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Archive for the ‘Media Literacy’ Category

Lesson 120 The News Media is Part of the Problem

Posted in Lessons Learned, Media Literacy on July 7, 2012| 1 Comment »

My wife and I spent this week at the Chautauqua Institution, a cultural, educational, and family vacation retreat in upstate New York. We had been told that attending one time would have us coming back again and again for years. And I must admit we are hooked.

The main morning program for the week was moderated by Jim Lehrer, retired host and executive producer of the PBS News Hour, and was focused on a review of  all of the issues related to the current presidential campaign. The topics ranged from the latest political poll findings, to the polarization of the parties, to the role of presidential debates, to the future of science and research, to an analysis of what voters need to know.

Only several times was the role of the media itself mentioned. Finally on Friday, Michael Gerson, former aid to George W. Bush and current conservative Washington Post Columnist, suggested that the new media world of 24/7 cable channels, talk radio, and bloggers has created a situation where people can now select only what they want to hear. There are no editors, and no effort to achieve balance of viewpoints. People therefore end up reinforcing their biases and further polarizing their opinions, rather than expanding their understanding and tolerance.

What we need now is a situation where people  become their own editors, and where a personal objective of theirs is to learn from other points of view. They can no longer demonize and treat opponents as enemies. We must find a way to return to the day when we debate during the day, socialize in the evenings as friends, and then sit down and work out our differences in an environment of mutual respect.

At the end of the week I concluded there is much to be discussed about the role of the media in all of this polarization. Do too many of today’s journalists see polarized gridlock as a happy source of ongoing daily headlines?  Should the modern journalist bear some responsiblity for reminding people to become their own editors, and to show them how to do it? In the final analysis, is the media part of the problem, and should we have more discussions on campuses, in schools, and at places like Chautauqua about the psychic and social consequences of media?

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Lesson 119 Media Revolutions Change Everything

Posted in Lessons Learned, Media Literacy on June 28, 2012| Leave a Comment »

The longer I work in the strategic communication field the more I find credibility in a kind of “you are what you eat” theory of how media affects us.

When print was the dominant medium in society, using it caused people to become more rational and structured in their thinking…or so it seemed to me and Marshall McLuhan. But when television became the dominant medium, using it caused people to take on more of its characteristics, and they became more emotional, fragmented, less rational, and more impatient.  With TV came less detail and more drama. Indeed, TV even changed the way we arranged the furniture in our living rooms, thereby changing how our families interacted… or how they didn’t!

Now the new digital media revolution is changing the world once more, and all the basic questions about social and psychic effects are being asked still again. How is it affecting how we think and learn?  Has it again changed behavior patterns in families, and is that good or bad? 

How about politics and government?  How much is media to blame for the extreme polarization we now have in our political campaigns, and in our legislatures?  What impact have these new media platforms had on how governments operate, and on who has the power?

What about the news?  In this new environment how do we know what is fact, and what is not?  What happened to the editors that checked the facts and demanded multiple sources before news was published?  Do 24/7 cable news channels, bloggers, website aggregators, citizen journalists, and social media users merely generate information clutter and create more confusion about what is really gone on?   

What impact has economic cutbacks had on how international events and crises are covered and reported?  Who is really reporting this news, and how is it distributed?  Why does it seem that all of the network and freelance reporters herd to crisis locations, thus leaving the rest of the world unreported? 

How has social media changed the ways nation’s conduct diplomacy?  What is “public diplomacy,” and why is it so important in today’s information cluttered environment?  What can we expect as more and more people inside closed societies find out about how people live in other parts of the world?

And what impact has all this had on institutional religion, on education at all levels, and on every organization–public and private, profit and nonprofit–trying to be understood with relentless data implosion going on all around them?    

Today’s reality is that each person now must become his or her own media editor?  The fact is that we can regulate our choices so as to receive only information we like, or we can achieve a more balanced diet.  It’s now up to each of us to decide.

But does this mean that to have intelligent consumers of media in the future we must introduce  media literacy education in our schools?  And if so, how and where?

These are the fundamental questions I will address this fall with some of the brightest Honors College students we have at TCU. And I will use this new media to bring experts and great thinkers into the classroom from various locations to collaborate with us. Stay tuned, you won’t want to miss the “breaking news!”

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Lesson 106 TV News, New Media, and Books!

Posted in Lessons Learned, Media Literacy, Strategic Communication on March 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

This week I had the honor of interviewing Jim and Kate Lehrer as a part of the Alan K. Simpson-Norman Y. Mineta Leaders Series at The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars. Over 425 students from universities across the nation and abroad, their academic advisors, corporate supporters, and special guests, were in attendance.

