Page 267 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Med a L teracy: Creat ng Better C t zens or Better Consumers?

of courses in history and social studies, for example, dealing with the role the
media play in shaping our understandings of the world and public opinion
about important social issues. However, from this perspective it is also crucial
to have courses specifically devoted to media education in order to avoid losing
focus on the centrality of media to the promotion of democracy.

mEDia EDuCaTion goaLs anD ThE
ConsumEr/CiTizEn quEsTion

In regard to the question of whether media literacy should assume a pro-
tectionist stance, those who argue against protectionism point out that people
actually receive a lot of pleasure from the media they use and that attempting to
protect them from something they have freely chosen is, at best, heavy-handed
and insensitive, and at worst, an attempt to justify censorship. However, for those
who emphasize the cultivation of engaged citizens rather than sophisticated
consumers, a critical stance on the media does not assume that people must be
protected from “bad” media and it does not ignore the pleasure that media pro-
vide. These critics do argue, however, that the stranglehold of commercial media
on our culture is detrimental to democratic ideals. They suggest that, contrary
to supporting censorship, they want an opening-up of the media system to more
diverse voices and ideas. While recognizing that media do offer audiences all
sorts of pleasures, they also ask how commercial industries have come to define
what pleasure is and why there is such a narrow range of acceptable pleasurable
images on display in the mass media—extremely limited notions of femininity,
masculinity, and proper gender relationships, for example.
Educators’ perspectives on whether media literacy should be explicitly politi-
cal or ideological are also clearly related to their sense of its purpose. Those who
believe that media literacy should be about cultivating citizenship unavoidably
must deal with what might be considered political issues—issues of power, con-
trol, access to resources, and the ability to create and implement public policy.
Critics of this sort of approach to media education argue that teachers should not
impose their own ideological perspectives on students and that a political ap-
proach runs the risk of alienating students, parents, administrators, and school
boards. Responding to this criticism, others suggest that the avoidance of issues
such as media ownership and control, corporate concentration and conglom-
eration, and hypercommercialism and profiteering in the mass media is tacit ac-
ceptance of the status quo and therefore just as political as focusing in on these
trends and raising critical questions about their impact on democracy. They also
argue that asking students to recognize and think critically about power in the
media and in the real world, and how it impacts on their lives, is not the same as
pushing a particular political ideology on students.
Finally, the different positions that media literacy advocates hold on the role
of corporate sponsorship of media education are also quite clearly a function of
whether they believe that media literacy is a matter a learning how to read mes-
sages in a more sophisticated manner in order to be better consumers of media,
or whether media literacy must go beyond messages in order to ask citizens to