Public Attitudes Toward Ethical issues in TV Programming: Multiple Viewer Orientations

"I Noticed More Violence:" The Effects of a Media Literacy Program on Critical Attitudes Toward Media Violence

“…We can be fairly confident that the media literacy program was, indeed, effective in stimulating participants' critical thinking about media violence, a topic of primary ethical concern among many members of the public (Lind & Rarick, 1992). The sixth graders considered the ethical issues raised by rewarded violence, violence that goes unpunished, and violence perpetrated by likeable characters; they became not only more able to apply these highrisk factors to programming to arrive on estimates of their relative frequency, but also more able to associate such content with an enhanced likelihood of media effects for the audience.…”

“…The subject of media violence, in particular, is typically at the forefront of controversies regarding negative media influence on children. Violence, in fact, has been found to be the primary concern among a list of ethical issues pertaining to entertainment media content (Lind & Rarick, 1992). Do media producers have an ethical obligation to limit the amount of violence in media targeted to children and teens?…”

Viewer Sensitivity to Ethical Issues in TV Coverage of the Clinton-Flowers Scandal

“…Our previous research found that viewers differ in their ability to see ethical issues in reporting and identified the four sensitivity abilities (Lind, 1997;Lind & Rarick, 1995). Lind's Component 2 asks viewers to decide whether a news story should be run, and prior work suggests that viewers can make such decisions and can provide ethics-based reasons for their evaluations (Lind, 1993;Lind & Rarick, 1992). In Component 3, viewers decide what to do, based on their evaluations of the story.…”

Cognitive maps assess news viewer ethical sensitivity

“…Since 1989, Lind and Rarick have been investigating how audience members perceive, evaluate, and act upon ethically controversial television content. This work bas used large sample surveys (Lind & Rarick, 1992) or in-depth interviews (Lind, 1993) that asked viewers to react to scenarios representing ethical dilemmas in television content by indicating if the scenarios should be aired, why or why not, and what should be done to control unethical content.…”