978-1319102852 Chapter 16 Part 2

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This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2005, 97 minutes). Academy Award-nominated director Kirby Dick

takes an incisive look at the Motion Picture Association of America, finds out who is on the

secretive rating board, and documents the movie-rating process. Ironically, the MPAA

slapped the documentary with an NC-17 rating for explicit scenes. This Film Is Not Yet Rated

was then “rating surrendered” and was recut for an R rating.

WEB SITES

ACLU: https://www.aclu.org

Benton Foundation (FCC reform news): https://www.benton.org/taxonomy/term/95

Benton Foundation (network neutrality news): https://www.benton.org/taxonomy/term/57

Benton Foundation (news regarding censorship): https://www.benton.org/taxonomy/term/6134

Benton Foundation (news about upcoming policy issues):

https://www.benton.org/taxonomy/term/6132

Center for Democracy and Technology: http://www.cdt.org

Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org

Federal Communications Commission: http://www.fcc.gov

First Amendment Center: http://www.newseuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center

Freedom Forum Institute: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/podcast/

Legal Information Institute (Cornell University Law School): http://www.law.cornell.edu

National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors: https://www.natoa.org

New America Foundation: http://www.newamerica.org

PBS Flashpoints: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/cultureshock/flashpoints

Pew Research Center: http://www.pewinternet.org

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Reporters without Borders: http://www.rsf.org

FURTHER READING

Cohn, Marjorie, and David Dow. Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of

Justice. Lanham, MD: Rowman, 2002.

Davis, Charles N., and Sigman L. Splichal. Access Denied: Freedom of Information in the

Information Age. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000.

Fish, Stanley. There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1994.

Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New

York: Vintage, 2002.

McChesney, Robert W. The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-

First Century. New York: Monthly Review, 2004.

McChesney, Robert W., Russell Newman, and Ben Scott. The Future of Media: Resistance and

Reform in the 21st Century. New York: Seven Stories, 2005.

Nichols, John, and Robert W. McChesney. Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell

Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. New York: New Press, 2005.

Peters, John Durham. Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Rainie, Lee, and M. Duggan. “Privacy and Information Sharing.” Washington, DC: Pew

Research Center, December 2015. http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/2016/Privacy-

and–Information-Sharing.

Starr, Paul. The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Mass Communications. New

York: Basic Books, 2004.

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Tillinghast, Charles H. American Broadcast Regulation and the First Amendment: Another Look.

Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000.

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Extended Case Studies from Previous Editions

For every new Media & Culture edition, we take a breaking news issue and develop a

comprehensive five–step critical process around that topic. For this twelth edition update, the

Extended Case Study revolves around “Can We Trust Facebook with Our Personal Data” (see

pp. 510–518). In the last five editions, we developed Extended Case Studies on:

• Analyzing the Coverage of the Volkswagen and Takata Crises (11th Edition, 2017)

• Mobile Video Reveals Police Brutality and Racism (10th Edition Update, 2016)

• Social Media and Finding Real Happiness (10th Edition, 2016)

• Patriot or Traitor? Unveiling Government Surveillance of Us (9th Edition Update, 2015)

• Our Digital World and the Self-Invasion of Privacy (9th Edition, 2014)

In case these “older” Extended Case Study topics from previous editions—all of which still hold

their relevancy—fit better in your particular course than our current topic, you will find both

teaching ideas and the entire text for previous Extended Case Studies below.

When can you teach the Extended Case Study?

3. Throughout the course, which works especially well if you organize your course more

thematically and want to draw connections across particular topics (e.g., privacy, public

relations, news media) using the Extended Case Study as a reference point. With every

$14.7 billion, a record payout for an automobile company. And that was just the beginning of the

crisis.

The Volkswagen company has been in the news quite a bit recently since it came out that their

“clean” diesel engines are not so clean and were designed to cheat emissions tests. However,

another automobile industry crisis has been far more deadly than the Volkswagen scandal, even

though it may not be spending as much time in the news headlines.

What in the world did Volkswagen do wrong?

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In 2016, to settle lawsuits from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the state of

California, Volkswagen pledged to pay up to $14.7 billion, a record settlement for an automobile

company. Up to $10 billion was reserved for buying back or modifying vehicles, and $4.7 billion

more was dedicated to fund emissions reduction programs and mitigate pollution caused by the

vehicles.

repeating a settlement similar to the one in the United States could exceed $100 billion.5

Interestingly, the Volkswagen crisis is not the worst automobile industry crisis of recent

years. That prize goes to Takata, the manufacturer responsible for exploding automobile air bags,

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which send shrapnel into vehicle occupants, injuring or killing them. According to the National

Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), this is what happens to the faulty Takata air

bags:

the air bag and into the vehicle occupants.6

By mid-2016, ruptured Takata air bag inflators had been blamed for fourteen deaths (ten of

them in the United States) and more than one hundred serious injuries.7 The air bags tend to fail

exploding air bag incidents have been blinded and scarred. Some of the faulty air bags have

exploded spontaneously without ever being involved in a collision.

