Lexi Dittrich CTP Blog #4

While viewing thirty minutes of the WISN 12 morning news, I gathered quite a lot of information on how the local news media shapes how the viewers perceive reality. First off, the stories were brief and all across the board. There was about a 3:2 ratio of stories, "good news" stories being reported more frequently than "bad news" stories, and each "good news" story was in place in between the "bad" stories, almost to distract or calm the viewers down from the negative. 

This pattern shows that the news media--with its function as an informer, interpreter, and a diversion from the real world--tries to create a softer, safer reality for the viewer, where people are generally kind and heroic. Case in point, after opening with very brief stories on the Midwest's flash flooding, the focus switched quickly to a story about a local man saving a deer from the flash floods.

This broadcast also focused heavily on the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure run that happened downtown today, which communicated the station's agenda related to breast cancer awareness. Additionally, a stream of positive stories was reported back-to-back in the middle of the program, reporting in succession on a local girl who called 911 to rescue her mother from a stroke, a woman returning thousands of dollars she found in a Domino's takeout box, and leading into the Pet of the Week segment. These stories construct a heavily endorsed false reality that life is consistently positive more than negative, which demonstrates the diversion function of the news as well as the "hypodermic needle approach" of injecting good values and positive role modeling into the viewer.

Another reality the news media tries to construct is one in relation to age, gender, and race. Young adults and older individuals (those appearing to be 50 and older) gained significantly more air time than middle aged individuals and the youth. Male and female appearances varied, however more men appeared throughout the program (about three more) than women had.

Race had a great variety as well, especially with coverage of this weeks opening of the National African American Museum of History and Culture. However, appearances of Caucasian individuals on the program was still over twice as common as the appearances of African American individuals. Besides that, there was only one appearance of somebody of a race other than the two above: he was a Middle Eastern race and was reported as the suspect for a fatal stabbing frenzy in a Washington mall last Friday.

This portrayal of age, gender, and race sends a message to the viewer, stating that the up and comers and the wiser are far more respected, women are less represented, and whites need more representation than the colored community. If this message is portrayed enough on the news, it leads to support the Cultivation Theory, that our perception of the world can be shaped by which groups of people are represented on television. 

These portrayals also play, in part, to Social Learning Theory, which states that, "media portrayals influence our development of schemata or scripts... about different groups of people." In this news cast, whites were mostly involved in stories about football. On the flip-side, African Americans were involved mostly in the story on the  African American museum, and the one mention and sight of a man of Middle Eastern descent was in a story labeling him as a murderer. Stories of the like portray social roles to the viewer (e.g., whites are obsessed with sports, African Americans are activists, Middle Easterners are terrorists, etc.) which the viewer then uses as a perspective to categorize people in their reality. 

In these ways, as our reading mentioned and our studies in class stated, the media has a very accessible ability to change our perspective on our self-constructed reality.