Time to say Goodbye
A reflexion on the course “Inside the News Media”.
Being a student of both British Studies and Publizistik, it seems obvious that the media and any related topic play quite an important role in my life. Thus I was very excited when I saw that this semester there was a course called “Inside the News Media” taught by Geoffrey Miller, a lecturer I already got to know and appreciate during the previous semester. And I was right to take this course since I learned a lot and also got the opportunity to engage in several interesting discussions surrounding the media.
Being one of the only students in this class that study Publizistik as their main subject, it soon became clear that I had been living in a “bubble”: In Publizistik, I am always surrounded by other people who also find great joy in analysing (and after graduating also hopefully creating) media, by people who, at least to some extent, trust in the media and, most importantly, who believe in its importance. Although being aware of the flaws and dangers that come with the media system, I never judged the media as a whole as being bad, lying, manipulating or as being propaganda machines. Turns out, as soon as I leave the Publizistik-bubble and talk to other students, there are some people who actually do believe that the media is nothing but a brainwashing-machine and whose distrust in the media is so encompassing, that they stopped consuming any “Mainstream” media at all.
Me not being a fan of any kind of “black-and-white”-thinking, I felt that this classification of the media as being the worst wasn’t fair. Sure, if the media is used to willingly manipulate people (as it happens to us all the time with advertisements), this can be very effective and one has to be aware of this potential danger. But with the media being the only news source we have, I don’t think you should simply damn it completely and stop informing yourself about what is going on. Sure there must be a way in between “I believe everything on TV, no matter who tells me about it and how absurd it might sound” and “the media is nothing but a propaganda-tool and whoever consumes any media is a brainwashed, blindfolded fool”.
So this is the only negative thing that I would like to mention about this course. Sometimes, balanced discussions turned into some sort of “bashing the media” and I kind of just leaned back to hear if someone would actually say the word “Lügenpresse” out loud. I sometimes would have hoped for a more detailed analysis of why the media, with all its flaws and dangers that need to be worked on, still is crucial to all of us. Also, I would have loved to discuss ideas about what we can do to battle fake news , how to find trustworthy news and how to ensure high quality journalism in the future.
Other than that, I loved everything about the course — Geoffrey, you’re awesome! I really enjoyed your efforts to get us all engaged in discussions, get us writing our own blog post, the funny videos you showed us to wake us all up and to illustrate what we were talking about. Both courses I took with you as a lecturer were very enjoyable and interesting and I really hope that you’ll find just as much pleasure in your next job as you did in your nine years of teaching at the Uni Mainz. You’ll sure be missed.
