Module 5! We did it!
So from the readings I noticed that they focused a lot on the underrepresentation of groups of people from the media, specifically the news. The video of Who makes the news was really interesting, it really went into detail about this underrepresentation. They did a study with 16,734 new stories and out that data into four major categories: underrepresentation of women, misrepresentation of women, gender blindness, and gender awareness. What really stood out to me in this video was how in the underrepresentation of women it was 26% to 76%, from the reporters it was 37% to 63%, and of all of those stories only 65 of them highlighted the issue of gender inequality. That was very shocking. Which kind of links to the article Who gets to speak on cable news. This article written by Peter Hart talks about the comparison of different news channels and their representation of different groups of people. Five weeks of broadcast was surveyed with 1,015 guests. Out of that large number, women were out numbered 730 to 285 and 85% were white. Those are shocking numbers.
When reading these articles and learning some of the numbers, How To Detect Bias in the News from FAIR.org made me double think about those numbers and recent news stories that I have read. So what are some ways to detect the bias? FAIR.org have a list of questions, but here are a couple that stand out: is there a lack of diversity? Are there double standards? Do stereotypes skew coverage? I think that knowing some of these questions is a good source of information to have. Since the news likes to sway and change our opinions, these are good things to keep in mind.
So I have always been confused on who the liberals and the conservatives are and what they each believe in about serious topics. Conservative vs. Liberal Beliefs from Student News Daily really helped clear that confusion up for me. This article really opened my eyes but I have to say that some of these arguments are pretty silly, sorry. But overall, this has helped me straighten out my views politically.
In chapter 10 of Karen Sternheimers book, it uses a work called “kidfluence” and I thought this was a very clever word. But what does this mean? “…estimate of the amount of purchases children influence range from $100 billion to $300 billion annually” (Sternheimer, 2013, p247). I thought that is a crazy number. I knew children have an influence on what parents buy but I didn’t realize how much of an influence, sorry mom and dad. Another term used that stood out to me was “guilt money” Sternheimer described this as being money that parents spend on their children because they are too busy to spend time with their own kids. I understand that parents are busy with work and other things, but you should always find time to spend with your children. “We need things, we are making statements about who we are as individuals, and we are affiliating ourselves with certain groups, making status distinctions” (Sternheimer, 2013, p254), and this is why we consume things. After reading this statement, I realized how true it is. What we buy is making a statement, we buy certain clothes to fit into a certain group. That’s a prime example. We are constantly consumers to help hold this statement that we send out.
I will admit that chapter 11 was a little difficult for me to get through, as we have covered popular culture a lot in this course. It felt a little repetitive to me. But just because I hate the idea of monopolies, the 1996 Telecommunications Act kind of stood out to me. This act “enabled behemoth media conglomerates to become even bigger, to create even larger monopolies in the production of media culture” (Sternheimer, 2013, p274). Whether it in in the media industry or not, the ideas of monopoly kind of disgust me. Like why cant smaller/other companies be on their own? I get that companies let larger companies take them over for money issues, but have they ever thought that those smaller companies might want to be left alone?
