You examine Ginsberg's premise in your book Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, addressing the common response, "Oh, it's just entertainment." You offer a very different point of view.
"'Come on, lighten up, it's just... (a TV show/a movie/a music video/a lying cable news blowhard)' is one of the most destructive attitudes of our time. Regardless of the topic, one of the first things I always say when I do media literacy speeches is that the corporate media has tremendous power, because it is the only institution that connects virtually all Americans. No matter where we live, the majority of us have access to the same television shows, movies, music, magazines, news outlets, and ads. Today, corporate media functions as our most common agent of socialization, helping to shape, inform, and reflect our collective ideas about people, politics and public policy molding our self-perceptions and how we relate to, and treat, others.
Before I wrote Reality Bites Back , the general attitude toward reality TV in the entertainment press, among fans, and even among most of academia, was that reality television was dumb, harmless fluff with no significant impact a passing fad that would eventually flame out. But since reality TV is 50 to 75 percent cheaper to produce than scripted TV and often comes with a huge amount of product placement revenue, I knew it was here to stay. I wanted to start a national conversation about how this incredibly influential genre of media has been functioning as backlash against gender and racial justice since the year 2000.
Reality TV has revived regressive, dangerous tropes about what viewers are supposed to believe about women and people of color. If you knew nothing more about American culture than what you saw in reality TV, it would be easy to think the women's movement and the civil rights movement never happened. But this very calculated set of manipulated images producers and networks have chosen to promote and profit off of is not who we are as women or as people of color. It's not what America is actually about."
For those unfamiliar with the term "media literacy," can you give an overview of what that means and why it is so important for women of all backgrounds?
"Women, people of color, low income people, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups need to be able to engage with media in active, critical ways, rather than passive viewership. Core media literacy questions teach us how to separate text from subtext, and stated premise from hidden meaning. They help us understand, challenge, and resist deeply inaccurate and biased representations of our communities. Media literacy frameworks encourage us to follow the money, asking who created, produced, distributed, and profited from any given piece of media. What commercial investment may have influenced whose voices were included in the story, and whose were invisible or demonized? Whose values were lauded and whose maligned? And so on."
Your media literacy work on campuses around the country brings an intersectional lens to understanding the media. Can you elaborate?
"Everything I do sits at that Venn diagram of media and gender, race, class and sexuality. I wrote Reality Bites Back after speaking with students for ten years about reality TV's influence over their perceptions of sexism, racism, poverty and wealth, slut-shaming, hyper-consumption and more. My latest multimedia lecture, Screen Shot: How Media Instigates Gun Violence and Rape Culture, looks at how misogynistic mass shootings, sexual assault on and off campus, and street harassment are portrayed in journalism, scripted and reality TV, movies, music videos, and advertising. I cover how those depictions make all Americans less safe, and what we can do to change both this media coverage and the culture of violence it supports.
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