Texas Speech Communication Journal

A Media Literacy Approach

According to the Alliance for a Media Literate America, media literacy refers to the ability to read, analyze, and critically evaluate information in a variety of formats such as film, television, print, radio, and computers, including the production of those messages (Center for Media Literacy, 2007). Media literacy can be used in the classroom to help students analyze the rhetorical messages embedded in various types of verbal and visual arguments and, in particular, can be a tool for helping students recognize the coding of violence in visual communication from a media literacy perspective. I have used this concept, in various formats, to address the prevalence of violence in the media and to introduce anti-violence education strategies in two courses-----Introduction to Mass Communication and Victims and the Media.

Teaching these courses has, for me, begged the questions: What difference can we, as communication educators, make in the lives of our students, who live in an increasingly violence-saturated media culture, and how can media courses be used to understand and cope with these representations? As Susan Sontag (2003) suggests, in a 24-hour news cycle culture, we are beginning to lose the ability to feel the pain of others. Couple that with the amount of violence we are exposed to in print journalism, broadcast news, the entertainment media and the internet, we seemingly live in a gloomy and hate-filled world. In this paper, I offer some strategies for using media literacy applications to empower students to understand, and come to terms with, the negative aspects of media messages they encounter on a daily basis. Using the two courses I teach as a backdrop for these strategies, I present a variety of resources that can be adapted to different communication courses, contexts, and student populations.

Anti-Violence Pedagogy in Introduction to Mass Communication

Introduction to Mass Communication is a foundational survey course found in most departments of communication. After teaching the introductory survey course for a number of years I have developed an approach to anti-violence education that may be useful to other teachers who address issues of violence in their courses. Some of my research has also been informed by an upper-level course I teach on Victims and the Media where I train journalists to be more sensitive to interviewing, photographing, and approaching victims of violence and other horrific events.

There are three media literacy approaches to anti-violence education I use in the basic mass media course: (1) a focus on media effects, (2) a qualitative approach to understanding genres of violence, and (3) a deconstruction of masculinity and violence in the media and the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) program. The core of my pedagogy has been informed from the Media Education Foundation (M.E.F.), which has produced a series of educational videos with accompanying study guides all available for free over the internet at www.mediaed.org. I will be interpreting key points from these films to give communication educators an idea of the content of these videos and how they may be used in the classroom.

It is my goal to enable students to become media literate in an increasingly violence saturated media culture. I begin with the work of Dr. George Gerbner in his 25 year study of television violence (The Cultural Indicators Project) to show students’ the frequency of violent images they are exposed to on a daily basis and the consequences of viewing the amount of violence to which they are exposed.

Cultivation Theory and Media Violence

I introduce students to the work of George Gerbner in his “Cultural Indicators Project” the longest, 25 years of studies ever done on television violence. I show my Introduction to Mass Communication students the Media Education Foundation (M.E.F.)-produced video, The Killing Screens: Media and the Culture of Violence (1994). Gerbner’s research shows the amount of violence viewers are exposed to on television and films. That is, he counts how corpses double and triple in sequels to films where he finds over and over the body count goes up, as in his words, “a greater dose is needed” to entice spectatorship. For instance, he shows how in Godfather I and II and Robocop and its sequel the corpses more than triple. And on television, Gerbner’s findings indicate “scenes of violence occur an average of 3-5 times per hour in prime-time dramatic fiction, and between 20-25 times per hour in cartoons” (Gerbner, 2003, p. 340). Gerbner’s theoretical approach for the consequences of being exposed to so much violence on a daily basis is called “cultivation theory” (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan & Signorielli, 1993 as cited in Gerbner, 2003). In other words, he means that television shapes viewers’ conceptions of social reality. That is, people who are heavy viewers of television have a television-like view of the world. His findings of the lessons of television violence indicate from survey research that heavy viewers of television have a “feeling of living in a mean and gloomy world. The effects of seeing so much violence on television range from aggression to desensitization and a sense of vulnerability and dependence” (Gerbner, 2003, p. 344) He calls this finding from his data, The Mean World Syndrome.

