The media loves to stir up controversy. Sensationalism and outrageous ideas help with the ratings and ad revenues, but that doesn’t do much to educate the public.
Jay Smooth asks whether it’s too much to ask of the media to not feed the trolls?
Tag Archive for 'media'
I’ve been enjoying the trail of MEDIA DIET posts over at The Atlantic and was especially thrilled to find out what Ezra Klein reads a few weeks ago.
I’m a bit of a news junkie myself, so I thought I’d take a walk through what I read on a regular basis with the help of Google Reader trends. It is probably best to start by saying that I don’t own a TV, so RSS feeds are the basis of my news world.
As a night owl, I do most of my media consumption between 7 p.m. – 1 a.m. because it’s uninterrupted reading time once I’ve made it home from the gym and whatever afterwork commitments I have on a given day.
I start any news dive with a visit to the Huffington Post to see what’s trending. I love using it as a starting point because as I begin following the aggregated content back to its home source, I wind up pinging across a number of news sites I wouldn’t necessarily visit daily otherwise. It is also rare for me to miss the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC (videos are released online about an hour after the show ends each weeknight), and I catch most episodes of The Daily Show.
As I write this post, there are 167 feeds in my reader, so this post is hardly exhaustive in reviewing what I read. It is impossible to keep up with everything, but I find that each time I remove a feed, I somehow wind up adding a few more. So I let my topics of interest ebb and flow over time.
For current events I follow parts of the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Mother Jones, ProPublica, Washington Post, Salon and TreeHugger. For tech news, I head to TechCrunch and Mashable.
The blogs I read are disparate to say the least. I read Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, Center for American Progress’s Think Progress, BoingBoing, BigThink, Jezebel.
Paul Krugman, Nicholas Kristof, Ezra Klein, Michelle Goldberg, Robert Reich, Jon Taplin and Jay Smooth provide lots of food for thought.
In case you hadn’t noticed, I find culture and politics fascinating, so Talking Points Memo and the latest Pew Research statistics are regular reads.
I also read for entertainment value – Indexed, ChartPorn and Joy the Baker.
The most surprising item in my reader is probably Michael Hyatt‘s blog. He’s the CEO of a Christian Publishing Company who writes excellent posts on leadership.
I’m not a huge fan of print magazines. They tend to stack up for 3 or 4 months before I finally flip through them. It is a rare day that I read a magazine cover to cover. Current subscriptions: Wired, Fast Company and Ode.
And, of course, there’s my 50-book goal each year.
In between all the reading, I keep up with some TV thanks to the Intertubes and Netflix: Bones, House, Vampire Diaries, 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother during the regular network season and Rescue Me, The Closer, Leverage, In Plain Sight and True Blood online and by DVD in the off season.
That’s a basic overview of my media consumption. What about you?
This video made me wonder: when men are referred to in the pejorative in media? It seems that that while society is rife with acceptable slurs for women, men are rarely frowned upon because of their nature or inappropriate behavior. In “sex scandal” after “sex scandal” the politician stands in front of the media with his wife in tow, apologizing for his lapse in judgment before emphasizing how much he loves his family; meanwhile the woman he paid is vilified for her prostitution in the media and then by the courts.
In the indie film Amy’s Orgasm (the title is far more salacious than the film), lead Amy sits down with shock jock Matt to discuss her best selling book. Despite their flirtatious banter, she reminds him, “slut, tramp, whore. Those are all words that would describe you if you were a woman. But you’re not. You’re a man; you’re a stud. I don’t date studs.” All of the nouns to describe a promiscuous woman have negative connotations, but for men, being a player is practically cause for celebration in their social circles.
Sexism has also had a role in the 2008 Presidential campaign. Blog Shakesville has documented 103 instances of sexism in the coverage of Hilary Clinton thus far. A CNN political commentator found himself in hotwater when he said some women deserve to be called a bitch, which by his definition seems to include aggressive, forceful women. . . in men that would be demonstrating traditional leadership skills and their ambitious.
As of 2006, women made up 50.7% of the US population, so if we’re offended by what we’re seeing, wouldn’t we “vote” to oust such negative stereotypes by choosing to consume different media? One of the main reasons we don’t see more uproar over the unbalanced coverage of women is ignorance. We’d have to recognize that the behavior is inappropriate, rather than the norm, in the first place.
Let me digress to a personal anecdote. In high school I reported being harassed by a group of male students in the hallways and in my chemistry class. Guidance had to have a few words with the guys, and the inappropriate behavior quelled, which was my goal. To my complete shock, a fellow classmate approached me in the hall to inform me that I was wrong to report the issue. “We’re women; we have to put up with it.”
Sorry, I have to disagree; what we do not denounce, we encourage and the latest studies on sexual harassment show another generation of girls growing up believing derrogatory remarks related to their gender to be the norm. Teen self-esteem expert Courtney Macavinta recently blogged about a new UC Santa Cruz study that found 9 in 10 girls between the ages of 12-18 report at least once experience of harassment at school including
**receiving inappropriate and unwanted romantic attention, hearing demeaning gender-related comments
**being teased about appearance
**receiving unwanted physical contact
**being teased, bullied, or threatened with harm by a male
The study points out that
Moreover, girls who had learned about feminism through the media or from people in their lives, including mothers and teachers, were more likely to recognize it than girls who had never heard about feminism, and girls who felt pressure from parents to conform to gender stereotypes perceived more sexism than other girls
You have to be able to identify a problem to call it out and demand change. Much like we’ve been desensitized to violence through TV, film, and video games; the same can be said of sexism and misogyny. Children are still in a culture that supports misogyny; at some point we have to break the cycle and stand up for equality, not just in women’s represenation in media, but for women in society in general.
Media that objectifies women and uses derogatory gender specific terminology reinforces language and ideology that denies women equal status. Judgement-neutral terminology should be the only acceptable language choice in so-called objective journalism, which is clearly, based on the above video, not the standard.
And it wouldn’t hurt if entertainment celebrated and multiplied strong female protagonists, instead of wondering why we need them.
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