Media Image
Women have long faced media images that create unrealistic images of themselves to live up to, but a lesser known fact is that men face the same problem. In today's mass media, men are dunderheaded, philandering imbeciles, or impossibly perfect heroes. These are equivalent to the slut and the Barbie images that women face in the media, and such false, unrealistic images of men are just as dangerous as their female equivalents. The portrayal of men in the mass media is negative and needs to be changed.
In a landmark study, Macnamara (2006) examined over 2000 mass media instances and found that 69% of them portrayed men in a negative light, and much of the rest was dismissive about the positive coverage. On their own, such images can be foolish and absurd, but as occurs with the negative images of women, the negative images of men have negative consequences in the real world. Macnamara cites negative health outcomes, suicide and family disintegration as some of the consequences of media's negative portrayals of men.
In his book This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz highlights the challenges men face in adapting to real world reality, after being raised in an environment surrounded by such negative imagery. Boys learn at a young age from their surroundings what is expected of them in society. Usually, those expectations amount to very little. As Diaz notes, "it is assumed that guys value sexuality over relationship and commitment." In his book, Diaz covers this issue,...
Mass Media and Ontological Security "Despite the fact that crime rates in most U.S. cities have been in steady decline for a decade, local newscasts still operate under the mantra, 'If it bleeds, it leads'." Gross, et al., 2003, p. 411. Does the mass media threaten society's sense of ontological security more than it contributes to society's ontological security? This paper delves into and analyzes this question from the perspective of peer-reviewed,
Also, gay characters have slowly become more prominent both on TV and in the movies. In the 1990s, producers gave up on feeling that they had to challenge gender representations as models of masculinity and femininity had become less offensive and clearly defined. We can, for instance, refer to the hit sit-com Friends which presented three male characters, Ross, Chandler and Joey whose masculinity was placed within conventional models of
Disengagement Theory Disengagement theory was one of the earliest theories written on aging and it was formulated by Cumming and Henry in 1961. This theory states that the society should find avenues for older people to actively disengage from authority to give way for younger people to take over. Through this way, the society creates a smooth transition for the younger generation to take over the active roles while the elders
In fact, this is something that Obama discusses openly in his book, Dreams of My Father. In that book, Obama discusses the fact that his stepfather is Muslim and how he believes his stepfather's religion helped shape the man that he is. However, that book, written before Obama came into the national spotlight and certainly before his presidential bid, does not say anything about Obama being Muslim. It is
..unhelpful...their adversarial posture becomes destructive, perhaps unpatriotic," (53). If Goldstein elected to reissue a second edition of Killing the Messenger, he would do well to include an essay by the recently deceased Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist who proudly revived the muckraker tradition by declaring that the best journalists are willfully opinionated. By selecting Roosevelt's "The Man with the Muckrake" as part of Killing the Messenger, Goldstein presents a balanced perspective
A in millions) Current in millions) Provided by Federal Bureau of Investigation as of September 18, 2006. www.whitehouse.gov/goodbye/3ae6b1ac94aa97e6650780f280890a7c81100e47.html" CHART: National Correctional Populations National Correctional Populations The number of adults in correctional population has been increasing. A in millions) Current million in millions) Provided by Bureau of Justice Statistics as of November 30, 2006. (Social Statistics Briefing Room, 2006) More Statistics Violence in the Media Huston and colleagues have estimated that the average 18-year-old will have viewed 200,000 acts of violence on
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