New Perspectives: Media, Messages, Men

A further orient emerges over the course of the text, which is that because some dissemination of information emanates from semens that ar unreliable, either because of bad faith or mere incompetence, not all media are equally trustfulnessworthy. In a sense, eyesight is not believing for all too many mass-media displays. That informs the authors' notion of "previewability," the name that they give to enabling a media audience "to bed what they will find inside the total message presentation" (22).

That idea forms a part of the critique of pornography, although it can be argued that with pornography one is frequently in a go under to preview the contents--if only because of a known quantity similar a magazine title (Hustler) or a photo lasting eight instead of 120 minutes coroneted Swingin' in the Rain--and can choose to take or cede the sheets between the covers. Where propaganda is concerned, on the other hand, there is frequently a potential attempt to tantalize, obfuscate, or conceal meaning and flavor by the use of words meant to valorize or build trust in the source or sponsor of the information. The same is frequently true of the linkage between editorial content and what could be called the "sell copy" of that very content. In that connection, the authors comment that advertizes are so often "twisted, biased, distorted, and otherwise rigged, that one is led to hope that headlines bear a

There are, of course, to a greater extent pernicious examples from historical fact: One is reminded of the famous Nazi lease The Eternal Jew, which proclaims an attitude and agenda that seek to take down one particular group of human beings and inflame the beggarly passions of another. A related example is the very well-made and world-historical film Triumph of the Will, manifestly having the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games as its subject plainly in fact being a latent eulogy to the Reich as irresistible force and immovable object. The challenge to recipients of communications, as Lowenstein and Merrill characterize instances of media product, would be the ability to dispassionately decode the latent content of a report, whether as an instance of total introduction on one hand or errant lean hatred on the other.

bout as much simile to their stories as the stories bear to the reality they purport to report" (197). A hypothetical example of that might be a headline on the cover of the National Globe that breathlessly touts (for example), "Oprah's transcendental Torment," and it turns out that (let us say) the story inside reports on the eon (if it ever happened) that Oprah's butler lost her lucky socks in the laundry. some other example might be a short TV spot that has the local newscaster saying, "Your child at risk of complaint in preschool? Film at eleven." The actual story, of course, could be nearly anything from the necessity of washing hands after potty-time to an epidemic of spinal anaesthesia meningitis; the principle of previewability remains.

Merrill, John Calhoun, and Ralph Lynn Lowenstein. Media, Messages, and Men: impertinently Perspectives in Communication. New York: David McKay Co., 1971.

If these points are the principal thrust of the authors' argument, then the text does fall upon its goals. Yet in another sense, there is about the restrain a double effect. The critique of mass media as the source of too much information that cannot be absorbed by any sane person and that threatens to ov
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