Virtual_Burlesque
Former Ecdysiast
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I recently saw House Hippos” – unfortunately, not on local televison, but rather on the internet.
Does anyone know whether any American stations are running these announcements?
Does anyone know whether any American stations are running these announcements?
Seeing TV through new eyes.
What a new media literacy guide has to tell us about how we watch the tube.
Alex Strachan, Vancouver Sun
Saturday, April 26, 2003
"It's not that we like TV more than our parents. It's just that it's spent so much more time raising us."
-- Bart Simpson, in The Simpsons
Spaghetti grows on trees.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/images/spaghetti4.jpg
The BBC says so. The Spaghetti Story first appeared on BBC1 on April 1, 1957 -- the date was evidently lost on a lot of viewers watching at the time -- as one of a series of travelogues or short documentaries that presented the scenic and unique features of a particular place, in this case an unusually good spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. "It isn't only in Britain that spring this year has taken everyone by surprise," the narrator informed viewers in the dulcet, authoritative tones of a typical BBC broadcaster. "Here on Turcino, on the borders of Switzerland and Italy, the slopes overlooking Lake Lugano have already burst into flower at least a fortnight earlier than usual. But what, you may ask, has the early arrival of bees and blossoms have to do with food? Well, it's simply that this past winter, one of the mildest in living memory, has had its effect in other ways as well. Most importantly, it has resulted in an exceptionally heavy spaghetti crop."
Using credible devices like solemn narration, folk music (acoustic mandolin, guitar and strings) and supporting images of peasants harvesting spaghetti, the video explained how spaghetti is grown, harvested and celebrated. ("The last two weeks in March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There's always a chance of a late frost which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavour and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices on world markets. But now those dangers are over and the harvest goes forth.") The program took pains to explain away any questions the viewer might have ("Many people are puzzled by the fact that spaghetti is produced at such uniform length, but this is the result of many years of patient endeavour by plant breeders who succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti") and revealed how, after picking, the spaghetti is laid out to dry in the warm Alpine sun, to obtain just the right flavour. At the end of the video, Britain's most trusted BBC commentator at the time let viewers in on the hoax and told them that spaghetti did not grow on trees, but came from Welsh mines.
That wonderful video is not just a curiosity item from the archives of British television. It is one of 51 short videos on Scanning Television, an eye-opening, often eye-popping, guide to media literacy produced by a Vancouver film- and television production company, Face to Face Media, and producer Gary Marcuse, together with the Toronto-based Jesuit Communication Project, with the additional support of Citytv Vancouver and CHUM Television.
TV or not TV -- that's not the question. Scanning Television is not so much about whether TV is good or bad for you, but how television works, how the medium conveys its messages, how those messages are constructed and how they're liable to be interpreted.
Scanning Television was devised with teenagers in mind, and a video package comprising four videocassettes or two DVDs, with accompanying companion guide for teachers, is available to teachers and schools, by logging onto Face-to-face Media But its short films, ranging from The Spaghetti Story and public service announcements about date rape and youth suicide to scenes from The Matrix and Chosen, a promotional film for BMW directed by Ang Lee, are likely to appeal to anyone with a healthy curiosity about the way media constructs work. Marshall McLuhan once said that any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a working knowledge of the way in which media work, and Scanning Television hopes to create a waking audience that watches TV with its eyes open, and its mind engaged.
There is some strong stuff, too -- the companion guide, written by Toronto District School Board curriculum consultant Neil Andersen, San Francisco media educator and writer Kathleen Tyner and Jesuit priest and Scanning the Movies host John Pungente, provides ample warning about some segments -- including the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, hard-to-swallow footage from Michael Moore's The Awful Truth, TV coverage of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and a timely section on media, war and the nature of censorship during a time of conflict.
An early edition of Scanning Television won a gold medal at the New York Festival and a bronze plaque at the Columbus (Ohio) International Film and Video Festival, but that's beside the point: What's important is that in a world of ever-increasing media images and impressions, many of them conflicting or contradictory, any guide is useful, especially one as user friendly as Scanning Television. The new edition includes profiles of controversial broadcasters al-Jazeera and Radio Havana, the world's first films by the Lumière brothers (the video includes three separate versions of the Lumières' film classic Sortie d'usine with voice-over narration by noted French director Bernard Tavernier) and clips from wacky 1940s teen-advice films like Are You Popular? and Dating Do's and Don'ts.
