With the nature of network news shifting and stumbling as it is, media literacy should become a priority curriculum issue for any school, especially those rushing to bring new media into their classrooms via networks .

Journalistic ethics are often "put out to pasture" and left to rust in the chase after ratings and profits.

How do our students learn to make sense of their worlds when so much of their information arrives distorted through the "looking glass" of mass media?

 

Wherever we look, tabloid values prevail. We see serious news stories shoved aside in favor of more sensational items as networks battle over declining market shares. We watch "human interest" stories with soap opera qualities prevail over events and policy issues of substance. We see microphones and cameras thrust into private moments like birds of prey descending upon carrion.

Decency, discretion respect, balance and context are roadkill - victims of the new entertainment tilted media.

 

While the newsroom was once insulated from both the "ratings game" and the corporate profit center, that insulation has fallen prey to "melt down" as the networks - having lost audience to cable - fight for survival and ratings.

 

Why is media literacy so important, then?

 

Students awaken each morning to a diet of scandal, violence, tragic events and controversy. News coverage now emphasizes the most "entertaining" of stories. Startling images shoulder aside thoughtful, balanced content. The lines between Hollywood, Disney, ABC, MicroSoft, and Simon & Schuster blur as entertainment becomes news, news becomes entertainment and "life becomes the movie."

 

Neal Gabler's book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, explains in some detail how sensation and entertainment have become the driving forces behind television news, as "news magazines" have grown in popularity and share of programming time . . .

What you have to do is give the audience a good show since presumably it is entertainment that people want. That is why television newsmagazines are so enamored of crowd-pleasing aesthetic strategems that even the network news programs wouldn't dare deploy: musical overlays on scenes of tragedy or poignance, ambush interviews, hidden cameras, the implacable lingering on an interviewee's emotional breakdown. Page 87