Assessing Violence, Sex, Drugs, and “-isms” in Media Texts
There's a chapter in the second edition of Screening Images (Worsnop, 1999) called “Violence, Sex, Drugs and -isms in the Media.” It is my attempt at creating a system for approaching “sensitive issues” in media texts without promoting censorship. This notion will be familiar to any language arts teacher. All that is needed is a mention of Huckleberry Finn, The Merchant of Venice, or The Catcher in the Rye to illustrate the issues involved. The basic question with sensitive issues is this: How can curricula include the study of recognizably worthwhile cultural expressions when those expressions include topics or treatments of subjects to which some people are sensitive, or to which they outright object?
My views on this topic are colored by the experiences I had as a curriculum coordinator in refereeing objections to books and by the perpetual discussion among media educators about the possible effects of media texts on human behavior (e.g., Does violence on TV lead to violence in society? Is sexual content in films affecting sexual behavior in society?).
In my work in media education assessment, I wanted an instrument that could focus discussion not so much on forceful expressions of personal feelings (biases) about a text, but on the understanding that there are many different sets of feelings about any individual text, all of which deserve consideration. I am not so naive that I believe people will alter their own feelings as a result. I have found, though, that some people are able to broaden their point of view sufficiently to acknowledge the existence (and perhaps the validity) of alternative, competing interpretations of cultural products. This is preferable to a situation in which individuals bludgeon one another with their own opinions until someone gives in or walks away.
I have also found that the debate on effects of the media is more polite when there is an agreed basis for the discussion. The basis I propose is a three-point scale that helps the media consumer or observer rate sensitive issues frankly against personal tolerance. The top level is described as “better than generally expected in my personal value system”; the middle level is “consistent with my personal value system”; and the lowest level is “not acceptable in my personal value system.”
Many other scales -- those used to rate movies or TV programs, for instance -- employ a system of counting instances of violence, enumerating the frequency and kind of nudity or sexual behavior, tallying up the representations of drug use, and so on. My contention is that a simple counting mechanism does not do justice to the complexity of the issues. Do we want to compare On the Waterfront to a television cop show simply by counting the number of violent depictions each includes? Do we want to compare the nudity in Schindler's List to that on the Playboy channel? Obviously (to me, at any rate), there has to be some other gauge than just arithmentic.
What I propose is to rate the qualities of the manner in which the sensitive issue is raised in the text, instead of the frequency. The qualities I selected are
These six qualities of depiction of sensitive issues can each be described at the three levels of acceptability to create a chart that can be used in many settings and situations. Here is an example for “Integrity” (other examples can be found in Screening Images, pp. 130-133):
The depiction of sensitive issues in this text is
- integral and important to other parts of the text (level 1)
- generally connected to other parts of the text (level 2)
- gratuitous or unrelated to other parts of the text (level 3)
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232