KNOW TV:
Changing What, Why, and How You Watch

Overview of Content
NINE CRITICAL QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU KNOW TV

By Dr. Renee Hobbs
Associate Professor of Communication, Babson College
Director, Institute on Media Education
Teachers and parents have, for many years; been comfortable being ostriches, our long necks reaching down to plant our heads firmly into the sand. What we have been avoiding is the complex world of mass media in the lives of our children. It’s been more comfortable to complain that television is the enemy of culture, civilization and the arts. It’s been more comfortable for us to stick to the "good" programs on The Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, and PBS, and wish that our students and children were not so immersed in cartoons, talk shows, game shows, sitcoms, reality shows, action-adventure programming. Its been more comfortable for us teachers to blame those irresponsible parents who simply do not exercise enough control to turn the TV off.
However, as we near the end of the 20th century, trying to ignore the ever-growing media culture by adopting the ostrich stance seems more and more ridiculous. Its no longer appropriate for us simply to blame the media industry for the products it makes available to our living rooms. As parents, we know that it's nearly impossible to keep children away from mass media messages, no matter how much we try. It's time to learn new ways of managing our relationship with media messages—and that means transforming ourselves and our children into active, critical viewers.
Educators have a particularly ambivalent love-hate relationship with media, since while many teachers hate the impact of media they see in their students’ behavior, attitudes and values, teachers recognize the powers of visual media as effective tools that aid the process of instruction. But it's important to note that simply using media in the classroom does not mean that teachers are developing student media literacy skills.
Teachers have been using film and television media to teach with for many years. In the traditional instructional use of media, a videotape is used to add instructional content to a lesson. A geography lesson will be enriched by the addition of a videotape on the Nile River. This approach to media uses in the classroom—while often highly effective in capturing student attention, motivating and informing students—rarely develops the skills of critical analysis.
Two additional components are necessary to develop student media literacy skills. Being an active viewer means knowing what to look for, and what questions to ask of a mass media message. The experience of producing is equally as necessary to be media-literate, because, as a producer of a media message, the many choices and decisions that are involved in the construction of a media message becomes clear.

Media Literacy = Critical Viewing Skills + Production Experience
These materials include a series of classroom activities to assist teachers as they include active viewing skills in their curricula, and to help them identify appropriate classroom activities that involve students in the message production process.
This program embeds the key concepts of media literacy, as developed in the Harvard Institute on Media Education, in a program that focuses on analyzing the genre of the documentary. The documentary is the most commonly used of classroom materials in a wide range of subject areas, including language arts, science, social studies, geography and health. Since teachers are already using these materials to teach with, the program aims to provide teachers with strategies for including the additional phases of teaching about media and involving students in media production activities. This program is not designed as a new component for the curriculum, but as an additional layer to include in teachers’ already existing curricula. What are the nine critical questions to help students learn how to analyze media messages?

What is a documentary?
Students may be familiar with the word "documentary," so it’s important to discover their levels of existing knowledge and their attitudes about this genre of programming. Many students will be able to identify which channels documentaries are most frequently found on, and many children will note that most documentary programs are "not for kids."
Unfortunately, some students have negative attitudes towards the documentary, which they may label as "boring." When students are asked who watches documentaries, they often identify "teachers" as a target audience, so when teachers explain to students why they like documentaries, this can be useful in helping students to understand the appeal of the genre among adults.
When Scottish filmmaker John Grierson defined the documentary near the turn of the century as "the creative interpretation of actuality," it was to recognize that documentaries are creative representations of actual people, groups and events. Under this broad definition, we may also consider "reality-based" shows like "America’s Most Wanted," "Rescue 911" and "Cops" to be "creative interpretations of actuality."

