Welcome to the Class
WHY TAKE THIS COURSE? The study of media has moved from its early roots in the examination of arts, culture, and current events towards more disciplinary and professional study of media forms, including book and magazine publishing, journalism and news media, advertising and public relations, narrative and non-narrative film, popular music, videogames, the Internet and social media. More recently, interdisciplinary approaches to media studies have begun to dominate the field, as researchers create new knowledge by examining the intersections between media texts, technologies, platforms, and institutions, in diverse fields of study including education, business, political science, psychology, and even criminal justice. These interdisciplinary aporoaches to media studies have examined how media help to maintain or challenge status quo power relationships in relation to social, economic, political, and cultural issues.
Media shape people’s understanding of social reality. Most people have well-formed opinions about law enforcement long before they ever actually interact with a police officer in real life. A variety of media texts, technologies, and platforms now influence the landscape of policing, affecting citizens and police alike. As social media becomes a routine part of most people’s daily lives, many feel empowered to post content and disclose information that depicts law enforcement activities. On popular YouTube channels, audiences can readily scrutinize the actions of police and citizens, viewing footage from surveillance cameras, citizen recordings of police, surveillance cameras, and body-worn cameras. A growing number of Americans believe that it is important to document police encounters to limit abuses of power.
At the same time, most people are largely unaware of the many ways that media depictions of crime affect people’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The research literature on this topic is plentiful. For example, citizens who watch local TV news are more likely to believe that crime is rising both nationally and locally than other members of society. Watching television news and crime-based reality programs affect how citizens make sentencing decisions, even after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and experiences with crime such as fear, past victimization, and prior arrests.
Entertainment media has long offered crime genres as a sensationalist thrill ride with moral messages or cultural commentary. Crime shows are among the most-watched series on TV. Some TV shows depict criminal justice professionals as committing wrongful actions in a way that normalizes them — making bad actors seem good and wrongful actions seem right. In many movies and TV shows, criminal justice professionals who are represented as “good guys” actually commit more wrongful actions than those constructed as “bad guys.”
In the summer and fall of 2020, after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black individuals who were killed by police, some scripted TV shows about law enforcement featured storylines that suggested that the training of police officers may be a factor in officer-involved homicides. For example, in one episode of N.C.I.S.: New Orleans, the team uncovers a gang of white supremacist officers who were all trained by an instructor who practiced Warrior Training, a type of training that encourages an “us versus them” approach to policing. Through entertainment media, viewers learn about police professionals who treat citizens — particularly Black citizens — as the enemy, presenting a “dehumanizing perspective that shapes how officers approach their job, use their discretion, and see themselves” (Bernabo, 2022, p. 488).
In many ways, media and technology are transforming the conversation about policing in America. With law enforcement under the magnifying glass, deficiencies in police education are also becoming more noticeable to the public. In this class, students get a hands-on chance to learn research skills through a research apprenticeship that examines an innovative train-the-trainers initiative in media literacy education designed to help police officers develop critical thinking and communication skills about media and technology in ways that improve the training of future police officers.
