Life after OZ: Ignorance, Mass Media, and Making Public Enemies

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Notes

The number of prisons in Illinois jumps to thirty-four if work camps, transition centers, and other centers are included (IDOC 2004).

In 2006, five multinational companies controlled access to the majority of media outlets in the U.S. Viacom, News Corporation, General Electric, CBS Corporation, Disney, and Time Warner control access to the largest media outlets: magazines, TV and radio stations, newspapers, music, and more. Diversity in media ownership, is generally perceived to be a “good” for a democracy as the more diversity in media outlet ownership, the wider range of perspectives on an issue will be in the public sphere, educating the general population. However, as Amy Goodman writes in her description of the “access of evil,” the consolidation of media producers and distributors was facilitated by changes in government regulations, specifically the 1996 Telecommunications Act, that permitted companies toacquire a greater share of the market. Goodman argues that this reduction in the diversity of media ownership has significant impacts on the range of representations the public receives, and Goodman cites George Gerbner, former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication, who in 1997 “described the media as being “driven not by the creative people who have something to tell, but by global conglomerates that have something to sell” (Goodman, 2006, 16).

Also see Conover, Newjack, and Britton, At Work in an Iron Cage, for similar discussions about labor in prisons.

The last chapter of Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) addresses the case of the white citizen from the United States, Amy Biehl, who, while in South Africa on a justice and education trip, was killed by Ntobeko Peni and Easy Nofemela. Her parents elected to heal through embracing the two men that killed their daughter, rather than demonization. See also the website for the foundation established to advance Amy's work: http://www.amybiehl.org/

I an indebted to conversations with Leslie Bloom, and reading her work on the consequences of federal poverty policies, for reminding me to name these laws as hateful.

Also, the shortlived 2006 ABC TV drama InJustice, where a team of lawyers from the National Justice Project, take on the case of a wrongly convicted man.

As the FOX TV show Prison Break was filmed on location just outside of Chicago in Joliet, Illinois, there was significant press coverage about this series in Chicago. Shaena Fazal, colleague, staff member of the John Howard Association, and Soros Fellow, and I wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune in an attempt to challenge the way the show was being interpreted in the press and to highlight just some of the factual inaccuracies in the premier episode: “On Monday night the new FOX TV show Prison Break debuted. While it is receiving rave reviews across the nation, critics have commented that it is somewhat implausible. For example, in Illinois two brothers would never live together in the same prison, it is prohibited, and it would be highly unlikely that a judge would grant a convicted defendant's request to be incarcerated in the institution he selects. And, unlike Prison Break, death row inmates (and lifers) in Illinois are ineligible to work in correctional industries, and are not allowed conjugal visits. There is nothing wrong with entertaining fiction about prisons, but we shouldn't ignore the reality of our penal system” (Fazal and Meiners 2005).

Frankenberg study documents complicated and skewered interpretations about the realities of geographic segregation. For example, her study identifies white women who perceive that they live in an all white neighborhood but do not see the labor of the non-white people that surround them or include them in their definition of community, and white women who live in deeply segregated communities but never perceived their communities as segregated (Frankenberg 1993).

Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class, Media Education Foundation, (2005) produced and written by Loretta Alper and Pepi Leistyna.