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Essay Subject: Analyzes television's cultural & political distortions, impact on children, gender issues, manipulation of images, blurring of news & entertainment.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Analyzes television's cultural & political distortions, impact on children, gender issues, manipulation of images, blurring of news & entertainment. Paper Introduction: INTRODUCTION Television is a pervasive element in American society today and is seen as having a great deal of influence, especially over the young. Numerous concerns have been raised over the influence of television and the impact it has on American social values. That impact is often negative, though perhaps not intended to be so. Television from its beginning has presented itself as a reflection of American society rather than a means of shaping it, yet critics charge that television does shape values and often does so by negating the social values considered most acceptable by society at large. The excuse for doing so is that the fact that people watch shows that they are not offended by the values seen on television. However, many people are offended and have challenged television to promote values beneficial to society Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. However, manypeople are offended and have challenged television to promote valuesbeneficial to society rather than those that could damage society.Television undercuts American values in many ways, three important areasevident today involve cultural distortions, political distortions, and theblurring of news and entertainment to create a false image of reality. Television is presumed to have a particular effect on children overand above what it might have on adults. INTRODUCTION Television is a pervasive element in American society today and isseen as having a great deal of influence, especially over the young.Numerous concerns have been raised over the influence of television and theimpact it has on American social values. Television from its beginning haspresented itself as a reflection of American society rather than a means ofshaping it, yet critics charge that television does shape values and oftendoes so by negating the social values considered most acceptable by societyat large. To some children, the screen is areal-world space, and they feel that everything that happens in this samereal-world space is related. & Hanson, J. 7) Skills at assembling stories ease the task of cognitiveprocessing and enhance the likelihood of comprehension. Wilson. Lowe (ed.), Television and American Culture. CONCLUSION Television undercuts American values by repeating the samemeaningless images in different contexts as a way of denying the need topromote values at all. It is the task of journalists to provide people with such knowledge. The fact that we are more and more inundated with programs thatcannot tell the difference between news and entertainment should beapparent to anyone examining the television schedule. In spite ofthis, however, we are more and more dependent on the news. Theyare doing this because they believe they will have a larger audience withthe hearing than with a soap opera, assuming their viewers are any longercapable of telling the difference. Theargument offered by Dole and Medved, however, is ideologically driven andassumes that there is one set of American values which are sacrosanct andwhich nave to be promoted by the media. Bennett, W.L. News: The politics of illusion. Women were rarely portrayed outside the home or family situation. In the 195 s, says the Commission,women had particular roles as homemakers: Television households were always spotless and smoothly managed, but the women who maintained them usually looked as though they spent most of their time in the beauty parlor. 2) The implicit recognition and response to form features precede theability to define or describe these features. Thus, attention is maximal generally for movies and, among children, for children's programming (Comstock, 1991, 26). Put simply, it is this: as our news media, especially television, fill our days with information from everywhere, about everything, we have increasing difficulty in deciding what any of it means. The reality is that this isless an assault than a subtle shift in perceptions caused less by anywilful desire to corrupt than by laziness and the repetition of certainimages which undercut traditional values. Greenfield, P.M. The only value television recognizes isthe value of a large audience, and this is the real source of complaint forconservatives and liberals alike--television devalues the very idea ofvalues, and this view is the real social ill it fosters. (1985). Window dressing on the set:Women and minorities in television. The Rodney King case, including the riotand three trials, did not become the newscast obsession that this case hasin a much shorter period of time. Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press. Commission on Civil Rights (1977). Of course, these images do promote valuesunintentionally and deny accepted values by not reinforcing them. The issue of television violence and its effect on childrenremains a volatile one. "The FCC takes a hard look at television." InC. This manipulation generally goes unexaminedand unchallenged because the news media is complicitous in the process.The making of an image, a practice which every candidate undertakes, fitsthe shape of the news in America today, especially television news.Bennett (1988) notes, however, that this sort of practice is open not onlyto abuse but to long-term damage to the political process: The lessons of history tell us that it is precisely through the repeated use of normalized political images that the greatest political deception and distortion occurs. Postman is well aware of the consequences of the increasing glut ofnews, and what he says applies to a given story like the Simpson case aswell: We are calling attention to the problem known as information glut. Ferris, C.D. Sometheorists have simply approached the issue with the question as to whetheror not television has any effect on gender role at all, and if so, what docurrent television presentations portray and what effect do theseportrayals have. News is not entertainment. The Commission found that women insituation comedies in the 197 s still tended to be subordinate to the menin their lives, though some female characters had become stronger over theyears and some new situations were explored: The new situation comedies are attempting to portray women more realistically than in the past. Willingness to explore controversial issues has resulted in the treatment of issues pertinent to women: rape, unwanted pregnancy, or job discrimination. Ferris (1981) notes that young children in asurvey were asked whether they would give up their toys, their fathers, ortheir television, and the majority said they would give up their toys andeven talking with their fathers before they would give up their television(Ferris, 1981, 141). Some of the elements the viewermust decode are visual, and others are auditory. Washington, D.C.----------------------- 11 However, there are numerous unanswered and disturbingquestions about what effect long hours of television watching may have onchildren. It is notsurprising that critics of television cannot agree on the effect of genderrole presentation in the media when they cannot agree among themselves onwhat types of gender roles should be projected in the first place. The medium of television has a symbolic code,and how we understand this code determines the messages we receive and theinterpretation we place on those messages. Postman (1992) indicates this when hewrites, To understand what is happening in the world and what it means requires knowledge of historical, political, and social contexts. 8) No matter what the cognitive level, temporally related scenes arebetter recalled than independent successive scenes. Yet, we do not have to resort to questions of misunderstanding oftelevision to analyze how children learn about issues such as gender, forthe overt messages of television are such that there are certain attitudesand trends which can be discerned and which are likely to have an effect onall viewers, with children gaining much of their knowledge of the worldthrough television, which in any case they see as more real-world than doadults. Thus, a hidden problem with reporting "official positions" as the main news of the day is the resulting likelihood of communicating a considerable amount of deception, lying, and political fabrication disguised as fact (Bennett, 1988, 72).The images projected in the media have considerable strength even thoughthere is usually a weak relationship between image and reality: The thing that makes an image compelling is not sound logic based in objective fact, but its appeal to hopes and fears based on self- fulfilling logic and self-serving fact (Bennett, 1988, 97). That impact is often negative,though perhaps not intended to be so. A poll showed that more than 7 percent of the public agreedwith Dole, with many "in favor of further restricting what can be broadcaston television" (Alexander & Hanson, 1997, 1 6). Portrayals of women in occupational roles were infrequent andwere restricted to relatively few occupations, and women were also rarelydepicted as working wives (Commission on Civil Rights, 1977, 13). A number of important findings have emerged fromthis research: 1) Children as young as 14 months can translate the two-dimensionsevents of television into an internalized representation for behaving inthe three-dimensional space of the real world. A new term hasbecome used to describe much of what is broadcast on television--"reality-based" programs, an ambiguous term that implies both that the stories arenews and that they are partially not news at the same time. His argument was seconded by critics such as MichaelMedved, arguing "that widespread disenchantment about the destructivemessages of today's movies, television, and music has resulted indiminished audiences for popular culture products" (Alexander & Hanson,1997, 1 ). CULTURAL DISTORTIONS One of the issues raised in recent years involves how televisionserves as an example in teaching gender roles to children. (1988). New York:Longman. The heaviest viewers of televisionare children. Taking sides. 6) Younger children are more dependent on appearances than behavingin forming beliefs about a character. The "reality" shows and what are called tabloid television shows inparticular concentrate on such taboos, building every story into a majorevent whether warranted or not. The Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1977)found that minorities and women were underrepresented on television: "Whenthey do appear they are frequently seen in token or stereotyped roles"(Commission on Civil Rights, 1977, 3). Mind and media. New York: Dushkin. BLURRING OF NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT Television news dominates today, and television news in particulartends toward the superficial. Amusing ourselves to death. (1981). The excuse for doing so is that the fact that people watch showsthat they are not offended by the values seen on television. The networks are