Page 139 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Media Studies 123

launched a campaign by Mao to regain control of the party from pragma-
tists who favored capitalist style economic development over state run

collectivism. The posters vilified his adversaries, and soon a movement
called the Cultural Revolution began that set back China ’ s economic devel-
opment and resulted in many deaths through purges. A more genuinely
popular use of posters to attain political ends occurred in Argentina in the
1980s after a repressive conservative military dictatorship fi nally ended.
It had suppressed a leftist movement through torture and murder, and the
mothers of those killed protested in the Plaza de Mayo, a public square,
using posters and placards that contained pictures of those who had
“ disappeared. ” They eventually succeeded in drawing attention to the
atrocity and getting redress.
Why are the media – everything from wall posters to Internet sites – so
powerful? It is largely because they use words and images to convey ideas
that inspire action. The action they inspire can be mild and can take the
form of simple belief in something. Many people who regularly attend
action adventure movies actually believe that the images of Arabs in such

films are accurate representations of Arab reality. Or it can be extreme and
take the form of murder. When the leaders of the genocide in Rwanda in
1994 wanted to “ get the word out ” about what they intended to do, they
used the national radio system to broadcast calls for ethnic massacre to
begin. Or it can be both belief and action in a causal sequence. Images of
Jews propagated in German culture widely before World War II were in
part responsible for the genocide against them during the war. The images
made it possible to believe that Jews were worth killing because they posed
a threat to everything Germany ’ s conservative leaders wanted the nation
to stand for.
But for the most part, the media are educational and rhetorical; they

shape what we think and feel; they influence us to see things in certain ways
such that our behavior in regard to them takes certain forms. They paint
the particular picture of reality we hold in our minds, and that plays an
important role in determining the choices we make as we live each day, the
beliefs and values we hold, and the things we do in the real world. That
explains why many people are so concerned about who owns the media
and why governments sometimes place limits on how much of a single
medium such as television or how many different kinds of media any one
person can own. The assumption guiding such policies is that one person
can imprint his or her way of seeing the world on the media and use them
to foster that particular picture of reality in people ’ s minds. And if people ’ s