Noted presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, has called Jim Lehrer a “national monument” for his contribution to TV News, and Kate is an award-winning writer of fiction. And so our conversation moved from the story behind the PBS News Hour, to the dramatic impact of new media on the journalism profession, to the role and future of books.

For Jim and Kate, life and work has been an active partnership. It all began when they met in Dallas, Texas. Jim was a newspaper man soon to move to noncommercial  television as the executive producer and host of a whole new concept in TV news. Kate was an English literature graduate from TCU in Fort Worth, Texas, and was instantly attracted by Jim’s intelligence and his surprising interest in literature.

The new concept in TV news was actually a simple one: Bring newspaper journalists together at the end of the day to sit around a table and report on what they found covering their beats… which included city hall, the public schools, higher education, neighborhood associations, the arts, and more. And it was this idea that would later form the foundation of a long running national broadcast. It would be an ongoing collaboration of Jim and colleague Robert McNeil. And from the very beginning it would be committed to balanced reporting, respect for the integrity of each guest, and dedicated to reporting stories in-depth. All of this has never changed.

As for the impact of new media, the Lehrer’s find it generally positive. Jim is a first amendment advocate, and  aggressively defends free speech.  In answer to a question from the floor he said he believes “candidates have the right to label a portion of health legislation as “death panels,” if they wish,” because he is confident that other points of view on the issue will follow. As for social and new media, the News Hour is working hard to utilize all the tools, so long as the original culture and integrity of the program can be maintained.

We agreed that our collective challenge will be to make sure that each person in today’s media world realizes he or she must become an active editor. Each one of us can choose only the media we agree with if we wish. Or, we can challenge ourselves with all points of view and sources of information.  In the end, we agreed that “media literacy” courses on the topic in public schools and universities are a good idea.

Both Jim and Kate write fiction, and they also talked about how important it was in their lives.  Both agreed that writing fiction allows “getting at the truth” in a way that day-to-day journalism does not. However, Jim’s latest book, Tension City, is a nonfiction “inside look” at the presidential debates.  Jim has moderated eleven of the debates, far more than any other journalist. He believes debates are a very important opportunity to see candidates perform under pressure, which the job of the presidency will require of them every day.  The title came from the senior George Bush, who used those words to describe his entire experience!

Our time together went by far too quickly.  There was so much to talk about, and so little time.  But it was seventy-five minutes I will never forget.  I was in the presence of one of the giants of broadcast journalism, and an award-winning author. And together they demonstrated the power of life partnerships when setting out to do great things.

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Lesson 105 Achieving Media Literacy

Posted in Integrated Marketing, Leadership, Lessons Learned, Media Literacy on March 22, 2012| Leave a Comment »

When television became the dominant medium it changed everything.  It changed how we arranged our furniture. It changed how families interacted, how politics are conducted, how religious denominations communicated, and even how we think and what we know.  Now the “new media” revolution is changing everything again!

Today there is no way to tell facts from fiction. And it’s all too easy to select only the channels or websites or blogs that reinforce our preconceived biases. Whatever’s easy and satisfying. There is so much information out there that it’s easy to become helplessly confused.  What is really going on in Afghanistan anyway?  I get news reports everyday and I still don’t know! 

I need to be my own editor but I don’t know what that means, or how. And what’s more, no one has yet shown me the need… convincingly.  Well, the need is now, and it’s getting serious! 

We are becoming a polarized society, and it’s too easy to fall into the trap of feeding our own narrow beliefs.  Solving real problems requires knowing and respecting all sides of all issues.  It requires being able to represent our cause, but then when the time comes to cooperate  in taking steps to move the society forward. The concept of “compromise now and eventually win the day” has been lost.

Early in my academic career I launched an initiative called “The Media Project,” which sought to show the public just how television was changing everything.  I spoke to teacher in-service conferences urging them to add units of study on media literacy in their humanities and social studies courses.  I spoke to parent-teacher organizations urging them to teach intelligent uses of television at home. Turn it on, but also turn it off! I asked school systems to consider adding whole courses on the topic.  All of this was aimed to simply get people to understand the power of media, and how to manage its use in their own lives.

Since then my life moved off in the direction of helping organizations make themselves better understood.  This route required accepting the realities of how media revolutions change everything, and then figuring out how to cut through all this information clutter with a unified message. It’s not easy. And only partial success is ever possible, and even that takes intensive interactive communication over time.

When I put my academic hat back on today I find myself once again thinking we still need a nationwide media literacy eduction program. In fact, we need it more than ever. We need it in our public and private schools, as a part of the core curricula in universities, and maybe even offered and promoted by the media itself.

Only a better educated public can make democracy work. And it is becoming more and more clear to me every day that understanding how media influences and changes everything should be a vital part of  everyone’s education.  And it’s not just the programming content, it’s the constant use of the technology itself that changes how everything works around it.

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