Page 246 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Med a and the Cr s s of Values |

If anything, the growing availability of mass media technologies, and their in-
creasing complexity, raises more questions than ever about the relationship
between media and citizenship.

see also Bias and Objectivity; Blogosphere; Bollywood and the Indian Diaspora;
Digital Divide; Global Community Media; Media and Electoral Campaigns;
Nationalism and the Media; News Satire; Political Entertainment; Propaganda
Model; Public Opinion; Public Sphere; User-Created Content and Audience
Participation.
Further reading: Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983; Blumler, Jay, and Michael Gurevitch.
The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1997; Habermas, Jürgen. The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962/1989;
Janack, James. “Mediated Citizenship and Digital Discipline: A Rhetoric of Control
in a Campaign Blog.” Social Semiotics 16, no. 2 (2006): 283–301; Lewis, Justin, Sanna
Inthorn, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us
About Political Participation. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2005; McNair, Brian.
Introduction to Political Communication. London, Routledge. 1995; Street, John. Mass
Media, Politics and Democracy. London: Palgrave, 2001; Zoonen, Liesbet van. Entertain-
ing the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2005.
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

Media and the Crisis oF Values

The conflict between the need for free expression and the importance of
social responsibility has always accompanied the study of literature, the fine
arts, and various forms of information transmission since at least the time of
Aristotle’s The Rhetoric and Poetics. However, concern for such values surged
when printing technology made newspapers, magazines, and books available
on a much wider scale and as literacy became more widespread. The advent of
new technologies in the twentieth century—film, radio, sound recording, tele-
vision, the Internet—has provoked even more discussion, pitting defenders of
freedom of expression against guardians of public morality and responsibility.
Groups such as the Parents Television Council, whose stated mission is “to en-
sure that children are not constantly assaulted by sex, violence, and profanity
on television and in other media,” represent one side of the issue. Other groups,
such as media-watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which
attempts to offer “a well-documented criticism of media-based censorship” and
advocates “greater diversity in the press,” champion the ideal of freedom of the
press. Can a balance be struck between these two camps so that human values
can guide the production and usage of the media today?
The discussion of values in the media divides itself into considerations of:
(a) the role of the media in society as either a major influence on public atti-
tudes and behavior, or merely a reflection or reinforcement of a given society’s
values; (b) the specific mechanism of media influence on the values of readers,