More Than Meets the Eye: Watching Television Watching Us

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Pungente, a media critic and teacher of media literacy, and O’Malley,
a journalist and author, have produced a book whose main purpose is
“to assist television viewers—and consumers of all media—to
understand more about the media that has become an integral part of our
lives.”

The authors create a “toolkit for television watchers” as they
focus on such topics as media education, prime-time dramas and situation
comedies, religious programming, television violence, soaps, talk shows,
and television coverage of wars and assassinations. Although their
primary aim is “not to judge but to provide the tools, so people can
make their own evaluations,” they include a chapter on values in
television. Here, they discuss, in a nonpreachy fashion, changing social
and family mores and values as reflected in such programs as Murphy
Brown, Northern Exposure, and Teletubbies. They see the V chip as a form
of censorship and in their discussion of television violence are careful
to distinguish between “essential” violence and “gratuitous”
violence.

Pungente and O’Malley emphasize the need for media literacy on the
part of television viewers. A critical eye is an essential in the face
of the manipulations underlying a great many aspects of television
programing (manipulations most strikingly evident in commercials and in
the machinations of talk shows). Their thoughtful and closely argued
book ends with an observation from a colleague and media literacy
teacher, Bill Walsh: “Media literacy does not change the media so much
as it changes us.” More than Meets the Eye will undoubtedly change its
readers as well.