Archive for journalism

Where the rattlesnake bites…

Posted on February 17, 2007 by

I can’t resist pointing to this New York Times article, having just blogged about censorship in the previous post.

A book wins the prestigious Newbery Medal award. It is “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron.

It becomes controversial because it uses an anatomically correct word. This word use is fitting with a theme of the book.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her.

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar – New York Times

This word is used as a descriptor between boys (and overheard by a girl) about the location of a dog’s snakebite. By 9 or 12 years of age, I hope that boys understand that there is another word for their private areas other than “family jewels” or “crotch”–if only so that they can talk with their doctors about jock itch, concerns about development, and what not. I expect that knowing the terms for various anatomical parts well enough to describe a dog’s snake bite will not cause the spontaneous spread of immorality. The boy explained to his friend that his dog was bit on the scrotum. The girl, overhearing, wonders about the word. I’ll bet that a similar book, aimed at the same age group, would be quite acceptable in mentioning that a pup nursed at it’s mother’s teat, or found a nipple to suckle.

“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” she said. “That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”

With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar – New York Times

By the way, all three of my sons know that there are seven continents, and my sons know the terms urinate, bowel movements, and scrotums. They don’t often mention these things in conversation, but if they did, it wouldn’t be for titillation effect–just for factual information.

Read the book. Then decide.

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Filed under: censorship, ethics, journalism, media

What’s More Real Than National Geographic–or Newsweek–or Time?

Posted on January 3, 2007 by

Turns out, that’s a very good question. Better than you might think.

I’ve found this wonderful link to a series of “pictures that lie.” (I’ve been getting a feed on the newly added bookmarks of del.icio.us user LibrarianEdge and this site was added by LibrarianEdge today–Thanks!). I’m extremely excited, because I was looking for a way to broaden the wonderful message of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (see my earlier post, here) and help it cross over to the male students I have. When I checked out the site, though, it addressed much more than body image issues.

It addressed censorship, political exigencies, propaganda, critical thinking, editing, feminism, media, photoshop ethics, and more (Oh, My!)! It helps place the information media awareness I want students to cultivate, the critical thinking skills they need to harness to be savvy on the web, into a perspective that includes a long history of media manipulation:

Before the invention of the digital image, the Soviets removed Trotsky from News Photos and archives when he fell out of favor and American farmers were shown with truck-sized crickets on their farm equipment. — See images 14 and 17.

The website makes it clear that image manipulation (lies, deceitful lies!) is not something only from the past, as it includes modern day images (Cover photos from Newsweek, Time, and TV Guide; modern icons such as Oprah, Katie Couric, and Martha Stewart).

My students don’t have to feel I am shining a spotlight on them as potentially gullible–these photos were aimed at a wide readership. It will be up to me to help the students realize that they can value Katie Couric and Oprah without being manipulated into putting them onto a “body image” pedestal that really isn’t them (isn’t means, in this case, that their heads were pasted onto model’s bodies for those cover shots). It will be up to the students, actually, but this should help them realize they need to look critically at EVERY image they see. Who put it there, who does it serve, is it touting a political point of view or reinforcing a powerful entity (political or corporate)…or just selling more TV Guides?

In earlier grades, I had students explore a wonderful webquest where they develop their own rubric to “rate” a website using information they researched (about authority, currency, etc.) and then they test their rubric by evaluating a pair of websites: one fake, one real. Students found the fake sights could fool some of them, some of the time…and they were not happy with that! I added additional “fake or fantastic” websites and we explored them as a group followup.

Now, I hope to help my students see how pervasive, and how easily accomplished, are “images that lie.” And that those images aren’t just aimed at fooling them–but at all of us. I’ll tell them that old saw:

Fool me once…

And I’ll mean, ME, too. I’m in there with them.

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Filed under: Cool Stuff I Found To Share, critical_thinking, ethics, journalism, media, My Middle School Tech Class