ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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Media Literacy

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Introduction

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a la Shmoop

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Hi, Dave Siminoff here, founder of Shmoop.

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And we're talking with Deb, Dr. Deb from Shmoop,

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about media literacy.

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So Deb, what is mass media?

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Like, what is mass about it?

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Is this like a Catholic church thing?

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Or it this about weight? What is mass media?

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Well, it's definitely not a Catholic church thing.

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Mass media is any type of media that

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just reaches large, as in thousands,

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hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

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Or maybe even billions.

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So we're talking everything from

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TV and movies to books to newspaper articles,

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anything that reaches a large amount of people.

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[ eww ]

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Got it. And who owns mass media?

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Like who controls it? Who manages it?

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Is there some evil Darth Vader-like group that's...

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Yes, there is. Basically what we have to remember

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when we're studying mass media is that

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everything that goes into mass media is intentional

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and someone is controlling it.

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It's not always the same person

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or the same group of people.

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If it's a TV show, then we have the producers

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as the man behind the curtain.

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If it's newspapers, then it's the editors and the writers.

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Someone is always controlling it and there's always some sort of intention behind mass media.

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And I remember when I was a kid

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the evening news was unbiased,

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or at least they tried desperately hard

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to be that way.

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And the way the news came to us

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was a different class of news.

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Today, journalists are --

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have no shame about simply being the voice for a political party.

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And so you can't trust any of the news.

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And it creates this awful world where you have to spend so much time

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figuring out what their angle is, what they're trying to sell me

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or get me to do or whatever,

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that it kind of ruins it.

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That's why we have courses like Media Literacy.

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That's exactly what this course is about.

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It's a course to teach you how to see past those biases.

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So they're there and they're not going away any time soon.

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And all we can do is be aware of it, like you are,

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and say, "Okay, this is biased in one direction or another.

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Am I okay with that? And how do I proceed knowing that?"

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[ whoop ]

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What is mass media?

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Who controls mass media?

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[ evil laugh ]

Full Transcript