Living in a Media World

If you listen to media criticism for long, you will hear a pair of words used over and over again: they and them. It is easy to take potshots at some anonymous bogeymen—they—who embody all evil. I even engaged in it at the beginning of this section series of posts with the title “The Seven Secrets About the Media ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know 2.0.”

So who are they? 

No one. 

Everyone. 

A nonspecific other we want to blame. 

Anytime I used they in a news story, my high school journalism teacher would ask who “they” were. And that’s what you need to ask whenever you hear criticism of the media. It isn’t that the criticism is not accurate. It very well may be. But it probably applies to a specific media outlet, a specific journalist, a certain song, or a particular movie. But we can make few generalizations about an industry so diverse that it includes everything from a giant corporation spending a reported $1 billion to produce Avengers: Infinity War and its Avengers: Endgame sequel to young people posting photos and messages on Snapchat.  There are a lot of media out there, but no unified them.

See all of the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0

Going online used to mean going someplace where there was a computer plugged into an Ethernet cable, but increasingly, going online now means pulling out your mobile device. And in many parts of the world, the mobile internet is the only internet.

Recent data from the Pew Research Center show that, as of 2018, 95 percent of American adults have a mobile phone and 77 percent of us own smartphones. That’s up from 35 percent just seven years earlier. When we just look at young adults, ages 18–29, 100 percent of them have mobile phones, and 94 percent have smartphones. That stereotypical image of young people always having their nose in their phone does have some basis in fact. If we look at it from the point of view of the media providers, we see that 45 percent of U.S. adults often get news from a mobile device compared to 36 percent who often get news from their desktop computer or laptop.

Another way to get a feel for the growing impact of mobile media is to look at the size of the audience for various channels. Those that allow people to express themselves publically through their mobile devices have much bigger audiences than those that call for passive consumption. So Facebook has an audience of 2 billion, YouTube has 1.5 billion, and the Super Bowl (on television) has an audience of 119 million. Think about it—the Super Bowl has just over 5 percent of the audience size of Facebook.

If you look outside the United States, the use of mobile media becomes even more significant. Among refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, mobile media are the only media people have access to. During the Arab Spring movement in Egypt in 2011, much of the news coming out of the country was by way of mobile phones.

Computers and laptops are still important tools for going online, but with the growing power, size, and availability

See all of the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0

No matter what media you are using—whether it be a legacy newspaper or television station or a social media channel like Facebook—you are always interacting with it at a social level—whether it be face-to-face, with friends on Facebook, or with the entire world via Twitter.

Take, as an example, when your author went to hear President Obama speak at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) campus. I got the expected reactions from friends to the selfie of my wife and me standing in line to enter the arena. I also shared news on Twitter about the president’s visit from social media guru Dr. Jeremy Lipschultz. And while I was on Dr. Lipschultz’s Twitter page, Omaha World-Herald weather reporter Nancy Gaarder tweeted out a photo of me at work. Now, in this case, Gaarder and I were interacting because she was sitting behind me and we got to talking face-to-face. But this was only the first of many social interactions for the day based on news being shared socially.

As everyone in the arena waited for the president to appear, I tweeted out a photo of the press corps area on the floor of the arena, along with the hashtag #POTUSatUNO, one of several in use at the event. Before long I picked up a response from Marjorie Sturgeon, a multimedia journalist for Omaha’s Action 3 News, who noted she could see herself in my photo.

Meanwhile, I was sharing news from the Omaha World-Herald, UNO student journalists, and other observers. Media recall research tells us that one of the best predictors of the news we will remember is the news we talk about. Thus the news we share socially will become the news that matters most to us.

When important news breaks, it’s likely we’ll hear about it first through social media. When a mass shooter killed at least fifty-eight people and left more than five hundred people injured in Las Vegas in October 2017, there were lots of contradictory stories circulating on Twitter and other social media. But with all the reports circulating, it could be hard to tell which stories should be believed. New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Casey McDermott noted that NPR included the following statement at the bottom of its web stories about the shooting:

This is a developing story. Some things that get reported by the media will later turn out to be wrong. We will focus on reports from police officials and other authorities, credible news outlets and reporters who are at the scene. We will update as the situation develops.