What is the Producer’s Purpose?
Because the documentary has a kind of intellectual authority as a "serious" genre in film and television, we often assume that the documentary is neutral or objective. But this fallacy is dangerous precisely because it leads us away from critically analyzing a message. One key of media literacy is that, since all messages are constructions, all messages are expressing a point of view.
The simplest way to explore the concept of point of view is to identify the constellation of motives that drive a producer to create a documentary: to inform, to educate, to entertain, to persuade, for self-expression, for profit. Michael Renov, in his book, Theorizing Documentary, identifies similar rhetorical and aesthetic functions of non-fiction arts, but omits the functions of entertainment and profit because he is primarily concerned with independent documentary productions. By looking at a range of different documentaries, we can see the relative importance of these motives as they operate within a specific media "text."
Often, the concepts of "bias" and "ideology" are used to analyze the producer’s purpose. A producer works in a social, political and economic context that sets constraints on a program’s content, tone and stylistic elements. Documentaries that are produced in Great Britain through the BBC are usually quite different from those produced by U.S. commercial programming, which differ from independently produced documentaries. As Elayne Rapping points out in The Looking Glass World of Non-Fiction TV, "The contrast between the 1950’s documentary approach of "See It Now" and that of contemporary reports is telling.
As video technology grew more sophisticated, the triumph of style over content was heightened. This allowed the networks to apply a variety of aesthetically moving and impressive techniques to serious topics. On the other hands, the range of views examined and the depth of the examinations has not changed as much as sometimes seems the case…Documentaries now serve the somewhat different purpose of expounding on, and so justifying, policies already in place. They rarely challenge hegemony; they explain it."

How does the producer’s purpose shape the program contact?
During the 1950’s and 60s, some documentary producers believed that it was possible for the camera to record "raw" reality, to reduce the intervention of the filmmaker’s presence and give viewers "the feeling of being there." Lightweight film equipment and the growing use of the camera as an instrument for scientific observation led to the development of documentary techniques called Direct Cinema, or "cinema verite," films that claimed to capture experience objectively without the use of dramatic structure or narration.
But the goal of capturing "reality" without the intervention of the filmmaker proved to be an elusive and nonsensical goal. The camera must be directed by a human eye and mind, and every choice about where to point the lens is a human decision that shapes the program content. Although a documentary can authentically reproduce some aspects of actual experience, a documentary cannot ever be perfectly "objective."
In exploring how all messages are constructed products, a useful method is to adapt a message in different ways. By adapting a message to suit different audiences, or to make use of different genres, students can see the complex decision-making involved in the choices about what language, sound or images to use in the creation of a message. A producer whose primary purpose is to persuade will attempt to appeal to viewers’ emotions in ways that an educator may not. A producer’s purpose will influence the choice of which medium and genre to use. Classroom activities can encourage students to explore how different purposes and motives can be used to develop different program angles on a topic.