They are more likely than comparable groups of light viewers to overestimate their chances of involvement in violence; to believe that their neighborhoods are unsafe; to state the fear of crime is a very serious personal problem and to assume that crime is rising, regardless of the facts of the case. Heavy viewers are also more likely to buy new locks, watchdogs, and guns for protection Moreover, viewers who see members of their own group underrepresented but over victimized seem to develop a greater sense of apprehension, mistrust and alienation, what we call the “mean world syndrome.” Insecure, angry people may be prone to violence but are even more likely to be dependent on authority and susceptible to deceptively simple, strong hard-line postures. They may accept and even welcome repressive measures such as more jails, capital punishment, harsher sentences---measures that have never reduced crime but never fail to get votes---if that promises to relieve their anxieties. That is the deeper dilemma of violence-laden television. (Gerbner, 2003, p. 345)

The mean world syndrome finding of Gerbner’s cultivation theory is a troubling consequence of being born into a cultural environment where television is the major storyteller. The television is on approximately 6 hours and 57 minutes in the average household according to Nielsen Media research statistics (Gerbner, 2003, p. 342). In lower income households, there is even higher viewing, thus less selectivity. Further, minorities are often portrayed as the victims or the victimizers see the so-called reality TV show Cops, for instance. When a person of color is portrayed more often as the victim according to Gerbner (1994), this makes minorities feel more vulnerable and dependent on authorities Women are victimized more than men. Minorities are more than 50 percent likely to be victims. One unfortunate consequence of showing minorities in negative roles is that this becomes politically exploitable by politicians to crack down on crime. As I will show in the section of my study on deconstructing masculinity and the World Wrestling Entertainment Network, it becomes normal to see the subordinate group when they are always portrayed as victims such as the case with women, gays, and people of color.

Qualitative Approaches to Understanding Genres of Violence in Visual Media

Another approach I take to teaching about violence is on the qualitative side of analysis of media form and content. I distinguish following the researches of Henry Giroux (1996) in his book Fugitive Cultures: Race, Violence and Youth, three forms of violence in mass media which helps students to distinguish the relative merits or lack thereof of each. They are ritualistic, symbolic and hyper-real forms of violent film. Henry Giroux (1996) refers qualitatively to those types of formulaic violence shown in popular film genres such as action-adventure, Hollywood drama, and splatter and gore films. He reads this code of ritualistic violence as “pure spectacle in form and superficial in content. Viewing audiences may enjoy the visceral thrill of such images; yet, it is not edifying in the best pedagogical sense, offering few insights into the complex range of human behavior and struggles” (p. 61). In my view, one consequence of ritualistic violence is that it reinforces the “mean world syndrome,” playing to the fear of crime. This common form of violence on the television entertainment networks (and even on the news) often codes black youths as criminals, sexual others as violent and aberrant in their behavior and the city as a site of degeneracy and decay. As Giroux (1996) points out, this form of violence passes itself off as simply entertainment and need not be judged (morally) for its political and pedagogical teaching value.

There are many examples of ritualistic violence from the Bruce Willis to the Arnold Schwarzenegger schools to films such as Escape from New York (1981) and The Crow: City of Angels (1996), which both show the urban landscape as a site of dangerous people and even adding for effect as The Crow does, sexual deviancy as rampant in the cityscape with scenes of extreme S&M and violence. Clips from any of these films can be used in class to illustrate ritualistic violence and to debunk the myth that “they are only entertainment.” That is, when the city is presented as a site of decay, and people of color are shown as cold-blooded killers such as Danny Glover in Witness (1985), especially as he is juxtaposed with the young, white Amish boy who has never been out of his insular community and witnesses Glover’s character cutting a man’s throat in a restroom in Grand Central Station. As bell hooks (1990) points out, the scene would never create the fear it does if the killer were played by a white person. Minorities now have more representation but are still “narrowcasted” by the media to reinforce stereotypes that are used to hype and sell films. These dehumanizing images are not always spotted by the naive viewer because they are so subtly coded into the narrative in the rhetorical forms of a “joke” or to create “suspense” such as Witness (1985) does at the expense of minority dignity. “In Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), a terrorist forces the white hero (Bruce Willis) to stand on a corner in a black neighborhood while wearing a sign that reads: I HATE NIGGERS” (Asim, 2007, p.189) The scene from the film exploits racial and class tensions, while coded as a joke.