Although it is shameful that Volkswagen lied about and denied its emissions trickery,

Takata’s record is even more dishonorable. Takata and Honda (the automobile company with the

most recalled models using Takata air bags) were both aware of the faulty air bag problem as

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expansion of the recall, the administrator of the NHTSA called the Takata case “the largest and

Nissan, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

In the Volkswagen emissions case, less than a half million automobile owners in the United

States were directly affected, and although excessive pollution emissions are bad for everyone in

each of the stories has helped increase or deter publicity? For this extended case study, we will

look at news stories of the Volkswagen and Takata crises, and comparatively analyze the

coverage of each of these events.

As developed in Chapter 1, a media-literate perspective involves mastering five overlapping

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and (5) engagement: taking some action that connects our critical interpretations and evaluations

with our responsibility as citizens.

Step 1: Description

Given our research question, in the description phase you will need to research news media

452), journalists select and develop stories based on one or more criteria, including timeliness,

proximity, conflict, prominence, human interest, consequence, usefulness, novelty, and deviance.

Step 2: Analysis

Takata (2010 to mid-July

Volkswagen (September 18, 2015, to

2016)

mid-July 2016)

New York Times

219

303

Washington Post

191

263

USA Today

Step 1. However, there might be some important differences in timeliness (the Takata story has

greater consequence: The faulty device can be deadly, and the recall directly affects nearly 70

million people in the United States, compared to less than a half million for the Volkswagen

emissions problem.

Step 3: Interpretation

Our initial interpretation is that in many ways, the Volkswagen crisis is the easier story to

cover. Instead of gradually building over several years (the news doesn’t do well with long-term

stories, as noted in Chapter 14), the Volkswagen story broke in September 2015 with a big

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announcement by the EPA, charging that the company had cheated and violated the Clean Air

Act.

Volkswagen is also a well-known name brand, placing at No. 18 in the world’s most valuable

brands in 2015 (but falling sharply to No. 57 in 2016).12 Takata has never been on the Global 500

vehicles are impacted by this recall than the five largest previous [recall] campaigns combined,

only 52 percent of the survey participants were aware of the issue.”14 As Chapter 14 notes, the

media tends to report stories that feature prominent people, and the same goes for prominent

companies and brands.

We should add one other point that helps interpret the disparity in coverage. Because the

Takata story is longer and more complex, and the company is based in Japan, it’s the kind of

Pulitzer Prize–winning team that investigated the global business practices of Apple and other

technology companies.15 The blog on the Takata air bag recall for Car and Driver magazine by

Clifford Atiyeh and Rusty Blackwell continually updates the story, and is another excellent

resource that defies journalism’s chronic problem of not following a story over the long haul.16

Step 4: Evaluation

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The evaluation stage of the critical process is about making informed judgments. Building on

responsible for spreading the word about recalls of faulty or dangerous cars—automotive

manufacturers and suppliers, government safety agencies, the news media, or all of them to the

same degree?

Step 5: Engagement

recalls before reading this? If not, let the news media know that you and others need to hear

more about these recalls.

There is a related question: If you buy a used car that may have had multiple owners and

there is a recall, will you find out about it? (In the case of the Texas high school student who

safercar.gov. The site carries news about automobile recalls, including the Volkswagen and

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Takata cases. You can look up your car, and those of family members and friends, on one page

of the site: https://vinrcl .safercar.gov/vin/.

Finally, the latest in the Takata story, and it’s still not good: There are millions of cars with

Takata air bags in the United States, and it will take at least until 2019 for all of them to be

shocking but legal, as the NHTSA believes the air bags won’t become faulty for several years, by

which time the air bags will be recalled and replaced. But what if the drivers don’t find out about

Toyota, and, yes, Volkswagen. See safercar.gov for full details.

Extended Case Study: Mobile Video Reveals Police Brutality and Racism (10th Edition

Update, 2016)

United States and the fact that the victims of many cases of brutality were black.

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Policing is a difficult job. Officers are obliged to protect the public and work under great risk

every day. But in instances where police put certain members of the public at risk, that obligation

is not met. The accompanying instinct of police officers to protect themselves at the expense of

the public can be a sign of institutional racism, and African Americans are inordinately victims

of such police violence.

Lives Matter movement, begun after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 Florida

shooting death of seventeen-year-old African American Trayvon Martin, a young man in a

hoodie sweatshirt walking back to his father’s house with a can of juice and bag of Skittles

candy. The movement spread on Twitter via the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag.

about the events.

