Media and Power: A Handbook

Front matter

Note to Instructors

We have created this Handbook as an Open Educational Resource (OER) under a liberal CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Thus, instructors are free to build upon, adapt, translate, or alter this material as they see fit, and attribute accordingly:  

Media & Power: A Handbook by Bettina Fabos, Christopher R. Martin, and Catherine H. Palczewski is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The cover image, “Ideal Aesthetics, 9” screenprint 12” x 9” 2017,” is a work of print art by Dana Potter. More of her work can be found at Hilo Arts Lab: http://hiloartslab.com. This work is used with her permission.

Our goal was to write a Handbook that could guide students through concepts, content, and exercises that help them develop media literacy by understanding media and power.

For corrections, feedback, or comments on how you are using the text, please fill out this Google Contact Form.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank journalist and author Susan Faludi for changing the trajectory of this course through her examination of captivity narratives in Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.^[1] It is because of this work that we came to teach residual discourse using The Searchers (an influential Western film), contextualize captivity narratives historically, and connect them to popular culture today. We also thank Susan Faludi for her tremendous groundbreaking book about media and power, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,^[2] and for her mind-bending memoir of her father, In the Darkroom,^[3] and its exploration of gender identity.

We’d also like to thank Anne Marie Gruber, the Liaison & Textbook Equity Librarian and an Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa (where we teach), who tirelessly champions Open Educational Resources and has guided much of this project.

Finally, we thank artist and Professor Dana Potter, whose vibrant and powerful artwork is incorporated into the cover image, which she designed.

About the Authors

Bettina Fabos, Professor of Interactive Digital Studies, University of Northern Iowa (Ph.D. University of Iowa)

Research Interests: Critical literacy, media literacy, digital archiving, cultural memory studies

Dr. Bettina Fabos specializes in media, visual literacy, digital archiving, and digital storytelling, and has been a leader in media literacy pedagogy for twenty years. As a young journalist working for the Daily Hampshire Gazette and New England Monthly magazine in the late 1980s, she was fascinated by issues of power, objectivity, and representation in media storytelling. She pursued a master’s degree in Telecommunication Arts at the University of Michigan, immersing herself in issues of representation (e.g., portrayals of Olympic figuring skating athletes), and developing video art projects that addressed topics such as sexual harassment (Lessons), gender roles (Secretary is a Female Word and Guess What? Mum’s Come to Visit?), and wedding consumerism (Betty Bride)--winning national awards for her video work. While at Michigan, Bettina also established multiple video showcases that highlighted important emerging video artwork created by women and LBGTQ+ producers. As a video producer, Bettina developed an astute understanding for visual communication and aesthetics: how visual framing, color, and narrative structure empower the media producer to convey stories, meaning, and ideological constructs.

In 1998, Bettina joined her mentor, Richard Campbell, with Christopher Martin (professor of Journalism at the University of Northern Iowa), in revising Campbell’s textbook Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age, the first introduction to mass communication textbook to take a critical media literacy approach to the media. By the early 2000s, Media and Culture was the leading textbook in mass communication, and it has set the standard for media literacy pedagogy to this day. Now in its 13th edition, the textbook is used in mass communication survey classes across the U.S. She also co-authors two additional textbooks, Media Essentials (now in its 5th edition) and Media in Society (2013). Bettina’s book Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialization of the Internet champions high-quality, nonprofit educational content on the web and offers a critical literacy approach to web content. She is active in the Creative Commons and OER communities.

Beyond media literacy pedagogy, Bettina is an active producer of interactive media content, specializing in interactive timelines. She co-founded Fortepan Iowa in 2015, a UNI-based cooperative portal featuring amateur photographs on 20th century Iowa life that uses a timeline interface to tell the pictorial history of Iowa. The project is part of the larger Fortepan.us project, which she also co-founded, and which has received funding support from the National Archives and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bettina is also project director of an entertaining and comprehensive interactive timeline on Hungarian history (Proud and Torn: A Visual Memoir of Hungarian History) that uniquely combines photomontage, public history, and graphic memoir to make the complicated story of modern Hungary easily understood.  

Bettina joined the University of Northern Iowa faculty in 2002 and is a founding member of the Interactive Digital Studies program. Bettina teaches courses in digital culture, interactive digital communication, digital visualization, and media power and representation.

She completed her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Culture at the University of Iowa. At Iowa, Bettina was a Presidential Fellow, a Spencer Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize.

Christopher Martin: Professor of Digital Journalism, University of Northern Iowa (Ph.D. University of Michigan)

Research Interests: Journalism, Working Class, Labor Unions, Media History

Dr. Christopher R. Martin is a professor of Digital Journalism in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Northern Iowa. As a scholar of journalism and expert in critical media and information literacy, Chris has been a nationally recognized leader in news analysis.

One of his primary interests is to understand how news media cover labor unions and the working class in the U.S. Chris has authored two books on this subject: No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class (Cornell University Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 C.L.R. James Award from the Working Class Studies Association, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. He is also author of an award-winning book on how labor unions are covered in the news media, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (Cornell University Press, 2004). Chris is a contributing scholar to the Center for Journalism & Liberty and a regular contributor to the Working-Class Perspectives blog.