Ritualistic violence is not only repetitively shown in the realm of fictional representation but also in the overwhelming violence that is covered by print and broadcast media. As Cote’ and Simpson (2000) point out in their book Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting about Victims and Trauma “crime news leads and takes up more than half of television newscasts and violence stories make up about a quarter or more of the locally generated stories in the newspaper which is known in the backrooms of news media outlets as ‘if it bleeds it leads’” (p. 87). But does reporting all of this violence really help the community or possibly contribute to the mean world syndrome? I shall come back to this issue in the final section of my paper on training journalism students about covering violence in the victims and the media course.

Giroux (1996) distinguishes a second code of violent films (beyond ritualistic), which he refers to as “symbolic violence,” “which attempts to connect the visceral and the reflective. It couples the mobilization of emotion and the haunting images of the unwelcome with an attempt to give meaning and import to our moral twitchings…It shakes everything up, reforming the fictive environment around itself” (p. 62). Unlike ritualistic violence, symbolic violence probes the limits of human rationality such as showing the audience a story about the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993) or hate crimes in the MTV-produced Anatomy of a Hate Crime (2001), to tell the Matthew Shepard story to obviously a younger audience. “This docudrama using the code of social realism is effective at showing some of the realities that often face gay and lesbian victims of hate crimes. For instance, the profile of Matthew Shepard’s assailants Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney fits the empirical data on perpetrators: they are often young males, often acting together with other younger males, all of whom are strangers to the victims” (Kleeman, 2003, p. 258). Symbolic violence teaches us about events that should never be forgotten or repeated. I use this form of violence to illustrate social problems such as hate crime victims, war victims in Saving Private Ryan (1998), and other existential issues that tie us together as human beings.

Third is hyper-real violence. This is where violence takes on an aesthetic quality in for example the popular gangster films of Quentin Tarantino such as Pulp Fiction (1994) or the film about what made the serial killers Mickey and Mallory Natural Born Killers (1994). While these ultra-violent films tend to use aesthetic techniques such as parody, gritty dialogue, over- technological stimulation and so forth, they are problematic. For instance, there is no compassion or sympathy shown to the victims in these films see Reservoir Dogs (1992).

Another problem with this cycle of films are racial epithets/slurs are commonly heard in their gritty dialogue. Jabari Asim (2007) in his book The N Word: who should say it, who shouldn’t and why critiques Pulp Fiction (1994) not on the basis of its fascination with tough guy violence but with the use of the N word, “which is uttered more than twenty times. Black audiences often responded negatively to its presence in the film, especially when spoken by the character played by Tarantino himself and the N word is uttered close to 40 times in Tarantino’s subsequent film Jackie Brown” (pp. 189-190). Admittedly, these types of films do have an “art house” aesthetic status among film critics but they still need to be judged for their teaching potential. It is my goal in the introductory mass communication course to enable students to identify what type of film they are watching and to become media literate by analyzing the coding of these genres. Furthermore, lessons about race, gender and class are part of my anti-violence education strategy.

Deconstructing Masculinity in the Media

The third area has the most transformative potential in the classroom as we deconstruct masculinity in the media. I begin by showing students the excellent (M.E.F.) produced video by anti-violence educator Jackson Katz called Tough Guise (1999). While the social construction of femininity has been widely examined, the dominant role of masculinity has until recently remained largely invisible. Katz begins by showing how males are put into a tiny box that emphasizes strength, muscularity, and the ability to dominate others. Boys are taught that if in anyway they veer away from these poses or “tough guise” they will be labeled a wimp, a faggot, a wuss, etc. Katz shows how this “tough guy posing” is detrimental to our society and is largely invisible because it is never questioned.

Masculinity retains its dominance in our culture similarly to whiteness and heterosexuality by seeming to be nothing in particular (Dyer, 1997). That is, masculinity, whiteness and heterosexuality retain their dominance in media culture because they are unquestioned as the norm. People are taught from the dominant culture and especially film and television to see gender as identified with women, race as only people of color, sexual orientation as something only gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (G/L/B/T) people have. In all of these cases, the dominant group is invisible: men have a gender, white people are a race, and heterosexuals have a sexual orientation. Focusing on the subordinate group is how masculinity retains its dominance according to Katz (1999) and must be made visible for the values and meanings it imparts to men and women---or boys and girls in the cultural environment of the media system and violence.

