So, YOU have always mistrusted the media.
3-D Movies manipulate the audiences’ visual and acoustic perceptions. Reality TV covers its constructedness more or less successfully. Network News are too short to be truthful about what they report. And documentaries only prove that the presence of media affects actual events.
Seems as if President Trump is right: FAKE MEDIA all around. Despite journalistic ethics the truth is not out there.
Yet in 1898 (and again in 2003) American citizens believed in the Yellow Press reports about Cuba enough to convince their national representatives to declare war (against Spain or Iraq respectively). In 1938, Orson Welles’s ”War of the Worlds” radio program caused a (mass) panic. Woodward and Bernstein brought President Nixon down with their investigative reporting in the Washington Post. And did ”Twitter” not help @TheRealDonald win the 2016 election?
In this seminar we will focus on how the (American) cultural context has historically shaped media production in content and form, be it the end of the 1900s’ emergence of the Yellow Press or the post-9/11 Superhero overkill. We will examine specific cultural moments when journalistic and fictional media products sparked and manifested social scares such as the Satanic Panic. In due course we will reverse the focus and analyze how the cultural backgrounds of media consumers determine the decoding of media products. Examples will include Godzilla (international perspectives), The X-Files (political leanings), and Elementary/Sherlock (gender).
The course will be accompanied by 6 practical exercises in media production. For students who are interested in literary text production, I will offer a Creative Writing Block seminar during the Projektwoche. |
