ABSTRACT
This chapter provides teachers with a guide to the field of media education appropriate for the 1990s. When lives have been lost, and blood shed for a television station, the democratic control of the mass media becomes both a matter of the widest public interest and debate, and a key marker in determining how democratic both established governments are and the “new” governments have become. The dominant view of the mass media adopted by most educationalists has been one of deep-rooted mistrust. The effect of the theoretical developments upon media education in the 1960s was profound. Whilst the Popular Arts movement did constitute a distinct step forward from inoculative media education, it did not break entirely with older attitudes. Discriminatory approaches to media study raised two further problems. First, in focusing so sharply upon value questions, discriminatory approaches tended to pay particularly close attention to textual analysis. Second, held at bay were questions of interpretation and readership.