Tough Guise (1999) critically reads the construction of a violent masculinity across a variety of media artifacts in the cultural environment such as toys, video games, popular films, music and television. Katz makes the point through the toy icon GI Joe that his biceps have gotten increasingly larger than humanly possible over time. He does the same measurement of Superman who, by the year 2000, is a cyborgian killing machine.

One of the important findings Katz makes is that the problem of male violence is de-gendered in our society. Out of the thousands of cases of rape, child molestation, binge drinking, road rage this is according to Katz an overwhelmingly masculine-gender-identified social problem. Katz analyzes advertising and films such as Something about Mary (1998) and shows through verbal and visual codes that the ostensive comedy is about stalking women. He presents another example from a Native American produced film Smoke Signals (1998), where he shows an older native boy teaching a younger one on a bus ride to look tough like a warrior, not stoic. He shows advertisements that glamorize driving recklessly, drinking, and other behaviors which get a lot of men killed in this culture. “Violence on-screen, like that in real life, is perpetrated overwhelmingly by males. It is important to note, then, that what is being sold is not just ‘violence,’ but rather a glamorized form of violent masculinity” (Katz, 1995, pp. 139-140). He decenters masculinity by making it visible and shedding light on the destructive meanings and values it imparts in the media environment.

Katz further shows the strides that were made in American culture from the 1960s Feminist Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Gay and Lesbian movement. He says while some men have changed their attitudes toward child rearing and relationships, others are angry and discusses the “backlash” as in the title of Susan Faludi’s (1991) book. Tough Guise (1999) shows three clips of Andrew Dice Clay, Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh and emphasizes the humiliating manner in which women (by Dice and Stern) and feminism (by Limbaugh) are treated by these misogynistic stars. What he finds most interesting is that the audience (of mostly men) cheers them on as they treat women as if the feminist movement of the 60s never existed. Katz offers counter-examples of men from sports, music, and film who seem to embrace what Beynon (2002) calls masculinities, which eschews the monolithic notion of the tiny box men are placed in discussed earlier. The baseball star Mark McGuire is shown crying in public after he gave money for sexually and physically abused children. Also shown is McGuire’s affectionate relationship with Sammy Sosa, where they relate not as competitors but as male friends. Muhammad Ali who was considered at one time one of the toughest boxers on the planet, has the courage to show himself in public with muscular dystrophy. Country music star Garth Brooks embodies a new kind of masculinity in his beautiful love songs that make both men and women cry. The Beastie Boys are shown speaking out against sexual harassment of women at one of their concerts. He praises the enduring legacy of soul music in bands such as The Temptations. A film that Katz (1999) finds to be exemplary of a new masculinity is the Full Monty (1997), where these men are willing to show themselves not as muscled he-men, but as ordinary looking middle aged men who want to be strippers.

The relationship between violence and school shootings and homophobia is deconstructed by showing the relationship between masculinity and bullying. Katz finds a pattern in all of the school shooters as being treated differently, teased and taunted. Whether it’s Columbine, Joneboro, Arkansas, Paducah, Kentucky or even Blacksburg, Virginia all, of these killers were boys and boys such as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris who were bullied by an abusive jock culture that celebrated toughness and muscularity. In guns, these kids found in the most grotesque manner possible the great equalizer. Most of the media coverage has missed the point that the school shootings are not about “violence,” generally speaking but about violent masculinity. Violence is again de-gendered in our society when newspaper headlines speak about the problem of “youth violence,” and of “kids killing kids,” not boys killing boys and boys killing girls. The one place Katz found the problem mentioned was in an op-ed piece in the New York Times where it was mentioned in parentheses that boys were doing these killings but the discussion ended there.

Jenkins (2003) points out similar to Gerbner’s “mean world syndrome” that post-Columbine violence became politically exploitable by Congress. Incendiary remarks were made by Senator Hatch saying we don’t need gun control but “goth contol,” or Senator Lieberman blaming Marilyn Manson for the tragic shooting. Katz (1999) makes the point that the horror genre attributes violence to pathological figures such as Jason, Freddy Kruger and Hannibal Lecter. In his view, this allows us to avoid confronting the fact that the majority of violence is perpetrated by average normal looking guys such as in the Glen Ridge rape case. This case involved four athletic and popular boys who brutally raped a retarded girl. The community was slow to believe they did it and slow to punish them for their violent acts.

