The Blame Game

          I found Monday's reading, New Content: Messages for the Masses, intriguing and informative.  I have always had a vague idea of bias in news media, but have never been able to point out specific biases or political leanings in newspapers or news broadcasts.  The Daily Show has pointed out some of these political leanings, but I am also aware that even a satirical news broadcast has its own biases and leanings.  I don’t think that biases in the media are necessarily bad, because I know that any content generated by humans will be prone to biases no matter how hard a person tries to remain neutral.  This reading reminds me of a class I’m taking right now called Native Americans in Illinois.  Much of what I study in this class relates to the biases held by historians and archeologists when it comes to the study of Native Americans.  Although many try their best to avoid their personal ideologies  when it comes to the formation of a thesis or argument, it’s inevitable that some form of bias will exist in their work.  It’s common that the bias doesn’t show itself until years later, when certain ideologies of eras come to light.  Much like forming a historical argument, news media cannot avoid bias.  Because I acknowledge that bias is unavoidable, I think news media has to make up for this lack of neutrality with respectability, awareness, and validity.

            I think it’s interesting that people are quick to blame others for being biases but are reluctant or even incapable of pointing out biases in their own thoughts or actions.  The reading pointed out this blame game: “In general, opinion research shows that perceptions of media bias correspond to one's own political bias: People in the middle see the media as generally neutral, while those on the left complain that the news is too conservative, and those on the right think the news has a left-leaning bias”.  I know that I experience this phenomena often.  For example, I am quick to point out levels of procrastination of my friends when they complain about bad grades, but when I receive a bad grade, I forget about my procrastination and instead blame the difficulty of a certain test or assignment.  This blame game enters all aspects of human relations, and it’s up to us to take a step back from what we are inspecting and try to remain as rational and neutral as possible.

Hollywood and the Holocaust

A question during Wednesday’s discussion was posted Robert’s power-point presentation:  Can reenacting history offer us a viable historical insight?  Surely, there are many different perspectives to atrocities.  We learned of a specific example in class with excerpts from the novel, “The End: Hamburg 1943” by Hans Erich Nossack.  This novel offers an interesting and relatively unexplored area of the Holocaust, but I think that it is definitely worth exploring.  Discovering what the Holocaust was like for Germans who were trying to live their everyday lives made me realize that not all Germans contributed to the Holocaust, and there were surely Germans who did not want to be apart of the Nazi movement.  Although I somehow always knew this to be true, it was nice to have a concrete example of a German man’s experiences living in the constant shadow of World War II.

I think that reenacting history offers us multiple viable historical insights.  For example, many different media processes explore the Holocaust., each with its own personal insight into the atrocity.  The film “Life Is Beautiful” offers a poignant perspective of the Holocaust, with the main character fabricating a story that compares life in his concentration camp to a game so his young son does not realize the terrors of camp life.  Although some might think that this plot is disrespectful to the actual horrors of concentration camps, I think that it is an effective and memorable way to discuss family life and coping mechanisms of Jews during the Holocaust.  Many people agree with the film’s unique perspective, because it won three Academy Awards.  On the other hand, a dramatic film about the Holocaust could offer just as much insight as a film like “Life is Beautiful”, instead utilizing different methods and telling different stories.  Films like “Schindler’s List”,  “The Pianist”, “Sophie’s Choice”, and “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” tell stories of the Holocaust from more dramatic perspectives.  Although all of these films are considered dramas, they all offer different insights, because they rely on unique experiences and methods of story-telling.  The films allow audiences to become attached to figures in the stories, and serve as important tools for learning about heart-wrenching aspects of World War II. 

I think that these films are often more effective than reading a history textbook  or researching the Holocaust online, because audiences form attachments to stories and characters.  For example, the first time I watched “Life is Beautiful” the reality of concentration camps really dawned on me.  I felt such sorrow and discomfort when the characters I grew to love were made victims of the Holocaust, and these associations led me to carry these emotions over to the actual historical event. 