How are image, sound and language used to manipulate the message?
As a word, "manipulation" has a bad reputation. But the original meaning of the word manipulation comes from the French word for "handful." When we examine the meanings listed in the dictionary, we see that manipulation means "to operate with the hands in a skillful manner." But it also means to control or play upon "by artful, unfair or insidious means to serve one’s own purpose." Manipulation is a necessary part of the creation of film and television. You have to handle images and words—sort them, organize them and put them together—in order to make a message meaningful.
Handling language is a complex affair in the production of the documentary because the language is largely designed to be heard, not read. A documentary producer has to write a script for the voice-over, conduct interviews and edit them to select only the most relevant and useful soundbites. The most challenging part of the process consists of organizing the language to present information in a sequence that is compelling.
Different techniques are used to convey a message within a limited time period using images and sounds. The most important one concerns the way you represent a person’s language. For while the subject of the interview controls what he or she chooses to say, the producer can, through editing, re-shape the ideas the subject presents. And since the producer controls the choice of language and image, a producer can make an individual look strong or weak , believable or phony.
Music is one of the most important techniques used to encourage viewers to have an emotional response. Music can be added to make something look more playful, more suspenseful, more dramatic and spectacular, and more fearful. Lots of times when we are watching, we do not notice the impact that music can have. A pretty ordinary or ambiguous image can be given a clear and dramatic meaning through the selection of music.
And of course the camera itself, while it captures some aspects of perception, shapes images just by choosing what to focus on and by the very look of the image itself. Camera techniques like the close-up, the pan, the angle shot, the freeze-frame, the time lapse and the aerial view all influence our perceptions of a scene. And of course, lighting, activity within the frame, the pace and rhythm of the editing all work to influence our emotional responses to the image. A producer and editor can do wonders by using many different images of a single scene to make something look more exciting and interesting. This kind of manipulation is increasingly necessary because according to experts, television has nurtured a set of expectations that everything be visually dynamic.
Perhaps this is a "natural" bias of film and television, or maybe the public has simply been trained to expect the television present a feast-paced and ever-changing visual display.
Often, a producer steps in front of the camera to adjust reality to make it more suitable for the demands of production, to create a more compelling image, to tell a better story. Such practices are common in documentary, yet manipulation of events in front of the camera is still considered inappropriate for news. Re-enactments and the inclusion of fictional elements in a documentary have been part of the art form since the art form was invented.
Does it matter whether the producer manipulates events in front of the camera or creates fictional events to represent real events? As more and more complex manipulation f time, space and reality become commonplace, we need the skills to detect this manipulation and understand why it is used. For students, the best way to understand the ethical issues inherent in the manipulation of image, sound and language is to experiment with their combination and discover the consequences for themselves.

What techniques are used to enhance the authenticity of the message?
As we have already explored, the word "real" is pretty tricky when it comes to the study of film and television. Documentary film and television derive their power because the images they provide seem authentic and believable. But the concept of "authenticity" is itself a construction.
As Bill Nichols writes, "Our perception of the real is constructed for us by codes and conventions." The use of archival film footage is one of the most common techniques that enhance authenticity because the footage encourages us to assume that, because the images are old, they are true.
During the 1980’s, additional techniques to enhance authenticity were developed. The public’s exposure to amateur video and "hidden camera" techniques have changed our expectations of what "real" looks like. People’s expectations about which images are authentic are influenced by camera techniques that include the shaky camera, the grainy image, or the use of the time/date stamp. Now, media professionals have mad advertising, documentaries, and even fictional programming using these techniques, imitating (or co-opting) the look of authentic style to grab viewers’ attention.
And, of course, documentaries can use imagery that is completely inauthentic to make a very useful and informative program. When making a program about the middle ages, for example, a producer will have no access to authentic film or video of the time period and may need to develop creative ways to produce compelling visual images that convey the mood of the times. Close examination of documentaries that make use of reenactments, for example James Burke’s series, "The Day the Universe Changed," would be valuable to help students see the complex ways in which authenticity is constructed.

What techniques are used to enhance the authority of the message?
Most documentaries make use of the convention of the expert, the authorities whose explanations, claims and presentation of information serve as the substance of the program. However, the "expert" is in fact another construction, since viewers have some expectations about how experts should look, how they should sound, and what kinds of locations in which they should be situated. As Bill Nichols writes, "Our willingness to agree with what is said (by experts or witnesses) relies to a surprisingly large extent on rhetorical persuasion and documentary convention." The implicit rule in documentaries is ‘Trust those who speak to the camera unless given reason to do otherwise.’
As a producer, if you want to make something or someone more believable, there are a lot of techniques you can use. Put them in front of an important building, surround them with a high technology anchor desk, or have them dress in a very formal way. And watch where you put the camera: it has to be close enough, but not too close.
Who gets to be an expert? Most often, documentaries rely on experts who are middle-aged, white, well-educated men. They are the mainstays of the documentary tradition. Why is such a pattern established, and what are the consequences of relying on male experts? For some subject areas and topics, they could be the only available people who knew about the topic. For some producers, the choice of male experts could be an unconscious effort to find "credible types," still associated with white men. For our students, the dominance of older white males, in subtle ways, may shape our expectations about who is entitled to be an expert.