Katz speaks out against hate crimes against gays and lesbians in how they are often treated by insecure heterosexuals. In one scene from Tough Guise (1999) several telephone calls are made to a gay activist, saying things like “gay boy, gay boy I hope you die of AIDS,” or “I hate faggots and I am going to kill you.” In studies about the Matthew Shepard hate crime, the killer Aaron McKinney who gave Matthew Shepard what became five days later the fatal blow with a 357 magnum had a homosexual experience with his cousin and was horrified after going into a gay church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Of course, the gay panic defense was invoked which is known to be most effective when the victim is dead. The judge in the case did not allow that move to be presented by defense attorneys during the trial of Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney (Kleeman 2003; Lofredda, 2000; Comstock 1991).

Overall, Tough Guise (1999) by anti-violence educator Jackson Katz is a very effective teaching tool. It opens students’ eyes to how the media glamorizes a dangerous masculinity and gets them to question the social construction of masculinity in our culture. There are study guides with questions available for free for this film at www.mediaed.org.

The World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Network and Violence

Another very good video I use to teach anti-violence education, again produced by the (M.E.F.) is called Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying and Battering (2002) by anti-violence educator Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally, Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The first critique of this popular show is that the authors of the video realize that the WWE is fake. The central argument of this video is that the popularity of professional wrestling reveals something larger about society, about the deep-seated norms, values and moral codes that shape our daily attitudes and behavior. The discussion revolves around the general issue of violence, and the specific issue of whether kids imitate this violence. They show many examples of the phenomenon of “backyard wrestling” where many kids are taking risks that are highly choreographed stunts on the WWE but are being enacted in daily life by children and teenagers after watching the show. What are the stories told in the narrative of the WWE? These cultural analysts compare the WWE to a cartoon or to what George Gerbner calls “happy violence.” That is violence without injury or consequence. The video is interspersed with interviews from kids going to the shows. They seem to take from the show what I am going to call a glamorization of an invulnerable and dangerous masculinity.

One of the more disturbing aspects of this show is the normalization of gender violence. Women are hit, humiliated and sexually harassed on this show. The WWE presents women being hit by men, being sexually humiliated, and being harassed as normal. The normalization, not to mention glamorization, of men hitting women is especially troubling given that men’s violence against women in the real world remains at epidemic levels. The National College Women Victimization Study “estimated between 1-4 and 1-5 college women experience completed or attempted rape during their college years” (National Institute of Justice, 2000).

Another problematic aspect of the show is the glorification of bullying. We see kids who watch this show identifying not with the victim but with the biggest and strongest bullies. The stories of masculinity told in this show are some of the most regressive I have ever seen, a masculine ideal that equates physical strength, intimidation, violence and control of others with manhood. It would be completely inappropriate to sexually harass women in the workplace, yet on the WWE it is presented as perfectly normal for men to do so to women.

It is important to get our students to begin to think critically about violence in the media. I have presented one way of delivering anti-violence education pedagogy in the Introduction to Mass Communication course by using (M.E.F) produced videos and research by cultural analysts of violence. We need programs for integrating media literacy into our curricula. In a postmodern culture where television and other mass media tends to seen as reality (Storey, 1998), I think it is pressing that we address the issue of violence in our mass media courses.

The final section of my paper concerns a course I teach called Victims and the Media where I train future journalists how to interview victims, deal with journalistic trauma, and improve the coverage of violence in the media.

Teaching Victims and the Media

Victims and the Media concerns the interpersonal and psychological effects of trauma on journalists and the people the interview. The course also is concerned with improving how the media covers victims of violence in print and broadcast formats. I will briefly discuss one approach to teaching interviewing victims and some research areas from this course of study that may be useful to other communication educators interested in anti-violence education strategies in the journalism sequence of courses. As in the previous section of my study, videos and other references will be mentioned that have helped me to develop anti-violence education strategies in this new area of inquiry.