not doingthis to educate the public or illustrate the workings of democracy. The issue was raised recently in a speech by Bob Dole during his runfor the presidency when he blamed Hollywood and television for corruptingfamily values. Comstock, G. Furthermore, the attempt to deal with issues such as these seems to have enriched the portrayals of the females in situation comedies (Commission on Civil Rights, 1977, 23). Postman notethe degree to which news programs and so-called news programs are coming todominate our lives, leading to an information glut that may be moreappearance than substance and that has produced a concentration on thebizarre and unsavory: The plain facts are these: television operates around the clock, its audiences cannot be segregated, and programs, especially TV news, require a continuous supply of novel information to engage the audience. POLITICAL DISTORTIONS Americans today have a wide variety of news outlets from which theycan gather their news, including newspapers, publications, books, broadcasttelevision stations, radio stations, the Internet, and cable, including 24-hour cable new outlets such as CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-Span. We do not have time to reflect on any piece of news, and we are rarely helped, least of all by television itself, to know what weight or value to assign to any of it (Postman, 1992, 152-153). Critics,however, ask whether the citizen is any better informed in spite of--orbecause of--all this choice, and critics further charge that "many citizens--perhaps the majority--live in a state of confusion and ignorance aboutgovernment and political issues" (Bennett, 1988, 1). Even on stories of substance, televisionnews only has a limited time in which to present the facts. Television in America. Researchers have found that children do not always understandtelevision in the same way adults do. Leaders of the political parties in and out of government know thevalue of the news and have developed many ways of manipulating the way theyare covered, an issue that surfaces from time to time when the news mediabegins to resent being manipulated or somehow has a particular reason foropposing that manipulation. Thus television must make use of every existing taboo in the culture, including sexual perversity, irrational violence, insanity, and the ineptitude of political leaders (Postman, 1992, 15 ). Thedissemination of the news is seen as a vital function in a democraticsociety, so vital that the Founding Fathers embodied the principle of afree press in the Bill of Rights. (198 ). Postman, N. Thefact that news is driven more and more by ratings and thus geared to whatpeople want, or at least to what news directors think they want, isapparent in the incredible coverage afforded to the O.J. (1997). New York: H.W. Beverly Hills: SDFE. Comstock (1991) reports on a number of studies that have providedinformation regarding how children process television and what cognitiveprocesses are utilized. 3) The ability to comprehend content, format, and form featuresincreases with cognitive level. New York: Viking. It is a necessity in a democratic society (Postman, 1992, 9). Other groups in American societycould offer a different set of values to be promoted and be just as correctthat television is not doing so. 4) Congruencies between content, format, and form help young peoplelearn from television. All of this is done to increase ratingsand thus to increase the size of the audience sold to advertisers. U.S. 9) Because there are many factors on which comprehension depends,visual attention is an imperfect predictor even among young children as towho would be least equipped to learn from television (Comstock, 1991, 25-26).Comstock concludes: This pattern leads to a principle: Attention rises with the ability and need to assemble a narrative successfully, and falls when elements can be comprehended individually or missed elements can be readily supplied by the viewer. Simpson case. References Alexander, A. Women have always been more frequently portrayed in comedy roles thanin serious roles on television. 5) Younger children comprehend portrayals better if they resemble invarious ways their own circumstances. This is whythe networks have often abandoned their daytime schedules in order to bringdirect coverage from the courthouse for hour after hour, and this for apreliminary hearing and not a full-blown trial. LosAngeles has been the site of a number of huge news stories in the last fewyears, and not one of them has received the sort of coverage over anextended time that this case has. Children take time tolearn some of the vocabulary of television and may misunderstand therelationship of one shot to another or one image to another (Greenfield,1984, 9-11). (1984). This attention is being given notbecause the issues involved are of such great public moment or because itproduces such a volume of real news each day. When they ventured into the occupational world their roles were stereotyped (Commission on Civil Rights, 1977, 8).A National Organization for Women report in 1972 found that women inwhatever role on television "were portrayed as dependent, unintelligent,submissive creatures who were adjuncts of men" (Commission on Civil Rights,1977, 12). As Alexander and Hanson(1997) note, many believe that television and other elements in theentertainment industry is "an enemy that assaults our values and corruptsour children" (Alexander & Hanson, 1997, 113). Rather, it has become anobsession because news directors believe it attracts viewers. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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