Life is just a game/art at Vermont farm

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Croteau: Media and Ideology Talking Point #1 Quotations

Croteau wrote of ideology in the political sense of justifying actions of those in power, by distorting reality.  The ideology of scholarship is the basic system of meaning which makes sense of the world. In contrast, the media ideology is a key between images and ways to define social and cultural issues. "The media is the battlefield upon which cultural warfare takes place."(pg 162). It appears we are invited to defend our realism but first we must define it. In this article we are challenged to look carefully at the "patterns" (pg163) in media text, instead of analyzing one film in isolation.  Looking at famous films in which the weaker heroine depends and is rescued by the stronger hero, one wonders what came first: the chicken or the egg? Was our societal media simply reflecting the ideology between men and women since the beginning of time or did the regning  media  create an even stronger version of what had always come before? Croteau wrote that " mass media are commercially organized to attract audience for profit, there is good reason to believe popularity will be more important to media producers than a commitment to any specific ideology." (pg 164)  The question I pose are the resulting films in the middle of the 20th century a distortion of reality or a mirrow on what was popular?I do not defend media powers, but one must understand the enemy before going into battle.

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