Fourth Blog

In chapter ten of James Potter’s Media literacy, he discusses how the news is not a reflection of events but is instead a construction that the news broadcasters create. He says that the news is constructed through a variety of constraints and bias’ including time and resource limitation, ownership, use of sources, branding, and even a set story formula.

     One of the news-framing constraints that Potter specifically advises to be cautious of is the use of public opinion. He says that we have the technology to record accurate public opinion, but only if it is there to record. On page 158 he says that “the problem is that often people don’t have an opinion about something, or they are not sure what their opinion is-they are ambivalent.” He then illustrates this point by asking the reader to conduct an informal poll. He assures that most of those polled will have an opinion, but few if any of those will have sound reasoning for having that opinion.

     The views of Potter on public opinion resonate in the youtube video by ChallengingMedia featuring Justin Lewis. Lewis says that public opinion is often guided by the media. One of the ways he says that the opinion of the public can be swayed in is the actual coverage time that is spent on an issue. He illustrates this in two ways.

First, he shows that when environmental threats were highly covered by the media, public opinion on those issues went up. But even when the problems were getting worse, public opinion went down as coverage went down. Next, he spoke about presidential candidates during an election. He showed that even though the candidates were basically the same on all major issues, they were portrayed as being completely different due to their stances on civil liberty issues.

Both of these examples show that not only is Potter right on the issue of poll takers often being undecided and quickly forming opinions during a public opinion poll, but that the news media actually counts on it and does not hesitate to feed on it. This is why public opinion must be very cautiously viewed, because those whose opinions were taken may not have really had an opinion at all, or maybe they just saw something about the issue just a few minutes early in the media and hastily formed an opinion on what they saw covered. The point is that unless the opinions being recorded are well founded with clear reasoning, experiences, or information, the views of those polled may only be of those that are running the news.    

Third Blog

For my third blog, I would like to discuss Deuze’s concept of buying name brand products over generic ones when he says on pg. 47 of how “People seem to be quite comfortable choosing brands, logos, and designs that somehow mean something to them (and their social networks) although without necessarily always choosing to buy the best or most useful product,” and compare his notions with those of Joel Lewis, a quality assurance inspector.

     In Lewis’ article: Is a name brand product always better than a generic, Lewis discusses the act of buying name brand over generic as well as why. Like Deuze, Lewis agrees that there is a compulsion to buy name brand over generic “just because of advertising and fear of being embarrassed by having a "Generic" branded item while their friends enjoy Name Branded items.” Also, like Deuze, Lewis says that people are not always buying the best product, but also believes that it is relative to what is being bought.

     Lewis says that when you are buying groceries, it’s better to buy generic because it all comes from the same farm or factories. If the product is clothing, Lewis says that name brand is the way to go because even though sometimes you are just paying for the label on the clothing, most times the name brand clothes are more durable and last longer than a generic counterpart. Same goes with electronics. Lewis says that the name brand products are generally more durable and last longer than the generics, but also points out that the price difference in electronics between name brand and generic will usually mean that the price that you pay will often be the same in the long run.

     What all this says to me is that although sometimes consumers are led to a purchase based solely on the name brand, it is not without merit. It is true that name brand products are more expensive than the generics, but because they are more expensive, they generate more money in sales. This higher revenue can then be used to buy better materials and higher quality control which will ultimately lead to a better, more durable product. Then there are the companies who own the name brand. That name brand is bringing the company a great deal of profit and the companies do not want to hurt the reputation of the name brand which would hurt sales. This is why they generally strive to have a product that lives up to the reputation of the brand name.

So, just because a product is name brand does not mean it is not just an overpriced label; it is more than likely an overall better product because it will have more invested in it.

Second Blog

For my second blog, I would like to discuss direct/indirect costs in the media using James Potter’s Media Literacy and Media and Advertising by Anup Shah. I want to contrast the idea of the costs the consumer pays for a media product against the idea that the media is selling the consumer as a product.


Anup Shah’s article Media and Advertising is a compilation of various authors that critique the way in which products are being presented to a given audience via advertising. The different authors present many different ideas about advertising such as advertisements disguised as news or as entertainment, product placement in the movies, or even political influence. The part of the article that speaks to me, however, is the section that talks about the consumer as the product.

In this section, Shah quotes Noam Chomsky as saying “[T]he New York Times [is] a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. … You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations.” This idea is interesting to me because according to our book (pg. 98), “The media of books, films, and recordings are supported almost entirely by direct costs to the consumer. With broadcast television and radio, there is no direct cost for exposure to a program, but there is a high cost for purchasing the means to receive a program.”

If we break these two quotes down, we can see that we are paying the media companies to sell us to corporations! To see the grand scope of this revelation of mine, you have to see that the media essentially does not see the viewing audience as living, breathing people; we are property. We are media slaves, and we pay to be so! I think this is why we enjoyed video sites like Hulu and YouTube when they first came out. You know, before the advertisers found out about them and there were no commercials. I think they gained so much popularity back then because we knew in some way, even if it was only subconsciously, that we were free.

First Blog Revised

For my first blog, I would like to compare Anya Kamenetz’s article The Real Smart Phone Revolution with Cara Bafile’s article Fifth Graders Soar into the Blogosphere. The focus I would like to discuss is the idea of students interacting with each other as well as their teacher on the internet.


To give a brief overview of Bafile’s article, she explores the effects that blogging some assignments on the internet are having on 5th grade teacher Gillian Ryan's classroom dynamics. In the article, she explains not only how Ryan has implemented blogging into her curriculum, how it has altered the class’ attitude towards assignments as well as how introducing blogging helped turn one student around from doing no work in class to being a productive participant.

The idea from the Smartphone article to which I would like to compare is where Kamenetz quotes Richard Rowe as saying “most communications were hub-and-spoke, one to many. The internet is a many to many environment.” Ryan couldn’t agree more and feels that switching to a many to many environment is a good thing. She says when she asks her class to write a blog that “I’m not simply asking them to write a response to me on a piece of paper, I'm asking them to share what they learn with the world. It makes what I ask them to do a real-world task.” This makes sense to me. I mean, if students didn’t like to share with others, would we have such things as Twitter and Facebook?

Both statements from Ryan and Rowe are go hand in hand in the idea that education is moving from a local one on one with a teacher or with fellow students to becoming a world wide effort and the children couldn’t be happier. It says to me that the children are loving the fact that now their ideas are in a place where they can be viewed by anyone at anytime and because of faceless ability of blogging, more emphasis can be placed on what is being said as opposed to who is saying it. This makes it possible for students who are normally ignored by those older than them to be taken more seriously. Because of this, students are no longer competing for gold stars or smiley faces; they are competing for recognition within the real world.