As developed in Chapter 1, a media-literate perspective involves mastering five overlapping

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“What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about your findings; (4) evaluation: arriving

and (5) engagement: taking some action that connects our critical interpretations and evaluations

with our responsibility as citizens.

Step 1: Description

Given our research question, in the description phase you will need to research news media

sophisticated databases of police shootings. Either database is a good place to start. You can drill

down your search and select filters to analyze only unarmed victims, and also analyze by race,

gender, age, and location. You may wish to look at police shooting cases in just your state.

See:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings–

us-database

First, examine at least five cases of African Americans killed by police in 2015 in which

video was available (e.g., Christian Taylor, Samuel DuBose, Walter Scott, Freddy Gray, and Eric

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Step 2: Analysis

where there is no video available?

Second, look at patterns in outcomes between the cases with video available and the other

cases. What is the status of the case? Was the shooting found to be justified, is the case still

under investigation, or was an officer charged with a crime?

questions “So what?” and “What does all this mean?”

The newspaper databases themselves increase visibility by archiving these cases and

enabling us to look closer and do our own analysis. But does the existence of citizen or police

video change the story for journalists in terms of emphasis on official points of view versus

citizen points of view? Does it seem to you that citizen and police videos help to better resolve

these cases, or does it become just one more disputed piece of evidence?

Step 4: Evaluation

users.

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Based on your critical research, what do you think about the ability of citizens to record

“provide a kind of impartial witness to every interaction?”5 Do you have concerns about who

gets to see the video footage and under what circumstances?6 Finally, instead of body cams, is

there something about the training of police officers that needs to change?

1. United States National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, U.S. Government Printing

Office, 1968, 9.

2. Richard Pérez–Peña and Timothy Williams, “Glare of Video Is Shifting Public’s View of

3. Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, and Jamiles Lartey, “Black Americans Killed by Police

5. Ibid.

6. danah boyd and Alex Rosenblat, “It’s Not Too Late to Get Body Cameras Right,” Atlantic,

May 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/05/its-not-too-late–to–

get-body-cameras-right/393257/. Also see Robinson Meyer, “The People’s Manifesto on

Police Body–Cameras,” Atlantic, May 15, 2015,

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/05 /civil–rights–rules-for-body-

cameras/393377/.

Extended Case Study: Social Media and Finding Real Happiness (10th Edition)

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Social media connect us in so many different ways, expanding our human interactions beyond

the limits of meeting in person. As noted in Chapter 2, social media include any blogs,

collaborative projects, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and

virtual social worlds that expand our social horizons. But while social media connect us, they

disconnect us in other ways, taking up time where we might experience real physical connection

and replacing it with short, highly mediated messages. With social media, we are both the media

and the subject, and we create the online version of ourselves.

For at least some of us, the social-mediated version of ourselves becomes the predominant

way we experience the world. As Time magazine noted in 2014, “experiences don’t feel fully

real” until you have “tweeted them or tumbled them or YouTubed them—and the world has

congratulated you for doing so.”1 The flip side of promoting our own experiences on social

media as the most awesome happenings ever (with the added subtext of “too bad you aren’t

here”) is the social anxiety associated with reading about other people’s experiences and the

accompanying realization that you are not actually there.

The problem is called Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and one report defines it as “the uneasy

and sometimes all-consuming feeling that you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the

know about or in possession of more or something better than you.”2 This fear was around long

before social media was invented. Photos, postcards, holiday family letters, and plain old

bragging have usually put the most positive spin on people’s lives. But social media and mobile

technology make being exposed to the interactions you missed a 24/7 phenomenon. Exposure to

a hypothetical better experience or better life is potentially constant.

According to a report in Computers in Human Behavior, with FOMO there is a “desire to

stay continually connected with what others are doing,” so the person suffering from the anxiety

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continues to be tethered to social media, tracking “friends” and sacrificing time that might be

spent having in-person, unmediated experiences.3 Some related social media problems can get

even more serious. A study by University of Michigan researchers found that the use of

Facebook (the most popular social media site) makes people feel worse about themselves. The

study of college students over two weeks found that the more they used Facebook, the more two

components of well-being declined: how people feel moment to moment and how satisfied they

are with their lives. These declines occurred regardless of how many Facebook “friends” they

had in their network.4

The idea that social media could be creating new forms of anxiety and undermining our

happiness presents an important question about our culture to investigate. For this case study, we

will look at social media in our lives and whether they help expand our friendships, undermine

our social well-being, or offer a mixed result of good and bad outcomes.

As detailed in Chapter 1 and throughout the book, a media-literate perspective involves

mastering five overlapping critical stages that build on each other: (1) description: paying close

attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study; (2) analysis: discovering and

focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage; (3) interpretation: asking

and answering the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about our findings; (4)