MEDIA’S TEACHING OF VALUES

MEDIA’S TEACHING OF VALUES

One of the concerns often raised about the role of media in society is their role as teachers of values, “passing the social heritage from one generation to the next” (Lasswell, cited in G.Tuchman, 1987, p. 195). What the precise content of this social heritage is continues to be debated, however. Although relatively few print media stories or radio or TV broadcasts have the explicit purpose of teaching values, values are being taught implicitly, particularly by television. Here we define values very broadly as attitudes dealing with any topic where there is a moral dimension, i.e., a readily perceived right and wrong position.

On the one hand, the media may be seen as mirroring the values of the society in which they occur. If sexual values support promiscuity in a society, this will be reflected in its media; if certain religious values predominate in a society, they will also prevail in its media. On the other hand, the media may be seen as a catalyst for value change in a society. Values in the media may not exactly reflect those prevailing in society but may serve, not necessarily by design, as a force for moving society’s values in a new direction. This is, of course, exactly the concern of media critics who argue that U.S. television and cinema most strongly reflect the values of the New York and Los Angeles communities where most programming originates and thus tends to cultivate those values in the rest of the country.

Taking a different approach, critics sometimes argue that media have a responsibility to lead society in the direction of more prosocial values; for example, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there were calls for media to promote ethnic harmony and not inflame passions against Muslims out of anger over the al-Qaeda attacks. Some countries take a much stronger position; in multicultural Singapore and Malaysia, for example, media are censored and not allowed to say anything that might encourage intergroup animosity.

We often hear laments that television and film are so much more permissive today than they used to be (“Oh, if we could just have back the good old days of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, The Brady Bunch, and Leave It to Beaver when family values were solid”). Clearly, in many respects Western media are more permissive today than they used to

be, although the situation is far from anything goes. In fact, there are some ways in which media are less permissive and stricter today than they were 50 years ago. Perhaps most prominent among the restrictive trends is any content or language that could be considered racist or sexist. The early TV

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hit sitcom Amos and Andy was considered too racist even to show in reruns as early as the mid-1950s; today it would be extremely offensive and inappropriate, if not downright grotesque. Racist jokes simply are not acceptable in U.S. prime time media, except possibly from a very bad character in a drama.

Any real or implied violence against women, unless it is critically examined in a dramatic context, is another very touchy area. Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners shaking his fist in his wife’s face and angrily saying, “One of these days, Alice, pow, right in the kisser!” was hilarious in 1955. Today it strikes modern viewers as offensive and inappropriate, much as a sitcom father swearing profusely or having a homosexual experience might have seemed in the mid-1950s. Rhett Butler persisting in his sexual overtures to Scarlett O’Hara in spite of her saying “no” in Gone with the Wind could

be defined as rape today, although it was considered romantic in 1939. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the golden age of the 1950s was not quite the way people often remember it (see Box 11.1).

Although most of the concern and study of values has focused on television and film, print media and radio are by no means uninvolved in value issues. Newspaper editors are continually faced with questions of how much information to print about crime victims. Radio stations must worry about listener response to song or rap lyrics that go too blatantly against prevailing social values, e.g., Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up,” rapper Ice- T’s “Cop Killer,” Intelligent Hoodlum’s “Bullet in the Brain” (about killing

a police officer), or many selections by Eminem. In this section we look at how media are involved in teaching or reinforcing values, particularly in the areas of family values and religion. These areas are offered as examples and are not meant to be an exhaustive discussion of values with which media are involved. Also, each of these two areas actually includes several more specific issues. Most of the comments primarily reflect media in the United States and may or may not be directly applicable to other nations, but all nations have some important media values issues.

Media transmission of values is perhaps the most difficult area of this book in which to do solid, well-controlled empirical research. Although there is much discussion of the effect of media on social values, there is much less good research that offers definitive answers. There has been some content and effects research, however, and some of that will be examined in this chapter. In terms of the theoretical perspective, probably the cultivation theory (Gerbner et al, 2002; Signorielli & Morgan, 2001) and uses and gratifications approaches (A.M.Rubin, 2002) have been most useful in generating and guiding research. As certain consistent values are repeated in

a variety of specific instances, they then cultivate those values in the consumer. How strongly those values are cultivated may sometimes depend

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on the consumer’s particular uses of the media and what gratifications they are obtaining from that use.

BOX 11.1

THE REAL STORY OF THE GOLDEN AGE OF

THE 1950s

Critics of modern media and society in the United States often lament that we have lost the solid family values of the 1950s, the last decade of television before all the social upheavals of the 1960s. Historian of the family Stephanie Coontz (1992, 1997) looks more carefully at this alleged golden age and finds that all was not in fact as golden as we remember it.

Coontz argues that the 1950s was a decade unlike any before or since. First, it was an era of unparalleled economic expansion; there was more growth in real wages in any year of the 1950s than in the entire period 1980 to 1995. Birth rates skyrocketed, approaching the rate of India. Even under the Republican Eisenhower administration, there was greater federal government support for families than there has ever been before or since. With the GI Bill paying college tuition, large amounts of money available for first home purchases and education costs, and numerous jobs available building interstate highways, expanding infrastructure and heavy industry, the 1950s were one of the very few eras in U.S. history when a large number of families could thrive on a single income. The divorce rate was lower than in the years that followed but also lower than what had proceeded: one third of the pre-World War II marriages had ended in divorce or abandonment. There was also a massive shift in family structure. People were moving to the suburbs and farther away from extended families, thus putting all of their energy into the nuclear family, a model reinforced by the cheery sitcoms of the time. Not everyone was prospering, however. Most minorities were largely excluded from the American dream. Rates of domestic violence, crime, incest, and child abuse were high but denied, since their principal victims were racial, ethnic, and gender minorities. A larger percentage of children were living in poverty than do today. Coontz argues that the 1950s are a time we could never return to if we wanted to, and she questions whether we should even want to.

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