Last Module
Hello ladies! Congrats to us all for completing this summer class!! I enjoyed reading all of your reflections throughout the semester because it opened my eyes to other perspectives on the readings/videos.
Now to begin my reflection, out of all the readings and videos what stood out most to me was the video Who Makes the News. GMMP. Overall this video was about the misrepresentation of women. Not only are women misrepresented by news anchors, but as news stories as well. This video reminded me of the assignment that we did evaluating the news because I was able to confirm their findings with my own experience. For example, in the video Who Makes the News I learned that women are rarely seen talking about the economy and politics and as I was watching the news coverage on the senate and abortion, as well as the support of Hillary Clinton, the anchors were only white males. Also, I was not surprised when I learned that some news tend to flip the truth in order to focus women and their stereotypes. For example, the news article of the 5th grader who had a baby but was represented as promiscuous instead of targeting the man who raped her!
Secondly, in chapter 10 I too was surprised to read on the average materialistic consumption by children. Also, a great example of this would be My Super Sweet 16 because many of us grew up watching these shows were the bigger the better. This show shows how many of us have become materialistic and then blame the media for it. On page 256 Sternheimer states, “Children under eight do not understand that the intent of commercials is to persuade them to buy” as well as “children in preschool are less likely to recall advertisements later”. These statements were very controversial to his information that children purchase about $100-$300 billion of products. When I used to work at Walmart, I think that parents were more influenced than children by advertisements because they looked more excited when purchasing toys than the children. The children were happy with a candy where as parents wanted to go all out and buy their kids what was “in”.
