editors sent me to a grungy video shop above a pub in East London, where I collected a tiny “pen cam,” signing it out on an account the paper maintained there. Back at the NOTW offices, staffers stitched it onto the lining of a hideous pine-green windbreaker four sizes too big for me. They aimed the camera out of a front button.

Sick over the task but afraid I’d be shipped home if I didn’t come through, I managed to locate Tyson at a hotel, befriend him and his posse and take some photos of him with strippers with the pen cam. I passed the info on to a fellow reporter and cried when it hit the paper the next day. The editors’ embellishments detailed three-way sex and other activities I had not witnessed. They made it look as if Tyson was in the midst of an orgy in the lobby.

Confessions of a News of the World reporter– The Hollywood Reporter