Reforming Hollywood

            I attended the Reforming Hollywood lecture given by Dr. William Romanowski, and I’m really glad I went.  I learned many interesting and surprising issues raised by censorship in film.  The majority of his lecture focused on the role that religion plays in the formation of censorship laws.  When there was no ratings system, anyone could walk into any movie, regardless of content.  Parents were worried that their children might see  nudity or violence on-screen, but there were no preventative measures to restrict members of the audiences.  However, movies had to make a profit, and it was unfair to ask them to cut certain scenes just to protect moral standards of parents and members of different churches.

            I have always found studio-era Hollywood fascinating, and this lecture touched on the corrupt nature of the first Hollywood studios.  The “Big Three”; Metro-Goldwyn, Famous Players-Lasky, and First National founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.  This organization was led by William Hays, who also happened to be a Presbyterian deacon.   Hays ran into trouble in this position, especially after the “Big Three” were accused as acting as a trust, with Hays as a spokesperson.  However, the MPPDA conducted the “Hays code”, a system of film censorship from 1930 to 1968.

            The debate about movie censorship has always had tensions between social awareness and levels of artistic freedom.  An interesting portion of this lecture had to do with the censorship of two movies.  “The Pawnbroker” was praised and approved by the Board of Film Censors (BFC) because it had religious undertones and it described the human condition.  On the other hand, “The Greatest Story Ever Told”, a film about the life of Jesus, was not approved by the BFC because it was deemed too superficial to be appropriate for the story of Christ.  Most of the founding members of the BFC were Protestant.

            Jack Valenti, a Catholic Texan,  because the president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).  He created the MPAA film rating system as a replacement for the Hays Code.  The Hays code was extremely out of date and no longer appropriate for the current film and culture environment.  The new systems of rating served as a safeguard for artistic freedom and also informed parents and viewers of suitability.  This is the ratings code that is still in use today.

            This lecture made me realize the diminishing scope of religious authority in the United States. Film censorship is now largely a matter of what is considered appropriate because of a ratings system, not because of religious authority.  It was a great lecture and I am curious to learn more about film censorship!

The Pros and Cons of New Media

I really enjoyed today's presentation, and I've been thinking about the conveniences of new media throughout the day today.  I've come to the conclusion that the Internet is a little too convenient for my taste at times.  For example, I can spend endless hours on Pinterest, a website that basically serves as a Google image search...but is more pretty.  I know that I should have more self-control at times, like instead of searching for pictures of celebrities hanging out together for my Pinterest boards, I could maybe do something like, I don't know, my homework?  As much as I should practice self-control and time management skills, sometimes it's difficult because websites like Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter do their best to draw people in and make them stay there.  They carefully calculate their users' interests and basically shove these interests down their throats, coercing people to spend as much time as possible surfing their sites.  What I'm trying to get at is that sometimes this seemingly useful feature of the Internet can really get on my nerves.  I am straining to remember a time on Youtube when advertisements didn't pop up when I was watching a video, or when I could watch an episode of a T.V. show I missed on the Internet without enduring the same exact commercial every six minutes.  I know these issues are trivial, but I wish I could just use the Internet in peace, without pop-ups, commercials, or weird advertisements for things I would never even consider buying.

On the other hand, sometimes I am grateful for the convenience of new media.  Today when I logged on my Twitter account, I saw new tweets from my friends at home that gave the sad news that a child from my neighborhood who has fought cancer for many years passed away today.  I don't want to say that I would have never heard about this news without Twitter, but I am saying that I'm glad I found out when I did so I can contact my friends and family and offer my condolences at this time.

So I guess my annoyance with the Internet depends on the information I am searching for or not searching for, and while some aspects of the Internet seems pointless to me, at other times the Internet seems essential.  I guess I'll just have to take the good with the bad, and try not to get too annoyed when I get spam.