Because of the nature of news, it is likely that journalists will have to interview trauma victims in the course of their work. Interviewing someone who is under psychological stress is difficult for both the interviewer and the interviewee. Unfortunately, journalists are typically not trained in interviewing victims in the news reporting courses. There are many examples of journalists asking people “how they feel” after undergoing a traumatic experience such as a disaster, school shooting, attempted homicide, etc. Also, the psychological effects and stress on witnessing human tragedy by journalists are beginning to be taken into account by news staffs and journalism educators since the late 1990s. Studies show the longer people had worked as journalists; the more likely they were to report trauma symptoms, such as intrusion symptoms or unwanted recollections, as well as avoidance mechanisms associated with trauma such as isolating, excessive smoking and alcohol intake, distancing in intimate relationships etc. (Simpson and Boggs, 1999; Simpon and Cote’, 2006).

The DART Center at the University of Washington at Seattle has an excellent website with teaching modules for interviewing victims and writing about victims (www.dartcenter.org). Cote’ and Simpson who wrote the first book on the subject Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting about Victims and Trauma (2000) is now in its 2^nd Edition published in (2006). The DART Center has produced a series of videotapes dealing with subjects such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D) and its relationship to journalists and trauma victims with Dr. Frank Ochberg, M.D. an expert in the area of trauma studies and journalism. Two other videos I use produced by the DART Center are simulated interviews of a spouse of a homicide victim and a rape victim. After going through the module on interviewing victims, showing the homicide spouse interview and the rape interview, I do one of the more interesting aspects of the course: student interviews with victims.

The Dart Center recommends hiring trained actors who know how to get in and out of character and consequently would not be traumatized from performing a simulated interview situation. I give the students victim scenarios such as a principal of a high school who is shot by a student or a victim of a serial rapist on a college campus. I then select a student to interview the spouse of the homicide victim and the rape victim. This is a good opportunity for journalism students to improve their interviewing skills and teaches them to handle the emotionally charged situation of a victim interview. I consider this exercise to be important as a kind of rehearsal for framing the trauma interview situation (Goffman, 1974). It is a good place for students to make mistakes and to become more competent interviewers. Also they begin to realize the emotional effects that conducting such interviews may have on them.

Victims and the Media questions some of the routine practices of journalists such as interviewing victims, writing stories about victims, breaking the “if it bleeds it leads” cycle of print and broadcast news production, and the until only recently taken into account “journalist trauma” that typically are not addressed in what Rentschler (2002 as cited in Kleeman, 2004) calls “rites of initiation” of journalists. “Rookie journalists aren’t prepared to deal with the mess and chaos of death. To experience them unprepared is part of their preparation. They are supposed to learn to ‘channel’ their experiences into writing and photography. They carry the social burden of getting close to violence to represent it for the rest of us” (Rentschler, 2002, p. 14 as cited in Kleeman, 2004).

Another part of the course involves the problem of the amount of violence that is shown on the news and the problem of the glorification of violence and violent people in the media. The preeminence of violent images that dominate the news (stories about crime, disaster and war) is what Sisela Bok (1998) calls in her aptly titled book: Violence as Public Entertainment the “mayhem index.” Does crime and violence reporting actually prepare the public to deal with the hazards they face or is the news media in a sense very similar to ritualistic violence helping to create what Barry Glassner (1999) calls a “culture of fear” ? There are no easy answers to this question but there are news stations that Cote’ and Simpson (2000) discuss that refuse to air atrocities on a daily basis and to further contribute to fear mongering.

I show my students the Cinemax produced documentary called Violence: An American Tradition (1995). The film documents the long tradition in American journalistic culture of making heroes out of outlaws (Jesse James), gangster types (John Dillinger), and serial killers (Richard Speck) and others. The documentary historically analyzes how Americans have treated Native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans in our long tradition of violence against others. The film also covers issues relevant to the course such as domestic and child abuse. Regarding the glamorization of criminals, these “undesirables” have been given too much space in print and popular media. Pulitzer Prize winner and the first woman reporter to cover the crime beat at the Miami Herald, Edna Buchanan exhorts journalists not to give too much exposure to criminals. “Writers have to work at not glamorizing them. Crooks may be colorful, quotable and even likeable, but they are not nice people. When you tell their stories it always helps to give the victims equal space (Cote and Simpson, 2000, pp. 7-8) Much of the ritualistic routine of news delivery by print and broadcast journalists does not compel viewers or readers to identify with victims. In a culture that has a fascination with violence, the perpetrators of violent acts often receive more attention than the victims. This seemed to be the case with Newsweek magazine’s coverage of Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. The killers were foregrounded by large framing shots, while the murdered children were put in tiny box shots (Kleeman, 2001, pp. 12-13.).