Chris’s research and writing has been published in Journalism Studies, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Communication Research, Labor Research Journal, Perspectives on Politics, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Communication, In These Times, Jacobin, Editor & Publisher, Huff Post, and Nieman Reports. He is also author or co-author of chapters for several edited books, including Routledge Companion to American Journalism History (Routledge, 2023), Labour in the 21st Century: Insights into a Changing World of Work (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), Public Sociology: Research, Action, and Change (Pine Forge Press, 2012), Language and Journalism (Routledge, 2010), and Knowledge Workers in the Information Society (Lexington Books, 2008).

With Richard Campbell and Bettina Fabos, he is co-author of Media and Culture: Mass Communication in a Digital Age (Bedford/St. Martin’s), now in its 13th edition, and Media Essentials: A Brief Introduction (Bedford/St. Martin’s), now in its 5th edition. Chris previously taught at Miami University (Ohio), and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of the State of Iowa’s Board of Regents Award for Faculty Excellence (2004) and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Faculty Excellence Award (2010). Chris is also president of United Faculty, an AAUP/AFT affiliate and the faculty union at UNI since 1976.

Chris’s teaching interests include Mass Communication and Society, News Writing for Media, Advanced Reporting, Feature Writing, Senior Seminar in Digital Media, Introduction to Graduate Study and a number of other digital media/journalism courses and graduate seminars.

Catherine H. Palczewski: Professor of Communication, University of Northern Iowa (Ph.D. Northwestern University)

Research Interests: Woman Suffrage, Public Argument, Gender, Argumentation, Social Protest, Political Communication, Public Memory, Visual Rhetoric

Dr. Catherine Palczewski’s work tends to focus on how marginalized groups rhetorically construct their messages to gain access to, and be legible in, the dominant public sphere. She has co-authored two significant textbooks: Gender in Communication (4th edition, Sage, 2022) and Rhetoric in Civic Life (3rd edition, Strata, 2022), and is the Editor of Disturbing Argument (Routledge, 2015), a selection of essays that explore “the disturbing prevalence of violence in the contemporary world” and “the potential of argument itself, to disturb the very relations of power that enable that violence.” Cate’s lead essay in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, "The 1919 Prison Special: Constituting White Women's Citizenship," examines the rhetoric surrounding the cross-country train tour of 26 white women who had been jailed as a result of their protest activity for woman suffrage. This groundbreaking essay reveals how white women's citizenship was realized, while Black women (who were also co-prisoners in the same jails) were excluded from citizenship. More recent work explores how the very conception of “public woman” has been conflated with prostitute and then leveraged against women who play a public role, most recently in the form of memes targeting Vice-President Kamala Harris (“Misogynoir and the public woman: analog and digital sexualization of women in public from the Civil War to the era of Kamala Harris,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2023).

Other examples of Cate’s scholarship on gender, public argument, social protest, public memory, and visual rhetoric appear in the edited volumes: Decolonizing Native American Rhetoric: Communicating Self-Determination (Peter Lang, 2018),  Speech and Debate as Civic Education (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), What Democracy Looks Like: The Rhetoric of Social Movements and Counterpublics (University of Alabama Press, 2017),  The Unfinished Conversation: 100 Years of Communication Studies (Routledge, 2014), Race and Hegemonic Struggle in the United States: Pop Culture, Politics, and Protest (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Wiley, 2015), and numerous journals, including Quarterly Journal of Speech and Argumentation and Advocacy.

Cate has received numerous teaching, research and service awards, including: the 2019 Graduate Faculty Teaching Award, the 2018 National Debate Tournament Keele Service Award, the 2010 Francine Merritt Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Lives of Women in Communication, the 2009 Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence, the 2008 UNI College of Humanities and Fine Arts Faculty Excellence Award, the 2004 George Ziegelmueller Outstanding Debate Educator Award, and the 2016 and 2002 Rohrer Award for the Outstanding Publication in Argumentation.

Serving as Director of Debate from 1994-2009, Cate has a notable background as a college debater for Northwestern University. She was a member of the 1987 U.S. Policy Debate team, and in 1999 served as coach of that team, participating in the Committee on International Discussion and Debate tour of Japan. She has also been an active member of the NCA/AFA Biennial Conference on Argumentation, serving as director in 2013 and currently as Treasurer and Steering Committee Member; she is also an Emeritus Board Member and Curriculum Committee member of the Women’s Debate Institute, and serves on the editorial boards of: Argumentation & Advocacy, Women’s Studies in Communication, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Western Journal of Communication.

Cate’s teaching interests include gender, argumentation, social protest, political communication, public memory, and visual rhetoric. She regularly teaches graduate seminars in critical methods, rhetoric, and public argument.

Funding

Funding for this project was provided through the University of Northern Iowa Textbook Equity Mini-Grant Program.

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