Living in a Media World

The mass media, both news and entertainment, are frequently accused of trying to put forward an extremist agenda of violence, permissiveness, homosexuality, drug use, edgy fashion, and non-mainstream values.

People in the media business, be they entertainers or journalists, respond with the argument that they are just “keeping it real,” portraying the world as it is by showing aspects of society that some people want to pretend don’t exist. They have no agenda, the argument goes; they just want to portray reality.

Now it is true that much of what the media portray that upsets people is real. On the other hand, it is a bit disingenuous to argue that movie directors and musicians are not trying for shock value when they use offensive language or portray stylized violence combined with graphic sexuality. Think back to any of a number of recent horror movies. We all know that teenagers routinely get slashed to ribbons by a psycho killer just after having sex, right? Clearly, movie producers are trying to attract an audience by providing content that is outside of the mainstream.

The problem with the argument between “keeping it real” and “extremist agenda” is that it misses what is actually happening. There can be no question that audiences go after media content that is outside of the mainstream. By the same token, the more non-mainstream content is presented, the more ordinary it seems to become. This is what is meant by Secret 3—one of the mass media’s biggest effects on everyday life is to take culture from the margins of society and make it into part of the mainstream, or center. This process can move people, ideas, and even individual words from small communities into mass society.

We can see this happening in several ways. Take the 1975 cult movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show that tells the story of a gay male transvestite (Dr. Frank-N-Furter) who is building a muscle-bound boyfriend (Rocky) for himself when a newly engaged straight couple show up at his castle’s doorstep seeking shelter from a storm. While the movie found success as a midnight movie in the counterculture community, it took years to move from being considered a flop to being a cult classic.

But in recent years Rocky Horror has moved from being a midnight movie to being a core element of popular culture. 

The Fox Broadcasting show Glee did a Halloween episode in 2010 where the kids in the show’s glee club produced The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a high school musical. But the Glee version had actress Amber Riley playing the part of Dr. Frank-N-Furter, while the part of Rocky was still played by a male actor, Chord Overstreet. Thus, the central plotline went from gay to straight. The Glee version also had Frank-N-Furter singing about being from “Sensational, Transylvania” instead of “Transsexual, Transylvania.” With these changes, The Rocky Horror Glee Show became a perfect example of Secret 3.

Rocky Horror started out as a camp musical in the 1970s that found enormous success in the counterculture community. But Glee sanitized it from a celebration of cross-dressing gay culture into a mass-market story of straight people playing with gay themes. In 2016, Fox Broadcasting showed a full remake of Rocky Horror that aired in October featuring trans actress Laverne Cox (of Orange Is the New Black fame) as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Hollywood Reporter reviewer Daniel Finberg noted in 2016 that the show is no longer shocking in that “one of the most unorthodox characters in the history of musicals has become oddly conventional.” 

An alternative approach is to look at how the media accelerate the adoption of activist language into the mainstream. Take the medical term intact dilation and extraction, which describes a controversial type of late-term abortion. A search of the LexisNexis news database shows that newspapers used the medical term only five times over a six-month period. On the other hand, partial-birth abortion, the term for the procedure used by abortion opponents, was used in more than 125 stories during the same time period. Opponents even got the term used in the title of a bill passed by Congress that outlawed the procedure, thus moving the phrase into the mainstream through repeated publication of the bill’s name.

This process is not a product of a liberal or conservative bias by the news media. It’s simply a consequence of the repeated use of the term in the press.

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

We often hear charges related to perceived sins of the so-called mainstream media. But who exactly are these mainstream media? For some, the MSM are the heavyweights of journalism, especially the television broadcast networks and the major newspapers, such as the New York Timesor the Washington Post. For others, the MSM are the giant corporations that run many of our media outlets. 

New York University journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen says that the term MSM is often used to refer to media we just don’t like—a “them.”  It isn’t always clear who constitutes the MSM, but in general we can consider them to be the old-line legacy media—the big-business newspapers, magazines, and television.

But are these old media more in the mainstream than our alternative media? Look at talk radio. Afternoon talk radio is dominated by conservative political talk show hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Limbaugh, in particular, is fond of complaining about how the MSM don’t “get it.” But how mainstream are the MSM? In April 2018, Fox News averaged 2.4 million viewers in prime time, MSNBC 2 million, and CNN about 1 million. 

With all the talk of cable news, it’s easy to forget that the legacy broadcast networks have significant audiences as well: ABC with 9.4 million viewers, NBC with 8.9 million, and CBS with 6.9 million, as of the first three months of 2018. (The Fox broadcast network does not have a network evening news broadcast.)  The Rush Limbaugh Show, on the other hand, averages 14 million listeners a week, and Fox host Sean Hannity’s radio show draws about 13.5 million listeners per week.  (Note that television audiences and radio audiences are measured differently.) 

So which is more mainstream? A popular afternoon radio show with a large daily audience or a television news program with a somewhat smaller audience?

And then there is video game streamer Daniel Middleton, aka DanTDM, who has nearly 17 million followers and more than 11 billion (that’s billion with a b) views on YouTube, streaming Minecraft and other video games. What could possibly be more mainstream than 17 million viewers and 11 billion views?  Again, these numbers are not directly comparable with television ratings—they are much, much bigger. Overall, YouTube claims to have more than 1.5 billion monthly users. Most videos don’t get a particularly large viewership, but the combined total is massive. 

