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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.
414
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?
1.
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?
416
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,
417
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
418
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
419
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
63
72
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
421
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
422
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
423
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.
424
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
425
“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
426
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.
427
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)
429
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)