Scanning Television was designed for teachers new to the concept of media literacy, as well as experienced media educators. The 96-page companion guide provides an outline of media literacy's basic aims, as well as suggestions for lesson plans in the classroom. The videos explore subjects ranging from youth advertising, culture jamming and racism to the evolution of digital technology and the Internet -- but they do it in a hip, savvy and playful way; this isn't one of those sleep-inducing Canadian Heritage Moments or a laboured bore like Canada: A People's History. (A public service announcement for children, House Hippo, originally produced by the industry lobby group Concerned Children's Advertisers, a consortium of 24 companies involved in media production, advertising and broadcasting, is a gentle treasure and is included in Scanning Television's anthology of short films. Instead of railing against the perils of inactivity in pedantic, parental overtones, House Hippo shows a mother hippopotamus and her baby munching grass in an open field, while the narrator intones, "The North American house hippo is found throughout Canada and the eastern United States.
http://www.cca-kids.ca/special/images/hippo_3.gif
House hippos are very timid creatures and are rarely seen, but they will defend their territory if provoked.
http://www.cca-kids.ca/special/images/hippo_8.gif
They come out at night to search for food and water and materials for their nests. The favourite foods for house hippos are chips, raisins and crumbs from peanut butter on toast.
http://www.cca-kids.ca/special/images/hippo_6.gif
They build their nests in bedroom closets, using lost mittens, dryer lint and bits of string. The nests have to be very soft and warm. House hippos sleep about 16 hours a day.")
Television is not, as some critics claim, a weapon of mass destruction (an overworked phrase, if ever there was one). More accurately, it is an instrument of mass distraction, and then only when it is at its worst. As Scanning Television goes to great lengths to point out, it doesn't have to be that way. "The biggest misunderstanding about media literacy is that it's media bashing, and it isn't," Pungente said in an interview during a recent visit to Vancouver. "Media literacy is not going to tell you whether something's good or bad. It's simply a way of making you more aware, and better preparing you to become a global citizen."
The number of media messages increases exponentially every year, Marcuse added. "The pace has increased to such a point that the need for young people, not to even filter information necessarily, but just circulate through it, to distinguish one type of message from another, is huge. Young people are just drowning in information, but knowledge is harder to come by."
"TV is like a flashlight. We can show you what's in the flashlight's beam. But it's hard to know what's going on above or below it."
-- Dan Rather, on CBS-TV during the first week of the war in Iraq.
"The first casualty of war is less often the truth than the way we tell it." -- Stanford University linguist and National Public Radio host Geoffrey Nunberg, in The New York Times, April 6.
Possibly no event in the recent past has highlighted the need for media literacy more than the Iraq war. Depending on which TV station you happened to be watching at the time, or which newspaper or magazine you read, you were confronted with an entirely different view of the war.
The choice of a single word in a logo used to describe the conflict could subtly alter the viewers' perception of who was doing what to whom. CNN anchored its coverage with a graphic that proclaimed "War in Iraq," for example, while CBC and some of the European and Arab-language networks chose "War on Iraq." BBC-TV went with the neutral "Iraq War," while ABC, perhaps favouring alliteration over political correctness, settled on "War with Iraq." More than three decades ago, Marshall McLuhan predicted World War III would be a global information war with no division between civilian and military participation. McLuhan was speaking figuratively, and while he didn't foresee "embedding" exactly -- the U.S. Pentagon's practice of placing hand-picked print and television reporters with frontline combat troops -- he could just as easily have been describing the recent conflict in Iraq.
In an essay last week praising Comedy Central's Daily Show, of all things, as an "extraordinary . . . cultural force, significantly larger than any mere satire of media idiocies," normally irascible New York Times media critic Frank Rich commended Daily host Jon Stewart for being irreverent without being ideological. On the day a statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down and trodden on by Baghdad residents in front of a worldwide television audience estimated in the hundreds of millions, Stewart told his viewers, "If you are incapable of feeling at least a tiny amount of joy watching ordinary Iraqis celebrate this, you are lost to the ideological left." He then added, "If you are incapable of feeling badly that we even had to use force in the first place, then you are ideologically lost to the right." In Rich's view, Stewart's comedy, falling somewhere between the poles of left and right but not claiming the mushy middle ground, delineated "the ambivalence and anxiety that many, if not most, Americans felt about their first pre-emptive war."
Television viewers wise to the wiles of media constructs were unlikely to be lost to either ideological wing, just as they were unlikely to see a recent, dramatic photograph of a U.S. Army private carrying a young Iraqi boy injured during a heavy battle for anything more than what it was -- a stirring image of bravery and compassion performed under fire. That photograph, a potential Pulitzer candidate taken last month during a chaotic firefight between the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment and Iraqi forces near the village of Faysaliiyah, stirred a debate in the media and beyond about the image's effects and potential hidden motivations. (The National Post, in a curious decision, chose not to run the image on its front page, because a senior editor found it to be "jingoistic." The picture ran on an inside page, alongside a staff-written story of how it came to be taken.)