How do different individuals interpret the same message?
Teachers need particular skills at understanding how children understand film and television in developmental context. Children vary widely in their ability to recall what they see on television. In one study of Israeli and U.S. children, researchers discovered that children’s expectations about television—whether they think TV viewing is easy or hard—influences their ability to use TV for learning. Students learn more from television if they expect to find the process of watching to be an active, challenging experience.
As a key concept in media literacy, it’s important to understand that individuals interpret messages differently based on their prior experience, knowledge and values. The creation of meaning is a process of interaction between the reader and the text. As teachers, it is important to provide a climate where we respect the diversity of responses to a work of literature as well as to videos, films and television. Too often, when we expect students to like a work that we do, or when we dismiss works that students enjoy, we inadvertently create a climate that discourages students from sharing their genuine responses to a message.

What techniques are used to involve or engage the viewer in the message?
One of the most important challenges faced by a producer of a news of documentary program is how to get the viewer involved in the program. Michael Curtin has called this "packaging reality," the process of giving non-fictional messages a dramatic shape.
Getting viewers’ attention and keeping their attention is one of the classic concerns of all media makers. A lot of elements can keep people’s attention, but movement, action, sexuality, violence, children, humor and the unexpected have been recognized as highly effective in a commercial context when viewers have a lot of programming choices.
Most documentaries make use of a narrative (story) structure. Stories are such powerful ways to organize ideas. By focusing on heroes, victims and villains, producers can increase the likelihood that viewers will be engaged with the topic. However, the use of typical story elements can also distort and constrict the complexity of an issue.

Who makes money from this message?
The best way to make money from film and television is to attract a large audience. The larger the size of the audience in television, the more money you can make by selling the audience to advertisers.
While we are all different individuals, there are a few things we have in common: the need to monitor our environment to search for visual change, especially changes that relate to sex and aggression. Keeping a keen eye out to monitor sex and aggression is one of those skills that has been biologically useful to the maintenance of humans as social creatures—we’ve been doing it for as long as humans have been humans, about 35,000 years.
The driving force behind most commercial programming is ratings, and programs that feature sex, violence, children, animals and UFO’s (the staples of sensationalist) will attract viewers—guaranteed. Discovery Channel has found that large animals—especially sharks and other that can eat you—generate the highest ratings.
One way to explore this complex issue is to study the use of programming promotions, a form of advertising extremely common on television. Promoting or "promos" are commercials for a show. Research shows that most children under 12 don’t see these as advertising. When teachers ask students to count the number of promotions and the times of day they can be found, what do they discover? Promos are most frequent in the afternoon when children are watching TV after school!
Promos can be informationally misleading, since the purpose of the promo is to get the viewer’s attention, not to inform them. This promo may exaggerate or misrepresent the more complex issue of the longer program simply because its goal is to make a visually compelling message. More people will see the promo than will ever see the actual program. People can get misinformation from a promo if they aren’t vigilant about the fact that a promo is not designed to be headline news. It’s designed to capture your attention and sell the product.

Conclusion

Television has an important influence on children’s perception of reality and their understanding of the world around them. It’s important to note that because children have so much less experience with the real "real world," it is hard for them to make good judgments about whether the life of a police officer is accurately represented by "Cops."
Young people who watch a lot of TV often find that TV’s "reality" is more real than their won day-to-day experience. Helping young people develop reasoning skills about the constructed nature of TV is the essence of media literacy education. Parents and teachers need to make this an integral part of a child’s education—both in school and at home.
But since more and more television producers are driven by the motives of entertainment alone, the values of journalism, art, advocacy, and education are driven to the sidelines. This means we need to be increasingly vigilant about deciding what to believe in among the many choices of programs we see on TV. Most importantly, we need to reshape the way we watch so that we are actively involved in questioning the messages we receive.