ABSTRACT
Media and English have been kissing cousins ever since F. R. Leavis launched what has since been dubbed the ‘inoculation’ approach to media: the development of critical close reading skills in school students to protect them from the ill effects of the mass media (Leavis and Thompson, 1933). For Leavis, as David Buckingham has emphasised (Buckingham, 2003), these ill effects were cultural; and Buckingham identifies two other kinds of protectionist impulses in media education since. One of these is the aim of radical pedagogy in the 1970s and 1980s to protect children from the ideological effects of the media; the other is the moral protectionism Buckingham associates more with media education in America.