NPR’s media news show On the Media has a guide for consumers dealing with breaking news that was shared widely on social media at the time of the shooting. Here’s an example of it from Matthew Gertz of the watchdog group Media Matters:

See all of the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0

Secret 4 is a little different than the oft-repeated slogan, “Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.” Instead, it says that media face the same issues over and over again as technologies change and new people come into the business.

The fight between today’s recording companies and file sharers has its roots in the battle between music publishers and the distributors of player piano rolls in the early 1900s. The player piano was one of the first technologies for reproducing musical performances. Piano roll publishers would buy a single copy of a piece of sheet music and hire a skilled pianist to have his or her performance recorded as a series of holes punched in a paper roll. That roll (and the performance) could then be reproduced and sold to anyone who owned a player piano without further payment to the music’s original publisher. 

Then, in 1984, Sony successfully defended itself against a lawsuit from Universal Studios by arguing that it had a right to sell VCRs to the public because there were legitimate, legal uses for the technology. Universal had protested the sales because the video recorders could be used to duplicate its movies. Before long, the studios quit trying to ban the VCR and started selling videocassettes of movies directly to consumers at reasonable prices. All of a sudden, the studios had a major new source of revenue. 

This can also be seen with the repeated fears of new media technologies emerging over the years. In the 1930s, there was fear that watching movies, especially gangster pictures, would lead to precocious sexual behavior, delinquency, lower standards and ideals, and poor physical and emotional health. The 1940s brought concern about how people would react to radio programs, particularly soap operas. Comic books came under attack in the 1950s. The notion that comic books were dangerous was popularized by a book titled Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham. Wertham also testified before Congress that violent and explicit comic books were a cause of teenage delinquency and sexual behavior. The industry responded to the criticism by forming the Comics Code Authority and ceasing publication of popular crime and horror comics such as Tales From the Crypt and Weird Science.

The 1980s and 1990s saw controversies over offensive rap and rock lyrics.  These controversies reflected widespread concern about bad language and hidden messages in songs. In 2009, pop star Britney Spears had a not-so-hidden allusion to the “F word” in her song “If U Seek Amy.” If you speak the title aloud, it sounds like you are spelling out F, U, . . . well, you get the picture. Critics were, of course, shocked and dismayed at this example of a pop star lowering public taste.

Of course, Spears didn’t really create her naughty little lyric on her own. Aside from a host of rock and blues singers who have used similar lines, Slate writer Jesse Sheidlower notes that James Joyce used the same basic line in Ulysses, when he has a group of women sing:

If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.

A careful reading of the third line will let you find a second hidden obscenity as well. 

Numerous media critics and scholars have argued that television and movies present a distorted view of the world, making it look like a much more violent and dangerous place than it is. More recently, mobile devices have been blamed for a range of social ills, from car accidents caused by distracted drivers to promiscuity caused by sexually explicit mobile phone text and photo messages.

Why has there been such long-running, repeated concern about the possible effects of the media? Media sociologist Charles R. Wright says that people want to be able to solve social ills, and it is easier to believe that poverty, crime, and drug abuse are caused by media coverage than to acknowledge that their causes are complex and not fully understood. 

Writing in 1948, sociologists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld identified four major aspects of public concern about the media:

• Concern that because the media are everywhere, they might be able to control and manipulate people. This is a large part of the legacy of fear.
• Fear that those in power will use the media to reinforce the existing social structure and discourage social criticism. When critics express concern about who owns and runs the media, this is what they are worried about.
• The belief that mass entertainment is a waste of time that detracts from more useful activities.

When your mother told you to turn off the television set and go outside, this was her concern!

See all of the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0