Mass Media and Values

The role of Mass Media in the formation of Values

Introduction:
In formal education, the teacher is the central influence on the students in the
classroom. In informal education, the mass media-print, radio and especially television – are the
teachers of the biggest classroom ever, the world outside the school, including the home.
During the past few decades the mass media have considerably changed the
environment in which children and adolescence view life. Almost all families have a radio set
and many have a TV set, and some have newspapers and magazines. Children become familiar
with them from infancy.

 6 Important Details
1. Values in the classroom are taught. Values presented in the media are caught.
 In the classroom, teachers spend some of their daytime hours inculcating in children all
the proper values, like frugality and honesty. At night, when the children sit in front of a TV set,
programs and commercials convince them that their lives become miserable if they do not own
a color TV set.
 Example: Commercial on TV

2. Mass Media can negate the teachers’ lessons to students about peace and justice,
productivity and nation building, and clean and moral relationships between men and
women.

3. False or incomplete information in newspapers and magazines can lead to wrong

impressions, if not wrong values.
 Example: Movies with violence and cruelty and the abuse of women in TV stories make
them more objects of sex than persons with dignity.
 The Mass Media being the way they are should be not just a problem but a challenge for
the schools and classroom teachers. The challenge enjoins schools and teachers to be creative
and to find ways and means to counteract the harmful influences of media, and to recast their
objections into a positive course of action.
 (TAT) – Television Awareness Training or in a broader sense it is also called Mass Media
Education. By mass media we include radio, television, newspaper, magazines, books, records,
compact, discs, audio tapes, videotapes, and advertising. Mass media education can be made a
part of the curriculum.
 Such education means simply to teach children and adolescence how to use the mass
media to enrich their whole personalities. It raises such questions whether or not the media
available to children are educationally good or bad.
 4. Running a media enterprise is a public trust. A license has to be used for public service
only.
 Mass Media therefore, is a public trust for public service. This has been the orientation
of the Communication Foundation for Asia (CFA) since the late 1960s. Through print, CFA has
supported agricultural development goals, population planning projects, social justice.
 It developed weekly and monthly publications like Ang Tao and Action Now before
martial law. In recent years, it published the monthly Gospel Komiks and Pambata Magazine to
aid schools in character and moral formation. – all of these projects are intended to utilize
positive mass media in accordance with the new morality. Development of the people,
therefore, is CFA’s basic commitment, whether through formal or nonformal education,
wholesome entertainment or people-oriented programs. This is the foundation of true,
meaningful development communication. It recognizes the value of freedom and responsibility.

5. True freedom always goes with a corresponding responsibility, purpose and direction.
 “People get the government that they deserve,” – people get the kind of public
institutions that they want and deserve. And people will get the kind of mass media and the
kind of programs that they deserve.
 Do people deserve a “freedom-for-all” mass media, promoting values of rugged
individualism, materialism and greed which inevitably lead to widespread graft and corruption
in ever the lowest level of public office?
Do they deserve a powerful, influential media that systematically negates moral
values which teachers diligently inculcate in the classroom?
Or would teachers rather have a responsible mass media-promoting, and
actually leading by examples, such values as social responsibility, public service as public
trust, social justice, productivity, industry, and morality? This leads to the next point,..

6. Values education, for better or for worse, is carried out in a more powerful way by
Mass Media.
 Teachers must be aware that values education does not begin and end in the classroom,
not even in the school.
 An enlightened mass media producing quality material would indeed enhance, reinforce
and hasten values education throughout the country. Thus, the teachers and media no longer
need to be at cross-purposes, but true and real partners in values education.
The teachers have a special, critical role developing values in the students with
regard to radio and television programs and printed materials. The schools and teachers
can integrate mass media education in the curriculum and so influence the students on
what newspaper, magazines and books to read. They can guide their choice of radio and
TV programs to listen and watch.
In this are both the teachers and development communicators must forge a
tight partnership. There are ways mass media practitioners can cater to the needs of
value development. The mass media must explore different ways of supporting and
complementing teachers’ efforts.
 Conversely, the teachers’ wholehearted support is definitely required in
development-oriented mass media projects.
Teachers may have to exert more effort in guiding students and pupils, by way
of assignments or suggestions, towards wholesome and values-laden reading materials
and broadcast programs. This would mean greater media consciousness for the
teachers. Those in development communication are aware of this and will help in any
way to light this burden.
 Example: Regular workshops and review sessions.

Ending:
The influence of media on the youth is no longer a matter of conjecture. It has the
potential for good as well as for bad. But then, Media can be turned into a positive instrument
for developing values.
Through the media we receive information, acquire vicarious experiences, and develop
attitudes and values that otherwise would not be within their reach. In this way, the media are
performing the function of educators and teachers.