Media Myths Answered

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Get Smart(er)!
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Dear Smarties: Professor Brenda Cooper and I started compiling items for the “media myths” quiz many years ago when we noticed how many weird stories (and I’m not talking about “News of the Weird”) routinely circulate in the popular media. At first, these things were just funny: How could people be so gullible? But more recently we can see that certain big players in public discourse have moved from the whacko fringes into the mainstream, resulting in misinformation that is not funny, but actually misleads sizable portions of the population.

One recent example is the Pew Center poll that showed major percentages of “normal” Americans believing that Barack Obama is a) a radical practicing Muslim who was raised in a Muslim madrasah; and b) Obama was not born in America. A decade ago this stuff would be banner headlines on Weekly World News (I have one from the 1980s: DONOR WANTS KIDNEY BACK! but today they're usually about sexy aliens), and would be worth little more than a chuckle at the supermarket checkout. But now, “fair and balanced” has been coopted by “loud and ridiculous” in the “responsible” press—a Spring issue of American Journalism Review documents how the mainstream news media out-whackoed the whacko press with increasingly lurid stories about golfer Tiger Woods that were completely unsubstantiated. Sure, Woods is a dawg and a philanderer, but serious news outlets from the “Today Show” to major newspapers simply repeated claims by a string of women who said they’d had affairs with him, without ever getting confirmation beyond their own stories.

In other areas, it also should be clear from the “myths” quiz that demographic and economic factors play important roles in the content of news, entertainment and advertising content. For example, what is the impact of so many white, middle-class men being in charge of so much of media content? As we discuss in the theories section this week, individual selective perception inevitably (but not necessarily intentionally) plays a role in how individual reporters or directors frame their stories.

Of course they do! A white, middle-class man sees and understands the world and what’s “real” and “true” differently than a, say, white, middle-class woman or—certainly—a 20-something Palestinian or a 75-year-old black woman from Birmingham, Alabama. I see the world differently than you do, and my mother sees the world differently than I do. Are we ideologically driven? Probably not. (Some are, but I read in the Weekly World News that Glenn Beck is an alien, which explains a lot...) It’s just that different people see and understand events from different perspectives. That’s a good thing in a free society. It also means that we all need to consider the source of our information (from Glenn Beck to Rachel Maddow to Ted Pease) and the source’s perspectives and possible goals.

Anyway, I meant to send you the “answers” to the Media Myths Quiz over the weekend. You can find them here. Check them against your answers, and think about some of the implications of these items and what they mean to you, personally, in your media use and information consumption, and what they might mean to the larger society. Media Myths Answered.

Smarten Up!
Dr. Ted Professor of Interesting Stuff