The photo, snapped by Army Times photographer Warren Zinn and distributed by the Associated Press news service, ran on the front pages of numerous newspapers across North America and prompted a lively discussion in those papers' letters pages. On balance, it seems readers read into the picture what they wanted to read into it, judging from the often contradictory comments printed in USA Today and other papers. (Sample comment: "[That] photo of a soldier holding an injured Iraqi boy explains, as no words ever could, why so many Americans support this war," printed on the same page as a letter that proclaimed, "Thank you for shattering the hype and myth that our country could go to war with smart bombs and high-tech weaponry, and avoid maiming and killing innocent Iraqi civilians . . . We should all look into that child's eyes and ask whether this is what America is all about.")
Knowledge of how the media work -- so-called media literacy -- leaves it up to the reader to decide whether there are any ulterior motives at work, or whether the image speaks for itself.
Another example: When CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Atlanta's Emory University in civilian life, was asked to perform emergency brain surgery on an injured two-year-old Iraqi boy April 3 while embedded with U.S. Marines, Gupta, working for CNN at the time, described it as "a heroic attempt to try to save the child's life." Media critics, including the Times's Rich, took the network to task for milking the moment for a live report. (The child died from his injuries.)
In another incident, TV coverage of U.S. Marines storming a bridge to save an elderly, injured Iraqi woman was met by praise of the soldiers' courage under fire, and criticism that the woman would not have been injured in the first place had the Americans not been there.
Media literacy asks the viewer, and reader, to question what he, or she, sees. Live reportage of a breaking news event is always going to be open to interpretation, and liable to accusations of media bias, because events are seen through such a narrow lens -- Dan Rather's "flashlight beam" which has no way of revealing what's above or below the beam. Television doesn't always bring clarity after the fact, either; comprehensive assessment is usually left to the print media, which have more time to reflect and place events in their proper perspective. Context in television is usually lost in a dizzying stream of images and unfiltered detail, but that's the nature of the medium. (It doesn't help, either, that U.S. television networks tend to cover a war the way they cover a sporting event, using "sports-speak" like "momentum," "blitzing," "throwing bombs," "win ugly," "calling an audible at the line of scrimmage," even "war-casters" to describe news anchors and embedded reporters. War is not the Super Bowl, nor is it a reality-TV show -- but then viewers who are media literate already know this. Media literacy empowers the consumer. The irony is that media literacy's most fearful detractors -- Marcuse notes that media literacy is a much tougher sell in corporate America than it is in the more enlightened media environment of Canada or Western Europe -- fail to recognize that a media literate audience is just as likely to recoil from Noam Chomsky's manufacturing discontent as it is to reject a media culture driven by unchecked consumerism.
"My theory is that because Canadians grow up watching television that never quite feels like their own, they're more aware of how it's put together," Marcuse said. "The other thing is that so many people in the United States are polarized in their positions, that when we come out with material that is essentially, as they say in the United States, "more analytical than critical," we've actually developed a way of promoting classroom discussion, and we're not out to simply criticize the media as being "bad" or advertising as being inherently dishonest.
Embedding, as originally devised by U.S. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, was seen as a way to control the flow of information back to the U.S. home front. For the most part it succeeded, though as Syracuse University media professor Robert Thompson noted in a recent interview with the Vancouver Sun, the most comprehensive, observant and informative reporting is likely to emerge now, in retrospect, weeks after the Pentagon controls have been lifted. (There are already signs of this: A detailed, and harrowing, account of emergency surgery performed aboard an aging CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter while under fire appeared in this past weekend's edition of the New York Times; the article suggested that the use of "mobile trauma wards" on, and above, the field of combat will be seriously reconsidered before being applied in future conflicts.) The real value of embedded reporting, Thompson believes, will be revealed once those reporters who were embedded begin writing books and magazine articles, and putting together documentary films, with the benefit of hindsight.
The conflict between media and government minders isn't over yet, either. According to Scanning Television, relationships between news media organizations and government are likely to be tested more and more as the Information Age evolves. The fact that combatants, and the battlefield itself, are no longer readily identifiable as such, only increases this possibility. During the Iraq war, both American and British governments asked that their media exercise restraint when airing footage and reciting facts provided by "the enemy" -- the decision whether to air al-Jazeera footage of captured American P.O.W.s, for example -- and both were quick to take foreign news organizations to task when they paraded those images on live television. Despite the preponderance of advertising on television, news coverage from the Iraq war proved once again that information is more than a mere commodity, Andersen feels.
"The more war news, the more people realized how little they understand about media, and the more anxious they became to gain some greater understanding," Andersen said. "It's like knowing your diet is generally unhealthy, yet knowing, too, that you need to learn more to be able to change it. People are just beginning to understand how much they don't understand, and it is making them very uncomfortable."
Scanning Television, winner of the Platinum Award at last week's 36th Annual Worldfest-Houston International Film & Video Festival for independent film-making, seeks to rectify that. And it's coming soon, to a school or public library near you.
We now return to our regular programs.
© Copyright 2003 Vancouver Sun