So it is largely meaningless to describe one medium as mainstream and another as nonmainstream. They are all significant presences in our world. Can we distinguish between old and new media? Perhaps. Can we argue that our alternative sources of news and entertainment are any less significant than the traditional ones? Absolutely not.

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

Critics often talk about the effects the media have on us as though the media were something separate and distinct from our everyday lives. But conversations with my students have convinced me otherwise. Every semester I poll my students as to what media they have used so far that day, with the day starting at midnight. I run through the list: checking Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram; listening to the radio; checking the weather on a mobile device; binge-watching Stranger Things on Netflix; reading the latest John Green novel; listening to Spotify on an iPhone; and so it goes.

In fact, media use is likely to be the most universal experience my students will share. Surveys of my students find that more of my morning-class students have consumed media content than have eaten breakfast or showered since the day began at midnight. Are the media an important force in our lives? Absolutely! But the media are more than an outside influence on us. They are a part of our everyday lives.

Think about how we assign meanings to objects that otherwise would have no meaning at all. Take a simple yellow ribbon twisted in a stylized bow. You’ve seen thousands of these, and most likely you know exactly what they stand for—“Support Our Troops.” But that hasn’t always been the meaning of the symbol.

The yellow ribbon has a long history in American popular culture. It played a role in the rather rude World War II–era marching song “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” The ribbon was a symbol of a young woman’s love for a soldier “far, far away,” and the lyrics mention that her father kept a shotgun handy to keep the soldier “far, far away.” The yellow ribbon was also a symbol of love and faithfulness in the John Ford film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

In the 1970s, the ribbon became a symbol of remembering the U.S. staff in the Iranian embassy who had been taken hostage. This meaning came from the song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree,” made popular by the group Tony Orlando and Dawn. The song tells about a prisoner coming home from jail hoping that his girlfriend will remember him. She can prove her love by displaying the yellow ribbon. The prisoner arrives home to find not one but one hundred yellow ribbons tied to the tree. The display of yellow ribbons tied to trees became commonplace in newspaper articles and television news stories about the ongoing hostage crisis after the wife of a hostage started displaying one in her yard.

Later, during the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War, Americans were eager to show their support for the troops fighting overseas, even if they did not necessarily support the war itself, and the stylized ribbon started to become institutionalized as a symbol of support. The yellow “Support Our Troops” ribbon was followed by the red ribbon of AIDS awareness, the pink ribbon of breast cancer awareness, and ribbons of virtually every color for other issues.

And how do we know the meanings of these ribbons? We hear or see them being discussed through our media. The meaning is assigned by the creators of a ribbon, but the success of the ribbon depends on its meaning being shared through the media.

So, do the media create the meanings?

Not really.

But could the meanings be shared nationwide without the media? Absolutely not. The media may not define our lives, but they do help transmit and disseminate shared meanings from one side of the country to the other.

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

Media literacy is a tricky subject to talk about because few people will admit that they really don’t understand how the media operate and how messages, audiences, channels, and senders interact. After all, since we spend so much time with the media, we must know all about them, right? As an example, most students in an Introduction to Mass Communication class will claim that the media and media messages tend to affect other people far more than themselves. The question of media literacy can also become a political question, for which the answer depends on whether you are a liberal or a conservative, rich or poor, young or old. But the biggest problem in the public discussion of media literacy is that certain routine issues get discussed again and again, while many big questions are left unasked.

The Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0
Secret 1 The media are essential components of our lives.
Secret 2 There are no mainstream media (MSM).
Secret 3 Everything from the margin moves to the center.
Secret 4 Nothing’s new: Everything that happened in the past will happen again.
Secret 5 All media are social.
Secret 6 Online media are mobile media.
Secret 7 There is no “they.”

Five editions of this book ago, I first came out with the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know. These were things we don’t typically hear about in the media. Secret things. Perhaps it’s because there is no one out there who can attract an audience by saying these things. Or maybe it’s because the ideas are complicated, and we don’t like complexity from our media. Or maybe it’s because “they” (whoever “they” may be) don’t want us to know them.

But the media world has changed considerably since the secrets were first developed in 2006:

• Netflix had no streaming service—it was only a DVD-by-mail service.
• There was no iPhone—the BlackBerry with its little Chiclet keyboard was the height of smartphone technology.
• There were no tablet computers.
• Cell phone service was typically sold by the minute, and most mobile plans had a limit to the number of text messages that were included in the basic plan.
• Google was in the process of buying a cell phone video sharing service called YouTube created by three former PayPal employees.
• Facebook was only two years old, and use of it was limited to college students.
• Instagram hadn’t yet gone online—that wouldn’t happen until 2010. By 2018, it had eight hundred million active users.

Today, my students tell me they watch most of their video using Netflix streaming, virtually all of them have a smartphone and several social media accounts, and their most frequent way of going online is with a mobile device. So in the sixth edition, it became clear that it was time to update the Seven Secrets to better match the current media world, so we released the Seven Secrets About the Media “They” Don’t Want You to Know 2.0. These key issues of media literacy—which don’t get the discussion they deserve—provide a foundation for the rest of the chapters in this book. (And just who are “they”? Wait for Secret 7.)

(This post give you links to all seven secrets. Teachers – You may want to bookmark this series of posts. If your students don’t all have their books during the first week of class, these can be a big help in getting class started.)