I address in the course in the form of cases studies, media coverage of the Columbine High School Shooting, the James Byrd hate crime in Jaspers, Texas and the Matthew Shepard hate crime in Laramie, Wyoming. Cote and Simpson (2000) are particularly critical of victim coverage by television and print journalism because of their tendency to emphasize the crime or the event, rather than the punishments or outcomes. They claim journalists are guilty of trotting out easy explanations or answers to quickly summarize violent acts (p. 7). For example, the media feasting on the Columbine tragedy produced both fact and error. “The Rocky Mountain News said the death toll ‘Could Reach 25,’ a number repeated in the next day’s edition and based on erroneous information from the police. Then the linkage between the shooters and the ‘Trench Coat Mafia,’ which was wrong, but the phrase appealed to journalists and editors grasping for a quick explanation for the killings” (Simpson and Cote’, 2006, p. 196).

Journalists may add insult to injury in their race to explain a horrific event involving victims, neighbors, friends of victims, people at risk, as in the Matthew Shepard case the whole community of Laramie, Wyoming. Rumors and hearsay are not a sound fact gathering practice and tended to fuel the media fire in the Shepard murder case. Bob Beck, news director of Wyoming Public Radio, referred to the scenario as “pack journalism”. Beck recalls. “I remember going to courthouse, and somebody would say, ‘Hey I understand he got burned-----which wasn’t true by the way---where did he get burned? Oh on his face, and they’re all taking notes, and they were sources for each other. One person would announce that he heard such and such from a deputy, and they would go with it; no one [else] went and interviewed the deputy” (Lofredda, 2000, p. 12. In writing new stories about victims, getting details wrong can be harmful to victims and their grieving families. These structural problems foster inaccurate reporting. Such practices are insensitive to traumatized people, and they tend to feed our society’s fascination with violence, while offering little solace to the experience of victims.

Meg Moritz a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado produced a very good video that I show in class called Covering Columbine (2000). Moritz offers some important lessons learned from the national media coverage of this tragedy as a result of a media summit. Some of these points are relevant especially to the anniversaries of horrific events such as 9/11, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and in this case Columbine.

Do not show footage of April 20, 1999. Not an excuse to revisit the horror again
Leave the names Klebold and Harris out of the story
Remember the victims
Do not show dead bodies on the street
The media should not explain the event
Too much feasting on the tragedy by the national media

Covering Columbine (2000) is also a reminder to journalists including photojournalists about the impact that seeing body horror will have on them. Cote and Simpson (2000) recommend journalists engage in debriefing after their encounter with a horrific event. There are three elements to a debriefing according to Cote’ and Simpson (2000): “(1) The reporter should speak freely about his or her reactions to the event. (2) The other people should affirm the value of those reactions. (3) Some encouragement toward self-care should be offered” (p. 53). A staff psychologist should also be made available to journalists after exposure to a traumatic event.

Conclusion

I have covered anti-violence education strategies useful for the basic media course in terms of media effects, a qualitative understanding of media form and content and deconstructing masculinity and the World Wrestling Entertainment Network. A media literacy approach to teaching mass communication is important for helping our students understand both the frequency and types of violence they are exposed to on a daily basis. Film and television shape our views of ourselves and others not always in a civil manner such as the way men and boys are taught to be violent and intimidating by the overarching media system. We can create better men by looking deeper into the media system and the values it imparts to both men and women in our culture. Getting students to be more aware of how masculinity retains its dominance to the detriment of other groups is a rewarding task of the liberal arts. I have offered some media artifacts that may be useful to others who take a media literacy approach to their courses.

I have provided a brief overview of the Victims and the Media program designed to help future journalists be better equipped to deal with victims and trauma. The way violence is covered on television and print media needs to be re-examined in terms of how victims are approached and represented by the media industries. The Victims and the Media approach to understanding trauma and reporting about victims is essential to inoculate future journalists before they enter the field and experience the sometimes devastating effects of their work. That is the gritty fact that they will see murders, sex crimes, and the people involved in these heinous acts (Buchanan, 1987). For too long, the impact of seeing trauma on journalists has been ignored by the field and must be taken into account.

References

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Abstract

A Media Literacy Approach

Conclusion

References

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