Teaching the Media

Just time for a very brief tip today. Apologies to anyone for whom this is old hat. Do you teach the mass media topic? Isn’t it about time we did something to drag our teaching of the topic kicking and screaming into the C21? In which case it seems to me that we should be going beyond parrotting out the models of media effects and bringing in a bit of topical material. Why not for example, use news clips from current political debate and highlight the tactics which political speakers use? For example - dog-whistle politics, negative campaigning, filibustering, lesser of two evils, fear mongering and so on. I know these aren’t on the syllabus -whoops -sorry- specification, but it seems to me that they can actually add more to students understanding of the issues and indeed of real social life, rather than the formalised knowledge of some perhaps rather ossified model. Looking at these tactics and then going on to models might - I’m just suggesting - bring the models alive, and could lead to more subtle evaluation of the models.

Just a thought. And after all, if media isn’t also about codes and language, what is it about? And I can see no good reason why we shouldn’t be teaching a bit about that. After all, we do Bernstein’s elaborated and restricted codes don’t we?