The television series Max Headroom was a futuristic show based on a news reporter named, Edison Carter. He worked for Network 23, which was in competition with another news network called BreakThru TV.
In the episode entitled War, BreakThru TV planned and staged terrorist attacks and then quickly reported on the stories. The setup was created in order for BreakThru TV to recieve better ratings than any other news network. As the network's ratings increased so did the planned attacks. The network was even going to go as far as killing a woman in order to recieve higher ratings.
This episode illustrates numerous concepts of Media Literacy, however the one concept that sticks out is the idea of blending messages. The media has three types of messages which are news, entertainment, and ads. News messages are designed to inform and entertainment messages are created to evoke emotion, such as laughter or fear. In this episode, BreakThru TV blends these two types of messages in order to create a higher response and higher ratings.
BreakThru TV discovers that by creating the news they can make it more entertaining. However, instead of informing the public with true information they are creating false facts and making the audience believe that they are being informed. This all relates back to the mass media's primary purpose for distributing messages, which is to generate revenue.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment