Exam preparation materials

Introduction to the Issues Chapters

Now that you have read through the 15 instructional chapters, you are ready to apply what you have learned in a systematic way. This section of the book presents you with four issues about the mass media that have generated considerable debate over the years. As you read through each of these issues chapters, think about what your own position is on the controversies they present. Does your position change as you learn more about the different sides of these controversies?

The purpose of these chapters is not to persuade you to believe that one side of each controversy is the “right” way to think about it; instead, the purpose is to get you to use what you learned thus far about media literacy to construct a more informed opinion. As context for understanding these controversies, use your four core media literacy knowledge structures about the media industries, audiences, content, and effects. As you read through these chapters, probe into the controversies in more depth by using your skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstraction. Thus, these four issues chapters give you a chance to continue elaborating your knowledge structures and to continue increasing the strength of your skills.

These four issues were selected because each attracts a high degree of public concern and criticism. Each has generated debate over various ways to deal with the problem that underlies the issue.

· Issue 1 presents the controversy about the ownership of media businesses. Critics argue that the industry has become too concentrated with too few companies owning too many media businesses. Are their arguments valid? What is at the root of this controversy?

· Issue 2 examines various answers to the question: Is there too much money being spent on sports? This question forces you to consider what too much money means.

· Issue 3 tackles the persistent controversy over whether there is too much violence in the media and whether this type of content is harming individuals and society.

· Issue 4 examines the growing concern about privacy and how the new media environment is making it much more difficult for you to protect your privacy.

While each of these four issues has generated considerable debate, rarely have these debates moved beyond a rather superficial level. To date, people who address these issues tend to have polarized positions, so these debates have generated more heat than light. As you read through the following issues chapters, try to keep an open mind and understand what people on different sides of the controversy are arguing. Try to view the controversy from as many perspectives as possible. Do not be satisfied with surface arguments. Be rigorous in evaluating the evidence and arguments from all sides of the debate. Dig deep to uncover more layers underlying the controversy. Discuss the issue with your classmates and friends.

Each of these four chapters begins with a delineation of the issue to clarify its controversial nature and to outline what is being argued. However, I do not present arguments to lead you to think a certain way. Instead, I give you the raw material to think for yourself. So, engage with the issues. If an argument does not sound convincing to you, analyze it to identify the problem. Challenge evidence that is presented. Keep digging through the controversy on your own. Through this process, you will be developing your own well-informed opinions.

ISSUE 1 OWNERSHIP OF MASS MEDIA BUSINESSES

Issue: The increasing concentration of media business ownership is an undesirable trend leading to harmful effects for the economy and society.

· Delineating the Issue

o Arguments against Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies

o Arguments for Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies

· Evidence of Concentration

o Trend toward Concentration

o Factors Driving the Trend

§ Efficiencies

§ Regulation

§ Deregulation

· Evidence for Harm

o Increased Barriers to Entry

o Reduced Level of Competition

o Reduced Number of Public Voices

o Changes in Content

· Your Own Informed Opinion

o Expand Your Perspective

o Analyze the Evidence

§ Ownership and Control

§ Harm

o Recognize Your Values

§ Localism

§ Efficiency

· Conclusion

· Further Reading

· Keeping Up to Date

· Applying Media Literacy Skills

One of the most prevalent criticisms of the mass media concerns their ownership. Critics contend that there has been a trend toward concentration of ownership and that this concentration has been harming the economy and society.

This chapter presents an analysis of this issue by first delineating the main arguments of critics and defenders of this trend. Then, we examine ownership patterns to determine the extent of the concentration. Next, we examine the evidence of harm to see if it supports the claims of the critics. Finally, I present some guidelines and exercises to help you develop your own informed opinion on this complex issue.

DELINEATING THE ISSUE

This issue is driven by critics who are upset that fewer and fewer companies own more and more mass media businesses. On the other side of this issue are the large media companies that continue buying additional media businesses each year. Let’s examine the arguments on both sides of this issue.

Arguments against Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies

Critics who argue against the increasing concentration of ownership of media companies claim that this trend is harming the economy and society. They argue that when fewer owners control more of the mass media, competition is reduced and this harms the economy because these large companies increase the barriers to entry in their markets so that it becomes more difficult for new companies to enter those markets successfully. As competition erodes, the incentives to keep quality high and prices low weaken. Thus, consumers are harmed because they are forced to pay higher and higher prices for products of decreasing quality.

Critics of the trend toward concentration of ownership in the media industries are concerned that this trend will limit the flow of information, which is especially important in a democracy. Critics argue that when fewer and fewer companies control the flow of information in a democracy, the population is exposed to fewer voices and this limits the range of information available to them to make informed decisions about important issues.

Arguments for Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies

Defenders of the trend toward concentration take the position that the overall economy is strengthened when individual companies become stronger. Stronger companies have deeper pockets so they can develop better products to meet the needs of many more people. This stimulates more spending as more people buy those products. And in order to produce more products, these companies consume more raw materials and hire more workers.

Defenders of this trend argue that media companies are focused much more on achieving economic goals rather than political ones, so media companies continually try to produce messages that appeal to the needs of consumers rather than try to fulfill their own political views.

EVIDENCE OF CONCENTRATION

In this section, we examine the evidence for concentration of media ownership. First, we look at the trends in concentration of ownership of media businesses both in the United States and internationally. Then, we examine the reasons for such a trend.

Trend toward Concentration

There is a good deal of evidence for patterns of concentration in all American industries, including the mass media. This trend is clearly illustrated by the research of Ben Bagdikian, who began conducting an analysis of media ownership patterns in the United States in 1983. He reported that although there were about 25,000 media businesses at the time, the top 50 of those businesses accounted for more than half of the revenues and audiences in their media markets. He complained that this degree of concentration resulted in 50 chief operating officers (CEOs) having the power to control over half of all the content provided by the media industry. Less than a decade later, Bagdikian (1992) reported that the number of companies that accounted for more than half of the media revenues and audiences had shrunk to 23, with 11 companies controlling most of the daily newspaper circulation; two companies controlling most magazine revenues; five firms controlling more than half of all book sales; five media conglomerates sharing 95% of the recordings market; eight Hollywood studios accounting for 89% of U.S. feature film rentals; and three television networks earning more than two-thirds of the total U.S. television revenues. By 2004, when Bagdikian published the seventh update of his analysis, he claimed that the number of companies that generated most of the mass media revenue in the United States had shrunk to five.

During the 1980s, there were 2,308 mergers and acquisitions involving media companies for a total of $214 billion (Ozanich & Wirth, 1993). This activity served to consolidate resources in fewer companies. Thus, the CEOs of these newer, larger companies hold a greater concentration of power as they manage those resources. During the 1990s, mergers became more and more popular (see Table Issue 1.1).

This table shows the timeline of mergers and acquisitions from the eighties to the present.Description

Table Issue 1.1 Media Mega-Mergers and Acquisitions

Media companies keep getting bought, merged, and reorganized, which makes it challenging to keep track of all this activity. For example, look at Table Issue 1.2 to see how Westinghouse Electric Corporation was transformed into National Amusements.

Table Issue 1.2

Merger activity shows no signs of slowing down; to the contrary, it appears to be increasing. The number of mergers among media-related companies more than doubled from 2011 to 2012 with over 1,350 mergers with a total value of almost $75 billion. However, 90% of these mergers were considered relatively small (less than $50 million; Fox Business, 2018; Globalization 101, n.d.; Johnson, 2018). While relatively small mergers continue each year, there have also been some mega-mergers among media companies. In 2016, AT&T made a bid to acquire Time Warner, and the $85 billion merger was approved in June 2018. In the same month, the Department of Justice approved Disney’s $52.4 billion merger with 21st Century Fox (Johnson, 2018).

Even newer media companies are becoming more powerful through mergers and acquisitions. For example, Facebook, which was founded in February 2004, began buying tech companies in 2005; by the summer of 2018, it had already spent over $23.1 billion buying a total of 66 companies (Toth, 2018). The most notable of these acquisitions were the facial recognition platform Face.com ($100 million), the video advertising platform LiveRail ($500 million), the photo sharing app Instagram ($1 billion), the virtual reality startup Oculus Rift ($2 billion), and the mobile instant messaging service WhatsApp ($19 billion).

Factors Driving the Trend

There are two salient factors that can be seen as being responsible for the trend toward more concentration of ownership of media businesses. They are the factors of efficiencies and deregulation.

Efficiencies

Larger companies are able to operate more efficiently than smaller companies because of economies of scope and scale (recall these ideas from Chapter 6). They achieve these efficiencies through three types of mergers and acquisitions. First, there is the horizontal merger. This is when one media company buys another media company of the same type. An example is a newspaper chain buying another newspaper. This pattern was very popular during the 1980s, when newspapers were being bought by chains at the rate of 50 to 60 per year. Thus, newspaper chains share in the costs of covering national and international news over many newspapers. Also, when they buy materials (such as paper and ink) in very large quantities, they can demand a lower wholesale price.

Second, there is the vertical merger. This is when one media company buys suppliers and/or distributors to create integration in the production and distribution of messages. An example is a book publisher buying a paper supply company (to help with production) and some bookstores (to help with distribution). Another example is Viacom, which owned television stations in Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Miami. It added significant vertical integration through its ownership of Paramount Pictures, thus allowing Viacom to control the production and distribution of television programs to the television networks (CBS or UPN) and through the Blockbuster stores that it also owned at the time. In addition, it could promote those shows’ soundtracks on MTV and VH1 and do book tie-ins through Simon & Schuster—all of which were also owned by Viacom.

Third, there is the conglomerate merger. This is when a media company buys a combination of other media companies and/or companies in a non-media business. An example is a film studio that buys a newspaper, several radio stations, a talent agency, and a string of restaurants. Conglomerates can better survive hard times when one sector of the economy is bad because they own businesses in other sectors that are likely to be doing well at that time. Therefore, conglomerates can spread their resources around all their businesses to help those businesses that happen to be struggling at any given time.

Regulation

In the early 1900s, the federal government became concerned over the degree of concentration in particular American industries. The government began monitoring the degree of concentration in American industries and forced very large companies (such as Standard Oil and American Tobacco) to split up when they had become too large and were becoming monopolies.

Within the mass media industries, the federal government instituted policies to try to prevent monopolies. When the government felt that a media industry was too concentrated, it would take steps to force those companies to sell off some of their vertically integrated businesses. For example, in the 1940s, the government felt the film industry was too concentrated with a small number of film studios controlling film production, distribution, and exhibition. Under this pressure, the film studios sold off their theaters, which removed them from the exhibition sector, thus allowing theaters to compete for films. Another example is AT&T, which made electronic components, produced telecommunication equipment, and sold phone service; in the 1970s, the federal government began taking steps to break up the company to allow for more competition (Samuelson, 2006).

The federal government also used regulation to ensure that the media were serving the interests of everyone in the population by trying to diversify ownership and keeping decision making at a local level. For example, when the radio industry was forming in the 1920s, the federal government set up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate broadcast licensing. Radio was different from all the other media industries at the time because radio required the use of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) to send out (broadcast) its wireless signal. While an unlimited number of newspapers, magazines, and film theaters could exist in a given location, the same was not possible for radio. If you want to broadcast a radio or television signal, you must send your signal out on a specific EMS frequency. If you and I wanted to use the same EMS frequency to broadcast our different signals, then our signals would interfere with each other and radio listeners would receive a garbled signal. Because there were only a limited number of EMS frequencies made available for radio broadcasting, someone had to decide who got to use which frequencies. The federal government decided that it was the one to make the assignment of radio broadcasting frequencies, reasoning that the EMS belonged to all Americans, much like a national park or any other resource that should be shared by all citizens.

In the early days of radio broadcasting, the federal government decided to require individuals to apply for a broadcast frequency with the FCC, which was immediately flooded with applications for AM radio frequencies. The AM band on the EMS allowed for only about 117 broadcast frequencies. The FCC could have chosen 117 applicants and awarded each of them their own frequency. This would have led to 117 AM radio stations, with each using their frequency to broadcast their signal to the entire country. But that is not what the FCC did. Instead, the FCC divided the country into many local markets and awarded some frequencies to each market. Also, each radio station was limited in the amount of power it could use to broadcast its signal so that the signals would not go beyond their local markets. This allowed the FCC to assign the same frequency to many different markets without having to worry about signals interfering with one another. The FCC chose this alternative because it wanted to spread the limited resource of broadcast frequencies around to as many different people as possible.

By keeping ownership of radio licenses at the local level, the FCC believed it was setting up a system whereby each radio station would focus on serving the special needs of the people in each local community. Private businesses were allowed to broadcast on these frequencies, provided they operated in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.

When television came along in the 1940s, the FCC used the same procedure of allocating broadcasting licenses to local television stations in the 215 local markets across the United States. Now we have more than 6,800 broadcast television stations and 13,000 radio stations.

Deregulation

In the 1980s, the federal government began deregulating all industries, including the media industries. Up until the 1980s, the FCC had been preventing broadcasting monopolies from developing by limiting the number of stations any one company could own to seven AM stations, seven FM stations, and seven television stations in total, with no two being in the same market. In the 1980s, the rules were relaxed to 12 AM stations, 12 FM stations, and 12 television stations.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 further relaxed the limits to a significant extent in the guise of opening up competition. Also, the ban prohibiting a company from owning a television station and radio station in the same market was lifted. It had long been believed that broadcast television stations were far too precious a local resource to allow one company to own more than one in a given television market. Almost all local markets had very few broadcast stations (typically three to five broadcast television stations), so it was important to have as many owners as possible to ensure a diversity of voices within that small number of stations in a market. However, over time, as greater numbers of people subscribed to cable television services, regulators came to believe that people in all local communities had access to many different voices, and therefore the limits on broadcast station ownership were no longer important.

This deregulation triggered many mergers among media companies. In that year alone, there was $25 billion in merger activity in the broadcasting industry and another $23 billion in the cable industry (Jensen, 1997). During the 1990s, there was more than a total of $300 billion worth of major media deals in which companies bought multiple television and radio stations (Croteau & Hoynes, 2001).

In recent decades, the trend to consolidation has grown stronger than the government’s impulse to regulate. Since 1996, the FCC has been less concerned with preventing monopolies within the United States and more concerned with allowing American companies to grow significantly stronger to compete and dominate in the world market (Albarran & Chan-Olmsted, 1998). FCC Chairman William Kennard said that he is merely recognizing the realities of globalization and new technologies. Since that time, the FCC has periodically held public hearings and continued to move in the direction of allowing more concentration of ownership. Now a single company can own as many television stations as it wants as long at the coverage of that set of stations does not exceed 39.5% of viewers; it can also own more than one television station in a television market. As for radio, a company can own as many stations as it wants, including three to eight stations within a single radio market, depending on the size of that market. By 2002, one company—Clear Channel—owned 1,225 radio stations in 300 cities across the United States and dominated the audience share in 100 of the top 112 media markets (Perlstein, 2002).

Over time, broadcasters have continued to work at reducing the limits on ownership. Broadcasters have argued successfully that they were being unfairly limited in their rights to own multiple businesses. They pointed out that there were no ownership limits for magazines, book publishers, newspapers, and internet sites; also, the previous limits on film studios had been relaxed. Consumer groups, who argued against relaxing the ownership rules, could present no convincing evidence that multiple ownership of broadcasting businesses caused harm to the public. In contrast, broadcasters showed that when businesses are consolidated, they are more efficient and that this efficiency benefits consumers.

Cable operators have also been fighting to have limits relaxed so that they can expand. In 2009, the FCC had limited each cable system to servicing no more than 30% of the U.S. population. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company at the time with almost 25% of the nation’s cable homes as subscribers, sued the FCC to raise the limit and won in the federal court of appeals, which reasoned that the restriction must be lifted to reflect the changing realities of a dynamic video marketplace in which consumers have lots of alternatives to cable; therefore cable should not be regarded as a monopoly (Flint, 2009).

All industries in the United States have been moving toward greater concentration of businesses, especially the media industry. To see how much cross-ownership there is among media companies, look at what the top seven media conglomerates each control (see Table Issue 1.3).

Table Issue 1.3

Sources: Compiled from Albarran (2002); Baker et al. (2000); Bettig & Hall (2003); “CBS Corporation” (n.d.); Chmielewski & Fritz (2009); “Comcast” (n.d.); Croteau & Hoynes (2001); Flanigan (2003); Free Press (2012); “NBC Universal” (n.d.); “News Corporation” (n.d.); Polman (2003); “Sony Corporation” (n.d.); “Time Warner” (n.d.); Verrier & James (2003); “Viacom” (n.d.); “The Walt Disney Company” (n.d.); Yahoo Finance (2018)

EVIDENCE FOR HARM

The criticism about concentration of media ownership requires the critics to present evidence of harm. While there is ample evidence for the trend toward concentration, there is less evidence that this concentration results in harm. Let’s examine those arguments for harm in four areas: increased barriers to entry, reduced level of competition, reduced number of public voices, and changes in content.

Increased Barriers to Entry

Has the trend toward concentration increased the barriers to entry so that an individual can no longer create a media business? The answer to this question depends on the media business. The barriers to entry into the radio and television broadcasting businesses have always been very high. But the barriers to entry into the newspaper, magazine, book publishing, recording, and internet businesses have been low, and there is no evidence that concentration of ownership has increased the barriers to enter these markets.

It is also important to remember that during the last four decades, when the trend toward concentration of ownership of media businesses has been so strong, there has also been the rise of the internet, which has enabled all kinds of people to produce their own media products and market them to all kinds of audiences using digital platforms. Anyone can create a blog to post information and opinions. Artists of all kinds can create videos, photographs, graphics, and music using digital tools and then upload these products to existing content distributers (e.g., YouTube, Instagram) or to their own website. Artists do not need to go through the traditional gatekeepers. For example, people can publish their own books and make them available for sale on platforms such as Amazon.com instead of having to get an agent and a traditional publisher. Meanwhile, the traditional media companies find that their newspaper, magazine, radio, and broadcast television businesses are struggling to adapt to the new media environment due to competition from new companies that offer better messages at lower—and sometimes no—cost to consumers.

Reduced Level of Competition

Although there is a clear trend toward concentration of ownership, this by itself has not eliminated competition. The big conglomerates still compete against one another and now they have to compete against many new internet companies.

There is also little evidence of vertical integration among companies providing computer services and hardware. “The computer industry is hugely splintered. Some firms sell components (Intel, AMD); some, software (Microsoft, SAP); some, services (IBM, EDS); some, hardware (Dell, Apple). There’s overlap, but not much” (Samuelson, 2006, p. 45). Also, the internet is dominated by newer companies (such as Google, Facebook, and eBay), not the older established companies. While these newer internet companies have already been engaged in a good deal of merger activity, they have not been buying traditional media companies.

Reduced Number of Public Voices

Critics argue that as concentration increases, the individual’s access to the media is reduced. Access in this sense means the ability to get your particular point of view heard through someone else’s media property. This is still relatively easy to do at the local level, such as with newspapers and small-circulation magazines. Most of these media businesses still print letters to the editors, and most buy articles from people with little journalistic experience. Also, most markets have call-in radio programs where you can get your voice heard. In contrast, national media properties, such as Time magazine or a television or cable network, require a great deal of skill and good connections to get your voice heard because the competition to use those channels is so strong.

Many critics argue that the media industries lose diversity of voices when the industries become more concentrated. Fewer voices should mean fewer opinions getting aired. However, Einstein (2004) says that “in study after study, scholars have determined that there is no proven causality between media ownership and programming content” (p. vii). Einstein argues that the reduction in the number of program choices is not due to consolidation but to television’s reliance on advertising as its primary source of revenue. Because of this reliance, there are severe limits on content, which include time lines for length of program, the “lowest common denominator” mentality, and an avoidance of controversy. In an analysis of the television industry over the past four decades, Einstein reveals that as the industry became more concentrated, programming became more diverse. She said that diversity was at its peak in the late 1960s and then declined when the FCC imposed regulations about sharing programs through syndication. Then, when those syndication rules were relaxed and broadcasters could keep the programs they produced to themselves, diversity increased sharply.

The claim that the number of voices heard in the media has been narrowing due to the trend in concentration of ownership of the mass media businesses appears completely wrong when we consider the internet. Platforms such as Twitter have given absolutely everyone a voice. Anyone can now express any opinion at any time. Celebrities such as Katy Perry have 108.5 million followers on Twitter (“Most Followed Accounts on Twitter,” 2020). Compare this to the highest rated television show (NBC’s Sunday Night Football), which attracted only 20 million viewers (Schneider, 2020).

Changes in Content

Critics argue that as competition among media companies decreases, the content of messages changes in a negative way. They claim that as companies grow larger, their content decreases in quality and the messages are more likely to harm the public.

Has the quality of the media products declined? There is no evidence that it has. For example, research has not found that the content of a radio station degrades after it is bought by a conglomerate. Lacy and Riffe (1994) looked at the news content of radio stations and compared group ownership effects. They found that group ownership had no impact on the financial commitment or the local and staff emphasis of news coverage. Also, a study done on newspaper content could find no change in content after a newspaper was bought by a chain (e.g., Picard et al., 1988). No evidence of change was found with the stories, the range of opinions on the editorial page, or the proportion of the newspaper displaying news. Crider (2012) conducted a content analysis of news stories on radio station websites to determine the amount of local news, which was covered by journalists at the local stations, and syndicated content, which was imported from other news agencies. While he found that local programming was less prevalent on smaller-market stations, there was no relationship between large corporate ownership and diminished local programming.

Has the trend toward concentration of ownership led to an increase in harmful content? This has not yet been tested directly but there is indirect evidence that concentration of ownership in the radio industry is associated with an increase in negative speech and obscenity. One research study found that as big broadcasters buy more radio stations, shock-jock programming often replaces local content. From 2000 to 2003, the nation’s four largest radio companies racked up 96% of the fines handed out by the FCC, although their stations accounted for only about half the country’s listening audience (Hofmeister, 2005).

YOUR OWN INFORMED OPINION

Most people have a rather superficial opinion on this issue: That is, people either think that the high degree of concentration within the media industries is a bad thing because they are skeptical of people and organizations that have a lot of power or they think it is a good thing because they like what the media provide. However, this issue is rather complex, with both sides having access to evidence to support their positions.

It is the purpose of this section to get you to think about your own position and make sure that you have a well-informed opinion. To help you do this, I will present three tasks: Expand your perspective, analyze the evidence, and recognize your values.

Expand Your Perspective

Issues typically focus on controversies. That is, there are usually two or more ways to view the controversy (the pro sides and the con sides). If you select one side without examining the other side, then your perspective on the issue is limited. Increasing your media literacy requires you to look at an issue from more than one perspective so that you can more fully appreciate the issue. Then, when you select a side, your opinion is well informed.

When you examine each side of a controversy, try to keep an open mind so that the facts you see have an influence on you. Try to understand how those facts work together to support each of the two sides. Remember that it is not the simple summing of facts that creates an informed opinion; instead, it is how the facts arrange themselves into coherent arguments that should influence you. For example, let’s say that you find 12 facts to support the pro side while you find seven facts that support the con side. Does this mean that you should value the pro side more? Not necessarily. If those 12 facts come from weak or biased sources or if some of the facts contradict one another, then those facts do not work together well in creating a persuasive argument to support the pro side.

Analyze the Evidence

Increasing one’s media literacy in dealing with any issue requires the examination of evidence for credibility. With the issue of media concentration, there are two kinds of evidence that we need to look at more carefully. One kind deals with the equating of ownership and control. The other deals with harm.

Ownership and Control

As you have seen above, the criticism of media ownership links ownership with control, but this linkage is faulty as you will see in this analysis of ownership. If the big media conglomerates were each owned by one individual, then ownership and control would be the same thing. But this is not the case. While the media conglomerates own many media businesses, the media conglomerates themselves have a diversity of ownership; that is, none of these conglomerates are owned by one person or even a small number of powerful people. All of these large conglomerates are owned by millions of people—these are the shareholders of these publicly traded companies. For example, the ownership of Disney is spread out over 1.5 billion shares of stock that are openly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Only 35% of these shares are owned by individuals; the other 65% of shares are owned by institutions such as retirement funds, governments, insurance companies, and mutual funds, which are themselves owned by millions of people. There are 2,663 of these institutions that own shares of Disney and none of these institutions owns as much as 7% of the company. As for individuals, Robert Iger, the former CEO of Disney, owns about 1.1 million shares, which is 0.07% of the company; thus, if he were to increase his number of shares by 12 times, he still would not own as much as one percent of the company (Maverick, 2020).

While ownership gives you some control over a company, the ownership stake of each individual and each entity is so small that it is foolhardy to equate ownership with control. No single person or entity owns very much of any of these large media conglomerates. Stockholders get to vote for members of the company’s board of directors who in turn get to appoint the people who manage the company and make the business decisions. The power for controlling a company is much more concentrated in the managers than in the individual shareholders. But even among a company’s top managers, their power is dispersed across their large staff of advisers, analysts, and their subordinate managers who make the day-to-day decisions required to run the individual media businesses and departments. Thus, the power to control the company is spread out over hundreds of individuals who are much less concerned with limiting voices or a range of media messages than they are with generating revenue. Managers have an economic responsibility to increase the wealth of the millions of owners of the company and this requires them to increase profits so that this money can be passed along to the owners either in the form of dividends on their shares of stock or by reinvesting in the company so that the value of the shares increases. Who benefits from the increasing profits? The answer is millions of shareholders as well as millions of other people who depend on retirement benefits, insurance benefits, and services from governments.

Harm

When analyzing the evidence that purports to show that media concentration is harmful, think about the various alternative targets for harm. In short, who is being harmed? Is it the population in general? Or is it a particular group of people? If you hold an opinion that one particular group is being harmed and you propose some regulation to protect them from that harm, consider how your proposed regulation might increase harm to other groups as it seeks to reduce harm to your one focus group. Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.1 will help you do this.

Next, look carefully at your local market. Work through Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.2 to make a judgment about the degree of concentration in your local market. First, gather information by seeing what you can find on the websites of the companies who operate media businesses in your local area. The website should provide you with enough information to get started, but you will likely have to develop a search strategy to move beyond these websites to get good answers to all the questions in the exercise. After you have gathered this information, look for patterns across the media business.

Recognize Your Values

When we dig deep into this issue of concentration of ownership of media businesses and get down to the bedrock, we can see that people’s opinions on this issue can be traced to their fundamental values, especially the values of localism and efficiency. Localism is the belief that society is better when power is spread out among as many people as possible; therefore, governments need to preserve the differences across individuals and protect forums of information so that all voices can be heard. In contrast, efficiency is the belief that the economy works better when all resources are used most effectively and thus requires the elimination of waste from unnecessary duplication.

Both of these values are very American. They can be seen as clashing in the way the founding fathers of this country wrote the constitution. They can also be seen as clashing in the way the government has viewed mass media businesses. And they can be seen as clashing in our everyday lives. At times, we as consumers favor localism when we want a marketplace with as many voices as possible so we have lots of choices about how to satisfy our various needs for information and entertainment. But at other times, we favor concentration when we want a marketplace with easily available standard products for as low a price as possible.

Localism

Localism is a populist value. It is exhibited by the belief that power should be spread out as much as possible so that many people share the power. Thus, the exercising of power should be done at the local level so that many people can be involved in decisions about how that power should be used. The value of localism is based on the idea that each person is a rational being, so each person should have an equal say in the political and economic arenas. This maximizes the freedom of each person. It also empowers all people by keeping them involved in as many important decisions as possible.

Localism is a part of the American tradition. The founding fathers of the United States followed this value when creating a democratic form of government rather than a more efficient totalitarian one (such as a monarchy) at the national level. They believed that the individual is more important than the government. When government is necessary, it should be decentralized so as to be closer to the people’s needs and more accountable to them. The U. S. Constitution exhibited this value of localism in the way it restricted the federal government from getting involved in certain areas, thus leaving decisions in these areas up to state and local governments. Thus, political power was structured so that it was spread out over many layers. America now has 18,000 municipalities and 17,000 townships. Within these, there are 500,000 local governmental units directly elected by local residents, and 170,000 of them have the power to impose taxes. Over time, the American public has retained its value for dispersion of power and has continued to support the overlapping, multilayered structure of government, even if it often seems inefficient.

Efficiency

Straining against this value of localism is a very strong trend toward concentration, consolidation, and centralization. Although almost every media company began as a small, local operation, each takes on the characteristics of big business as it grows. Big businesses are complex organizations that market many different products and services but do so under a strong centralized system to achieve a more efficient operation. Big businesses grow by claiming a larger share of the markets in which they compete. They accomplish this by acquiring control of more resources, and this often leads to buying—or at least investing in—other companies.

General industrywide trends show that fewer and fewer people control more and more of the media. And this trend will probably continue as the cost of buying and operating a media voice keeps going up and as entry into the industry becomes more difficult. Today, a person needs a great deal of money and expertise to attempt to buy a successful business in one of the established media industries. Because of this, only companies that already own media businesses are successful in acquiring new businesses. Entrepreneurs can still start a media business in the magazine, book publishing, and digital industries, but those businesses begin as very small enterprises. Either those small companies go out of business quickly or they grow successful and are usually bought by one of the big media conglomerates.

As media companies grow larger and more centralized, there is a danger that they will narrow the range of voices that will get heard. Thus, the larger and more powerful the media company is, the less access you have for making a contribution to its messages or influencing the way it makes decisions. However, if your purpose is simply to get your voice heard, then you can contribute a comment to a blog or tweet it immediately. Although your posting may not be read by more than a handful of people, you have the power to keep posting in many different places; no media conglomerate is preventing you from creating your own audiences.

It is important for you to realize that there are two sides to this issue; that is, both sides have advantages and disadvantages. When you understand the arguments on each side of an issue, you are in a better position to create your own opinion in an informed manner.

CONCLUSION

By now, you should have a better-informed opinion about the ownership of mass media businesses. However, this is an issue that is likely to keep changing as traditional media struggle to compete with newer media and as governments (both in the United States and around the world) struggle to figure out what the actual economic and social harms of concentration of ownership among conglomerates are and balance them against the benefits and then decide whether to regulate or deregulate those conglomerates. This is a complex issue and one that is constantly changing.

As you move into the future, try to keep an open mind and continually view the controversy from multiple points of view. Do not accept arguments on face value but demand credible evidence to support those arguments. Keep informing your opinion.

Further Reading

Bagdikian, B. H. (2004). The new media monopoly. Boston: Beacon. (299 pages, including endnotes and index)

Since 1983, Bagdikian has been conducting an economic analysis of the media industries to track the degree of concentration. With each new edition, the number of powerful companies shrinks as their media (as well as nonmedia) holdings dramatically grow. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned about how much power is being concentrated in the hands of a few CEOs of media holding companies.

Bettig, R. V., & Hall, J. L. (2003). Big media, big money: Cultural texts and political economies. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. (181 pages, including bibliography and references)

In this book, two professors at Penn State University argue that the media have been unfettered in their drive for greater profits and control over constructing meaning in our culture. They present a great deal of detail in support of this thesis in their six chapters. The authors demonstrate that the result of this media consolidation is that a few very powerful companies are becoming even more invasive in our lives and are successfully supplanting family, friend, religion, and education as the controlling source of constructing meaning.

Downing, J. D. H. (2011). Media ownership, concentration, and control: The evolution of debate. In J. Wasko, G. Murdock, & H. S. (Eds.), The handbook of political economy of communications (pp. 140–168). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

The author of this book chapter is an academic who does a good job of laying out the main arguments advanced over the years for the concern over growing concentration of ownership of the mass media. His tone is purely descriptive; that is, he avoids taking sides or making his own arguments about this controversy.

Einstein, M. (2004). Media diversity: Economics, ownership, and the FCC. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. (249 pages, including references, appendices, and indexes)

The author examines the issue of whether the consolidation in the media industries has led to a lessening of diversity. This book offers strong historical and economic perspectives on the issue. She concludes that despite a clear consolidation of ownership of media properties and the narrowing in the number of people making decisions about media content, there is even more diversity in messages now than there was four decades ago.

Maney, K. (1995). Megamedia shakeout: The inside story of the leaders and the losers in the exploding communications industry. New York: John Wiley. (358 pages, including index)

This is a well-written description of the major players in the technologies landscape in the mid-1990s. There are lots of anecdotes and stories about what has been happening in the telephone, cable, computer, wireless, and entertainment industries. The book is full of facts and personal descriptions of the personalities involved. However, things are happening so fast in these industries with new rollouts and buyouts that the book is likely out of date.

McChesney, R. W., Newman, R., & Scott, B. (Eds.). (2005). The future of media: Resistance and reform in the 21st century. New York: Seven Stories Press. (376 pages, including index)

This edited volume of 19 chapters plus an introduction was written by scholars who have been very concerned about the conglomeration of American media and that the role of the FCC is not only allowing it to occur but is actually encouraging it. The authors document the increasing level of concentration in ownership of media properties by fewer and fewer companies and argue that this trend is harmful for consumers and citizens.

Keeping Up to Date

· Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/resources/)

This website allows you to check all the media holdings of many major conglomerates.

· Vault.com (http://www.vault.com/wps/portal/usa)

This is a website that provides lots of useful information about various industries. Particularly relevant to media literacy are the industries of publishing, newspapers, internet and new media, music, broadcast and cable, advertising, and public relations.

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.1 Confronting the Issue of Concentration of Media Ownership

1. Analysis: Dig deeper into the issue.

1. Can you think of additional reasons (beyond what was presented in this chapter) that add to the criticism for why the trend toward greater concentration of ownership is harmful? Can you find evidence to support these additional reasons?

2. Can you think of additional reasons (beyond what was presented in this chapter) for why the trend toward greater concentration of ownership is positive? Can you find evidence to support these additional reasons?

3. Can you think of a bedrock value beyond localism or efficiency that could be used as a perspective from which to view this issue?

2. Evaluation: Make judgments about the validity of the arguments.

1. Given the arguments presented in this chapter, which have the most valid evidence to support them?

2. Which of the arguments have faulty support? For these, can you find strong evidence? Or should these arguments be rejected altogether?

3. Induction: Look for patterns in the evidence.

1. Look for patterns (of support or faulty reasoning) across arguments.

2. When you see a pattern, think about how you would continue to test it. What kinds of evidence would you need to see in order to increase your belief that those patterns really existed and were continuing into the future?

4. Synthesis: Construct your informed opinion.

1. Which arguments of the defenders of the trend toward media ownership concentration do you find most valid and compelling?

2. Which arguments of critics do you find the most valid and compelling?

3. Can you think of a way to incorporate the arguments you identified in a and b into a single, well-integrated position that recognizes the value of both sides?

5. Abstraction: Express your position succinctly.

In 200 words or less, can you express your informed opinion clearly and support it with compelling arguments?

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.2 Assessing the Concentration of Media Ownership in Your Local Market

1. How many movie screens are there in your market?

1. How many theaters control those screens?

2. Are the theaters owned by chains? If so, how many chains control the total set of screens?

2. How many radio stations are there in your market?

1. How many are group owned?

2. How many of the stations are owned by companies that also own other media businesses in your market?

3. How many broadcast television stations are there in your market?

1. How many are group owned?

2. How many of the stations are owned by companies that also own other media businesses in your market?

4. Is your local newspaper owned by a chain? If so, does it own other media businesses in your market?

5. Are there any magazines published in your market and distributed only in your market? If so, does the controlling company also own other media businesses?

6. What is the name of the company that provides your market with cable television service? Is that cable company a multiple-system operator?

7. In total, how many different media outlets (voices) are there in your market? How many individuals or companies control these voices?

8. If you wanted to express yourself through the media in your market, how hard do you think it would be to gain access to one of these outlets?

1. For example, assume that you wanted to criticize some new governmental regulation or tax policy in your local area. Which outlet would be most likely to give you space or time to speak out?

2. Which outlet(s) do you think would be the hardest or impossible to use?

9. Given your answers to the questions above, how concentrated do you think your market is? Do you think it is more or less concentrated than the national market for mass media?

10. What are the harms to the local economy and society due to the degree of local concentration of media?

11. Given your answers to all the questions above, do you think the outlets in your local market are in the control of too few individuals?

Descriptions of Images and Figures

Back to Figure

This time line starting in 1985 until 2020, with the various events from each year indicated as a point on the time line between that year and the next, is tabulated below:

The year 2020 is indicated at the end of the time line.

The text on the left reads:

Sources:

Compiled from AP Online (2000); Arnold (2011); Chmielewski & Fritz (2009); Common Cause (n.d.); Fabrikant (1995); Fox Business (2018); Globalization 101 (n.d.); Greimel (2000); Hayes (2017); Hofmeister (1997a, 1997b); Holstein (1999); Lorimer (1994); Lyall (1996); McDonald (2000); Menn (2007).

ISSUE 2 SPORTS

Issue: The money cycle drives sports. Some people think the money cycle is destroying sports while other people think that it is improving sports.

· Delineating the Issue

· The Money Cycle

o Players

o Owners and Leagues

o Television Networks

o Advertisers

o The Public

· Olympics

· Video Gaming

· The Big Picture

· Your Own Informed Opinion

o Cost–Benefit Analysis

o Implications

o Extend Your Knowledge

· Further Reading

· Keeping Up to Date

· Applying Media Literacy Skills

Sports have changed dramatically over the past four decades. The reason is money—big money. Globally, $1.3 trillion is spent annually on sports of all kinds (Plunkett Research, 2017) and this amount continues to increase each year—driven by the money cycle. This money cycle is especially influential in the United States, where sports revenue has climbed to $519 billion annually; this means that the United States—with less than 5% of the world’s population—accounts for almost 40% of all the sports revenue generated globally.

DELINEATING THE ISSUE

The controversy concerning sports in the media is whether big money has ruined sports or whether it has made sports better. As with the previous issue, the controversy in sports can be traced to people’s values. Some people hold an egalitarian value in which they cherish the similarities across all individuals and believe that everyone should be treated equally; they get upset when a few elites are treated massively better than the average person. In contrast, other people believe that there are enormous differences across individuals and that those who have an extreme degree of talent in some area should be rewarded massively. People with lesser talent need to appreciate the differences and admire those who perform at the top.

There is no ultimately correct position on this issue because there is no philosophical standard we can use to determine the worth of a person’s talent or life. Instead, we let the economic marketplace tell us the value of talent. However, while markets are typically driven by the forces of supply and demand, there are times when irrational forces also drive markets, causing them to become inflated to a point that an irrational bubble of inflation bursts, thus setting off a market correction. The stock market has experienced many such bubbles and corrections, as has the economy in general. At any given time, the market may be undervaluing or overvaluing particular resources.

With the issue of money in sports, your personal values are important. You must decide for yourself whether the money is now too much (i.e., the salaries of athletes are too high, the team owners and leagues are too rich, and the cost to the average fan is beyond affordability) or whether the money has made the games and the athletes better than ever. The key to being media literate is to get the facts and understand the arguments on both sides of this controversy. Then you can decide in an informed way which side makes more sense to you personally. In this chapter, I will present some key facts to help you construct your informed opinion. First, I will show you how the money cycle is accelerating and how that acceleration is changing traditional sports. Then I will present two examples to illustrate the influence of the money cycle on the ancient sports of the Olympics as well as the creation of the brand-new sport of video gaming. The chapter concludes with some guidelines about how you can use this information to strengthen your skills of media literature and design a stronger knowledge structure on this topic.

THE MONEY CYCLE

The amount of time and money Americans spend playing, watching, and talking about sports increases each year. The key to making sense of these increases as well as the nature of sports today is to understand the money cycle. The mass media have been an integral part of making the money cycle possible. The media provide the means for advertisers to inject mammoth amounts of money into the cycle. Also, the media provide so much continual exposure for professional as well as college sporting events that millions of people have made sports an essential ritual in their lives. And the media have transformed hundreds of athletes into celebrities who can themselves command huge payments for endorsing the products of commercial advertisers that can earn those athlete celebrities far more money than they earn by playing their games.

This money cycle has the following five components:

1. Athletic talent demands higher salaries plus bonuses each year. Because athletic talent is in short supply, talented athletes can typically find a team willing to pay a large amount of money to attract them to their team.

2. Owners of teams are willing to bid high for athletic talent so that they can field a competitive team that will attract fans to their games as well as to telecasts of their games. Because owners of competing teams feel the same pressure to improve their teams, all owners continually drive up the salaries they pay to attract the best players and coaches.

3. Television networks compete against one another to attract fans, so they drive up the fees they pay for the rights to telecast the games. Network programmers know that when they own the rights to telecast sports, their network generates higher revenues and the network gets stronger; in contrast, a network gets weaker when it lets a competing network outbid it for the telecasting rights.

4. Advertisers of certain products regard sports fans as an especially desirable audience. They pay sports telecasting networks a premium to get their persuasive messages to those audiences. They also use sports magazines, sports websites, and the sports sections of newspapers to reach their audiences.

5. We, the public, receive a lot of satisfaction in following our favorite sports teams, so we follow the games on television, tolerate the commercial interruptions, and buy the advertised products. Also, we find certain sporting events to be highly entertaining (Sunday Night Football, Super Bowl, playoffs), so we watch them even when we do not have a favorite team in the contests.

When the five segments of the cycle cooperate and work together well, more money is pulled into the cycle. The public watches more games and buys more advertised products, especially those products endorsed by athletes. With higher viewership for sports shows, television networks charge advertisers more for access to the viewers. The television networks make more money and can afford to pay the sporting leagues higher fees for the rights to televise the games. The leagues and owners make more money and can afford to pay more to attract the best players and thereby play more games, which attracts more fans.

The cycle keeps going around and around, each time at a higher level of salaries for players, which requires more income for owners and leagues, which demand richer contracts from television networks, which must charge more for commercial time to advertisers, who want larger audiences, who want more exciting games, which requires better players, who want more money . . . and the cycle continues.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these segments of the money cycle and make a distinction between the participants who are more active in driving the cycle from those participants who are more passive as they respond to the demands imposed by the cycle. The most active participants in this cycle are the owners and players because they have the most power in negotiating for money. The remaining participants—television networks, advertisers, and the public—are still essential to the money cycle, but their actions are largely in response to the actions of other participants rather than being initiators of change themselves.

Players

Salaries for players in all professional sports have been escalating in the past half century, and these increases have been much faster than the increase in the cost of living. This means that athletes and contests have become dramatically more important as a resource in our culture. To illustrate this trend, let’s begin by turning the clock back to 1959, when Ted Williams, a future hall of fame player for the Boston Red Sox baseball team, was offered a contract for $125,000. Williams returned his contract unsigned to management; he was rejecting their offer. His reason for rejecting the contract was that it was for too much money. Williams argued that he was not worth that much money because he was coming off a year in which he hit “only” 0.259, which was a bad year for Williams, although it would be a better-than-average year for almost everyone who ever played professional baseball. Williams asked for a pay cut of 25%, which was the maximum pay cut possible.

Since the days of Ted Williams, salaries for Major League Baseball (MLB) players have been increasing rapidly. For example, in 2020, the MLB player with the highest contracted salary was Mike Trout, who played centerfield for the Anaheim Angels (Langs, 2020). If baseball would have had its usual 162 game season, Trout’s salary would have been $232,716 per game, but in the pandemic-shortened season of 60 games, he was paid $628,333 per game. Thus, Trout was paid more to play two innings in 2020 than Ted Williams was paid to play an entire season in 1959. Furthermore, in 2020, there were 186 baseball players who were each paid more money to play one game than Ted Williams was paid to play an entire season.

As for the National Basketball Association (NBA), Michael Jordan was earning $4 million during the 1995–1996 season, when he led the Chicago Bulls to their fourth championship in professional basketball in six years. He was named the most valuable player of the year, and many basketball fans still regard Jordan as the best basketball player of all time. A year later, he was a free agent and signed a new contract for $18 million, making him the highest paid player in the league—temporarily (Rhodes & Reibstein, 1996). By the 2019–2020 NBA season, there were 64 players earning more than $18 million per year (“NBA Player Salaries 2019–2020,” 2020).

Salaries for players in the National Football League (NFL) have also escalated dramatically. For example, the average salary of an NFL player in the 1995 season was $716,000; that had increased to $2.7 million by the 2020 season (Renzulli & Connley, 2019; see Table Issue 2.1).

Table Issue 2.1

Source: Statistica (2020, July 14)

Athletes can also command large fees for endorsing products. Companies are willing to spend huge fees on athletes who endorse their products because such endorsements work to increase sales. For example, tennis pro Roger Federer has a deal with Japanese clothing designer Uniglo, which pays him $300 million over three years. Soccer star Cristiana Ronaldo has a deal with Nike valued at a billion dollars to him over his lifetime. And in 2018, professional golfer Tiger Woods was estimated to be worth $1.5 billion, with only 10% of that wealth being earned through winning golf tournaments (de Crespigny, 2020). While top professional athletes earn very large salaries from playing sports, many earn much more money by endorsing commercial products (see Table Issue 2.2).

Table Issue 2.2

Source: Forbes’ The World’s Highest-Paid Athletes (2020)

Until several decades ago, the owners and leagues were much more in control of players’ contracts and salaries. Sports began to be commercialized early in the 20th century in the United States when they developed

labor markets of athletic talent, in which wealthy teams offered “traveling players” financial inducements to come and play for them. It was this, of course, that created the phenomenon of the professional athlete, even though labor market mobility (and hence salaries) would quickly be contained by the emergence of cartels in all the major sports. (Whitson, 1998, p. 60)

These cartels controlled player salaries and player movement, but this arrangement broke down as a result of labor challenges in the 1970s, and now there is a great deal of player movement accompanied by an escalation in their salaries.

To help control the rise of salaries and to try to create parity among teams, several professional sports established salary caps for teams in their leagues. However, many owners have routinely ignored the caps for years. For example, in the 1995 NFL season, the salary cap was $37.1 million per NFL team, and 26 of the 30 teams in the league went over that maximum; the Dallas Cowboys spent $62.2 million (“NFL Teams,” 1996). By the 2020 season, the salary cap had been increased to $198.2 million per team; the cap was so high that none of the 32 NFL teams were spending over the cap at the beginning of the 2020 season (Gordon, 2020). Not only are the salary caps much higher, but teams have also gotten more creative in the way they write player contracts so that they appear to be staying within the salary cap rules and therefore avoid paying fines for exceeding those caps.

Why do owners continue to escalate salaries? The answer is that teams cannot be consistently competitive unless they invest in great athletic talent, which is in short supply. Star players are key to helping their teams win, which in turn attracts more fans to their games both with attendance at the stadiums as well as watching the games on television. The more a team wins, the greater the value of the franchise is. For example, the Chicago Bulls franchise was valued at $17.5 million in 1985—Jordan’s rookie year. In 1996, after the Bulls won their fourth NBA title, the franchise was valued at $178 million. The owner had a huge yearly income from broadcast rights, merchandising, and ticket sales. In 1996, all games were sold out, and there was a waiting list of more than 17,000 fans for season tickets (Rhodes & Reibstein, 1996). Now, the average NBA team is valued at $2.12 billion (Adams, 2020).

Owners and Leagues

The major professional sports leagues are all very profitable, although there are times when they claim to be losing money. For example, in the summer of 2011, when the NBA players’ contract had expired and the league was negotiating a new deal with the players’ union, the NBA claimed that during the previous season, 22 of its 30 teams were unprofitable and that the league lost about $300 million, although the NBA had generated a record $4.3 billion in revenue from television contracts and record attendance at the games (Pugmire, 2011). The NBA argued that although it generated a huge revenue, its expenses were too high—especially players’ salaries—and it was asking players to take a pay cut.

When we look at the big picture, it appears that all the major sports leagues in the U.S. are doing well (see Table Issue 2.1). While the majority of income for all teams and leagues is from television broadcast rights, the owners of teams have been aggressive in developing additional revenue streams, such as luxury skyboxes at stadiums and apparel merchandising. Also, the owners frequently raise the prices of tickets, concessions, parking, and souvenirs.

College sports have become huge businesses of mass entertainment. Colleges own their teams and make a huge profit on marquee sports such as football and men’s basketball. These sports are subsidized by student athletes who are prohibited from being paid by National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules. While these athletes are given scholarships to attend the universities for which they play, the immediate financial value of these scholarships for star players is far below the money they would make if universities had to compete in an open market for their services. Even private colleges with high tuition can field a football team for about $2 million and a basketball team for less than half that; compare those figures to the annual payrolls of professional teams. Colleges share in television money and also have revenue for tickets, parking, and concessions. While colleges do not play as many games per season as pro teams do, they have another source of revenue that pro teams do not have—donors who, as athletic program boosters, get to write off their donations as tax deductions. Colleges are looking for even more sources of revenue. College football is now selling naming rights to particular regular season games.

While NCAA rules limit the amount of financial support that colleges can give to their athletes, those rules do not limit what colleges can pay their coaches. Therefore, the salaries colleges pay to their football coaches keeps increasing, especially recently. By 2019, the average salary being paid to coaches in the 108 NCAA Division I football programs was $1.75 million, which was an increase of 75% over 2007. In 2020, the average annual salary paid to coaches in the five biggest football conferences was $3.6 million, with 16 of those coaches being paid more than $5 million each (“NCAA Salaries,” 2020).

College sports generate huge revenues at major universities. Division I schools generated a total of $9.15 billion from sports in 2016. Most of this revenue was generated by a small number of schools, with the top 24 earning more than $100 million a year; almost half (44%) of those college programs earned less than $20 million a year (Gaines, 2016).

But their expenses are very high because universities support a wide range of sports programs (such as golf, tennis, track, volleyball, cross country, etc.) that generate almost no income yet have considerable expenses. The American Council on Education explains that out of 1,000 college sports, “10 programs will have a net income of $9 million, and the remaining 990 will each lose $1 million” (Suggs, 2018).

Television Networks

The biggest increase in sports revenue is from television. Without a television contract, no sports league could survive. In the early 1960s, some entrepreneurs started the American Football League with a television deal of $1.7 million. Although this does not seem like much money today, it made the difference in whether the league survived in the early 1960s. In 1965, CBS paid $14.1 million to broadcast NFL games. By the mid-1990s, the NFL was charging $500 million per year for broadcasting rights, and this sum was so large that it had to be shared by five networks: ABC, NBC, ESPN, FOX, and TNT. By 2018, the NFL was receiving $6 billion per year from television networks in exchange for the rights to broadcast its games (Gough, 2018).

The television networks are willing to spend these large sums of money because the NFL generates strong television ratings. In the fall of 2012, 31 of the top-rated 32 television shows in the United States were NFL games (Eichelberger, 2013) and even though ratings of NFL games started falling in 2017, the games still generated higher ratings than most other television programs (Deitsch, 2018). In 2019, the NFL and college football broadcasts accounted for six of the top 10 rated shows as well as 20 of the top 50 highest rated shows (Schneider, 2020).

The television networks know they cannot depend on teams winning to keep increasing their viewership. With the four major professional sports (football, basketball, baseball, and hockey), each contest has only two teams, which means the number of losers is always the same as the number of winners. There is no way to increase the number of wins relative to the number of losses. Therefore, television broadcasts of any sporting contest will disappoint about half the viewers. In order to hold the attention of all sports viewers, television has had to develop techniques to keep all viewers tuned into games, even when viewers’ teams were losing. The most successful of these techniques has been to present games as entertainment packages that include lots of elements besides the games themselves to keep viewers entertained. Thus, announcers must do more than describe the game’s action; they need to be good storytellers. The announcers must fill in the history of the teams and tell compelling stories—“There is a tradition of bad blood between the teams” or some other subplot—to keep people watching the games, especially when the score is lopsided. Announcers must tell human interest stories about the struggles of individual players both on and off the field. And they must turn certain players into larger-than-life heroes, who can take over a game at any instant with their courage or superhuman abilities.

Certain players are pushed into the spotlight each season, and those who performed well there have become legends—players such as Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretsky, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan. Even non-sports fans know who these people are, and those reputations attract a lot of new fans to the games.

With television and advertisers putting so much money into these sports, they demand that the leagues make their sports even more exciting and more amenable to advertising. The leagues have complied. For example, the telecast of a football game is more than three hours long, although the game itself takes 60 minutes, and there is less than 10 minutes of action on the field during those 60 minutes that the clock is running. The announcers must provide lots of anecdotes, statistics, and color commentary. The director must provide lots of replays, slow motions, shots of the crowd and cheerleaders, and so on.

Over the years, the professional sports leagues have changed the rules of their games to make them more exciting for fans. For example, the NBA created the three-point basket, which added another dimension to the game and made it more exciting. Basketball now has a shot clock that requires players to shoot the ball at least once every 24 seconds. The NFL changed the extra point rule so that teams could go for two extra points, thus helping the team behind to catch up faster and make the game more interesting. Rules were changed to provide more protection for the most valuable offensive player—the quarterback—who needed more time to engage in the game’s most exciting play, which is the long pass.

To accommodate advertisers, the NFL instituted the two-minute warning in the mid-1960s to guarantee a break for commercial messages at a time when viewership is usually high. Also, the NFL and the NBA have frequent television time-outs. Uniforms are more colorful. All of these changes to the games were instituted to increase viewer interest and thereby provide advertisers with the largest possible audiences.

Advertisers

Advertisers pay huge fees to television networks to get their messages to their target audiences. During the first Super Bowl in 1967, the cost to broadcast a 30-second ad was $42,000; by 1995, the cost had increased to over $1 million. By 2020, the cost of showing one 30-second ad in the Super Bowl had increased to $5.6 million (Crabtree-Hannigan, 2020).

Advertisers have also turned stadiums into advertising vehicles with the naming of the stadiums and by putting ads on scoreboards, walls, ticket stubs, concession stand product packaging, and so on. Some basketball courts have ads painted on them; hockey has ads in the ice and around the rink’s walls. Some football teams have ads on their jerseys (Nike swoosh), and in car racing, the drivers’ uniforms as well as the cars are covered with ads.

In the spring of 2004, MLB even tried putting ads on the bases, but criticism flared up and it has backed off—for now. One critic said that this “undermines the character of America’s pastime at every level.” This criticism makes one wonder whether the critic has seen a baseball game in the past two decades, with all the advertising that is already at the stadium. It is interesting to consider what another critic said as a way of thinking about what might be coming in the future: “How low will baseball sink? Next year, will they replace the bats with long Coke bottles, and the bases with big hamburger buns?” (Penner, 2004, pp. D1, D8).

Businesses are happy to contribute large sums of money to sports—as long as those businesses get high visibility in return. For example, Frito-Lay gave $15 million to the Fiesta Bowl and in return received three years of sponsorship rights to that college football game. This means that the name of the game was changed to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, and this name had to appear on all the signage and be mentioned by all announcers referring to the game.

The Public

The public has always been interested in sports. But for the money cycle to grow, the number of fans has to grow each year. Also, the commitment of those fans needs to grow each year so that those fans spend even more time watching the games, going to the stadiums, buying the team merchandise, and supporting all the advertisers. Most importantly, the general public in each locale must identify and support its local teams. All of these things have happened and continue to happen.

The media offer the public a great variety of sporting events, and people expose themselves to these messages. In 1998, researchers estimated that there were more than 8,000 sporting events televised that year (Kinkema & Harris, 1998). That sounds like a huge number until you realize that this is an average of 22 events per day; today, this number is likely to be much larger. With long tail marketing, there are many niche audiences for a greater variety of sporting events, and with interactive technologies, we have instant access to all kinds of sporting events beyond what the traditional media offer.

Not only does the money cycle depend on continued support from fans, but it also requires support from non-fans. This is most clearly seen in the building of new sports stadiums across the country. The major sports leagues have been successful in getting local municipalities to finance a large part of these stadiums through public financing and taxes. In the five-year period from the summer of 1998 to the summer of 2003, 12 new NFL football stadiums were opened—many in cities with existing football stadiums. Each of these new stadiums had between 82 (Seattle) and 208 (Washington, DC) premium skyboxes that the owners of the NFL teams could rent out to wealthy clients and businesses. But the sweetest part of most of these deals was that the NFL got the cities to pay for most of the construction costs. Only one owner (Daniel Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins) paid for at least half of the construction costs, and with three of the stadiums (Raymond James stadium in Tampa, Florida; Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas; and the Coliseum in Nashville, Tennessee), the NFL saw to it that the cities paid the entire cost of the stadiums. Therefore, if you use an airport, rent a car, or pay for a hotel room in a city with an NFL team (or a MLB team or NBA team), you are likely paying a tax that helps that city finance its stadiums (Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, n.d.).

Most cities feel that it is important to have major sports teams. Cities with teams are willing to spend a great deal of public money to keep them, and those cities without a team are willing to spend a great deal of public money to attract a team away from another city and to even build a news sports stadium. The costs of building professional sports stadiums are going up dramatically, and it is costing taxpayers a lot of money to have a team. For example, let’s look at what happened in Houston, Texas. The city built the Astrodome at a cost of $35 million and opened it in 1965. Ten years later, it opened the Compaq Center, which cost $27 million, as the home for the Houston Rockets of the NBA. Thus, Houston had invested a total of $62 million to build venues for its big three professional sports teams. Then, in 2000, Houston spent $250 million to build Minute Maid Park, which was designed for baseball only. Two years later, Houston opened the brand-new Reliant Stadium for football only at a cost of $449 million. And in 2003, it opened the Toyota Center, which was designed for basketball, at a cost of $175 million (Reinken, 2003).

The cost of building a new NFL stadium surpassed $1 billion by 2009. The Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, cost $1.3 billion to construct; Minnesota Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium cost $1.1 billion; San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium cost $1.3 billion; and New York’s MetLife Stadium cost $1.6 billion (Notte, 2017). Then, in 2020, the $5 billion Los Angeles Stadium was completed as a home for the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Charges, which also includes a 298-acre sports and entertainment complex.

OLYMPICS

The ancient Olympics were a venue for amateur athletes to compete every four years. Of course, at the time, there were no professional sports. The ancient Olympics continued for more than 1,200 years, died out, and then were revived in 1896 as the “modern” Olympics. For a long time, the modern Olympics preserved its focus on amateur athletes and banned any professional athlete of any kind from participating.

Cities competed to host the Olympic games every four years. By 1932, the cost of hosting the games had increased to a point where cities could not earn enough revenue to cover all their expenses, so it was a sacrifice to host the games. Still, many cities competed because it was prestigious to be the host city. It also provided a great public relations opportunity to show off the host city to the world.

Eventually, with the rise of television, networks were willing to pay the International Olympic Committee (IOC) fees for the rights to broadcast the games, and this helped host cities defray the costs of building all the venues and the cost of running the Olympics (see Table Issue 2.3). In 1964, NBC paid $1.5 million to the IOC for the rights to broadcast the Tokyo Summer Olympics. By 1980, the cost had skyrocketed to $85 million when NBC acquired rights to the Moscow Summer Olympics, despite the fact that the Soviets wanted $210 million—plus $50 million in production equipment to be left behind. The broadcast was never made, though, due to the boycott of the 1980 games by the American government. ABC paid $225 million for the Los Angeles Summer Games in 1984 and $91 million for the Winter Games in Sarajevo. Despite losing money on the Winter Games, ABC came back with an even higher bid of $309 million for the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary. NBC got the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, Korea, for $300 million. NBC paid $456 million for the 1996 Atlanta games, and CBS bid $375 million to broadcast the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. NBC broke its record by bidding $705 million for exclusive U.S. rights to broadcast the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, and another $545 million for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City. The total NBC package is worth about $1.3 billion—none of the other U.S. networks entered a bid (Nelson, 1995). NBC secured the rights to four Olympic games (the 2014 Winter Games in Russia, the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, the 2018 Winter Games, and 2020 Summer Games) for $4.38 billion. Then, in 2014, NBC bought the rights to broadcast the next six Olympic games for $7.75 billion (Armour, 2014), even though NBC had a history of losing money on their broadcasts of the Olympics. For example, NBC lost $233 million in its broadcasting of the 2010 Winter Games (Flint, 2011).

Table Issue 2.3

Where does this television money go? It is paid to the IOC, which also sells rights to broadcast the games to media in other countries. When ABC paid $309 million for the 1988 Winter Games, the European Broadcast Union (EBU, which represents 32 countries and a population of several hundred million) paid $5.7 million; the Soviet Union (along with it Eastern European allies), North Korea, and Cuba paid a combined total of $1.2 million. Thus, it is clear that the United States (or, rather, advertisers on U.S. television) really supports the games—without U.S. support, the Olympics would be very different.

The IOC also sells advertisers the rights to sponsor the games or show their products during the games. Real (1998) explains that American television has increasingly borne the cost of hosting the Olympic games. In 1960, American television money contributed about 0.3% of the cost of the games; in 1980, American money supported 6% of the cost; and in 1984, it contributed 50%. Today, American television totally supports the cost and allows the host city to make a big profit.

The Olympics have become a major venue for advertising. The modern Olympics have always accepted advertising. In 1896, there were ads for Kodak. Coke began its association with the games in 1928. But as the games got more expensive, planners needed more advertising revenue. The 1976 games in Montreal experienced a $1 billion deficit.

In 1984, when the Olympics were held in Los Angeles, the games not only covered their enormous costs but also made a huge profit of $215 million (Manning, 1987). They did this by selling corporate sponsorships of various events and locales. Visa alone spent $25 million on rights and promotions, and 146 corporations were official sponsors of various events. By the 1996 games in Atlanta, the IOC had signed up 180 companies and brands that used the Olympics for promotions (Grimm, 1996). The top 10 of these official sponsors (such as Coke and IBM) paid a total of $2.1 billion (Jensen & Ross, 1996). This more than offset the total cost of $1.7 billion for holding the 1996 Atlanta games (Boswell, 1996). Now, almost all athletes have corporate logos on their clothing. Sponsorships are sold for each event and for the games in general. Companies use the event as an opportunity for global marketing.

Ever since the Los Angeles games in 1984, the Olympics have been highly commercial and highly profitable for the host city. Today, competition among cities to host the event is very strong.

For television networks, the Olympics have not been very profitable, because the cost of securing broadcast rights have escalated so much, as have the broadcasting costs themselves. In the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the United States sent 500 athletes to compete; ABC sent 3,500 people (1,400 engineers, 1,800 support personnel, and 300 network production and management people) to broadcast the games. To produce 188 hours of coverage, they used 205 cameras, 660 miles of camera cables, four helicopters, three houseboats, 26 mobile units, 35 office trailers, and 404 hardwired commentary positions. There were microphones on basketball backboards, underwater in the diving pool, in boxing ring posts, and on equestrian saddles. The cost of covering the games was $100 million. This is why the television networks must sell a great deal of advertising.

Ratings for the Olympic games have been dropping over the last four decades from an average rating of over 20 down to an average rating of about 10 for the London Olympics in 2012 (Sandomir, 2012). While the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang was the highest-rated show broadcast in the United States during its two weeks of games, the ratings were only 10% (Otterson, 2018).

Given the ratings drop and the costs accelerating upward, television networks typically lose money televising the Olympic games; however, they continue to bid up the price for future telecasting rights. They reason that the Olympic telecasts attract large audiences that they can use to target their promotions for new entertainment shows. Thus, if those promotions can generate larger audiences for the shows premiering after the Olympics, the networks will more than earn enough to cancel out the loss of telecasting the Olympics and generate a larger overall yearly profit for the network.

Because of the highly commercial nature of the Olympic games, the IOC was unable to maintain the prohibition against professional athletes. The Olympics today are very different than they were even 25 years ago. They are showcases for the best athletes—professional as well as amateur—in the world. But even more important, they are a showcase for international companies that want to develop worldwide markets for their products and services.

VIDEO GAMING

Video gaming has become very popular among the general population over the past three decades. Now more than two-thirds of all households play videogames, and 45% of all gamers are women. Globally, gamers play an average of six hours a day and that figure is even higher (6.4 hours) in the United States. Almost one-third (32.1%) said they would quit their job if they could support themselves as a professional video game player (Milligan, 2018). It has grown so popular that video gaming is now a collegiate varsity sport and there are professional leagues.

Some colleges are making video gaming a varsity sport similar to soccer or basketball. Top players receive athletic scholarships worth up to $19,000 per year. Players wear team jerseys displaying the logos of sponsors, schools sell naming rights of their gaming rooms, and players practice up to five hours per day. The Collegiate StarLeague, which began in 2009, now has 55,000 active competitors across 1,800 college campuses across North America (Farough, 2019).

There are also professional leagues of video gamers, and these contests are regularly televised on major cable channels such as ESPN. Television money is flowing into the sport. According to SuperData Research, 93 million people watched an esports event in 2015. When the League of Legends held its pro World Championship in October 2013, it drew a viewership of 32 million, which is more than Game 7 of the 2013 NBA finals (26.3 million; Gregory, 2015). By 2020, the esports audience worldwide had grown to 495 million viewers, and revenue had increased to $1.1 billion (Adgate, 2020).

THE BIG PICTURE

This chapter has presented many figures illustrating how the money cycle has increased expenditures on sports over the years until now; more than $485 billion is spent on sports annually in the United States. Most of those figures have focused on the high-profile spectator sports, especially the big four of American professional sports—football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. But if you look at Table Issue 2.1, you will see that the total revenues of those four powerful sports leagues totals $32 billion, which is a huge sum of money but only about 6.4% of the total revenue generated by sports in the United States each year. What generates the other 93.6%? Other spectator sports generate an additional $40 billion. This includes racing (especially horses and cars), golf, tennis, volleyball and all other sports. This figure also includes all sports spectatorship at levels below professional, such as college and high school sports. So, when we add up all money for what we pay to watch sports, it accounts for about 11.8% of all money spent on sports each year in the United States. The other 88.2% is money we spend on participating in sports, such as buying sporting goods, joining recreational centers and leagues, paying fees to play golf, and so on (Plunkett Research Ltd., 2018).

While the sports industry in the United States employs about 1.3 million people, less than 1% of them are professional athletes; another 1% are umpires, referees, and officials; about 15% are coaches and scouts; and the rest work at gaming centers and sporting goods stores (Plunkett Research, 2017).

The big picture then is that sports are extremely important to Americans—not only as fans but also as participants. Almost 9 out of every 10 dollars we spend on sports is for participation. And our participation is stimulated by the performances we watch as fans of high-profile athletes in the media.

When you take a big picture view on sports, you need to think beyond the mega-salaries paid to star athletes and think about how those athletes might be inspiring you to participate in sports yourself or to simply exercise. As you expand your thinking, consider how those high-profile sporting contests may be teaching you lessons about preparing for challenges, setting goals, working hard, and excelling in the many various contests we face in our everyday lives. Professional athletes and their games do have much value to offer our economy and our society. You need to take that into consideration as you develop your own informed opinion on this issue about sports and whether sports are worth the money, given the amount of resources being pulled into the accelerating money cycle.

YOUR OWN INFORMED OPINION

Now that you have been exposed to many facts about the money cycle in sports, you need to examine your opinion about this issue. Begin by thinking about your own behaviors with sports in terms of the resources you expend and the benefits you receive in return. Then think about what the implications are of your behavior and the behavior of others concerning sports.

Cost–Benefit Analysis

Up to this point, we have focused on general trends in sports. You have seen that sports have become more exciting and entertaining to the general viewer over the past several decades. Now it is time to analyze your own behaviors and values concerning sports. Begin with a cost–benefit analysis by working through Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.1.

Some of the costs to you are obvious. As a fan, you support your teams by buying tickets, parking, refreshments, and souvenirs at the games. But some costs are hidden. If you do not go to the stadium, you can still support your teams by watching them on television and buying products advertised on those telecasts. And even if you do not go to the games or watch the local teams on television, you are still supporting those teams financially through local taxes and paying the interest on revenue bonds your city council has sold to build the luxurious new stadiums that will keep owners from moving their teams elsewhere.

Clearly, you are supporting the sports money cycle; you cannot avoid providing some support. The big question for you now is this: What am I getting back as benefits for all these costs? This part of the cost–benefit analysis is more difficult to conduct because the benefits cannot be neatly quantified as costs (money and time) are. However, it is important that you really think about the satisfactions you derive from sports—from participating as well as watching.

Implications

Even if you do not consider yourself a sports fan, the sports money cycle is still exerting an influence on the economy and the society in which you live. Therefore, this money cycle is still exerting an influence on your life in all kinds of indirect ways. And if you are a sports fan, it is fun to try to answer a series of questions: Is there a limit to what players can earn? Is there a limit to what we are willing to pay for tickets, concessions, parking, and clothing with the logos of our favorite teams? Is there a limit to what municipalities will add to the local tax burden to hold onto a local team? Is there a limit to how many commercial breaks we will tolerate when watching professional sports on television? How far can the money cycle go in changing professional sports?

Think about the implications of the money cycle on sports in a broader way and when moving into the future (Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.2). How have the changes in professional sports filtered down to college sports, high school sports, and recreational sports? Do the changes in professional sports negatively influence the expectations of those who play little league baseball; that is, is the pressure to win too high? Does it take the fun away from watching intramural sports or a community league game? What will the future be like if the sports money cycle continues? What are the dangers and benefits of this? Can you think of solutions to problems caused by the sports money cycle?

Extend Your Knowledge

In this chapter, I have presented you with a great deal of detail about the sports money cycle, but there is still much more you could learn. Try Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.3 to dig deeper into this issue. Then, as you move forward in your life, think about how you keep up to date on this fast-changing cycle.

These Applying Media Literacy Skills exercises are rather involved. You may not want to do them all right now. That’s okay. But keep them in mind and keep working on improving your opinion regarding the money cycle and sports. Take more control over the costs you give up and be more demanding of benefits. The more you think about these things, the more you will be wisely using your resources and thereby increasing the value of the media to you personally.

Further Reading

Gaul, G. M. (2015). Billion-dollar ball: A journey through the big-money culture of college football. New York: Viking. (249 pages, including index)

Written by an investigative journalist, this book shows how college sports, especially football, has changed dramatically in the past few decades. He addresses many questions: Why do colleges pay coaches so much money? How do colleges make enormous incomes from their football programs? How have the lesser-known college sports and women’s sports been affected by the dominance of football in major colleges?

Raney, A. A. (2009). The effects of viewing televised sports. In R. L. Nabi & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media processes and effects (pp. 439–453). Los Angeles: SAGE.

This chapter presents a relatively current review of the empirical literature on the effects of exposure to sports in the media.

Raney, A. A., & Bryant, J. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of sports and media. Mahwah: Erlbaum. (612 pages, including indexes)

This edited volume contains many chapters written by experts on sports in the media. It is organized into the four sections of the development of sports media, the coverage and business of sports media, sports media audiences, and critical perspectives on sports media.

Wenner, L. A. (Ed.). (1998). MediaSport. New York: Routledge. (336 pages, including index)

This edited book contains 17 chapters in four parts: playing field, institutions, texts, and audiences. Although this book is now dated (with most of its research coming from the early to mid-1990s), it still presents valuable insights into how sports have developed primarily in the United States to become such a powerful economic and social force.

Keeping Up to Date

· ESPN (http://espn.com)

The television cable network devoted to sports has a website that presents a great deal of current information about players, teams, and contests.

· Plunkett Research, Ltd. (http://www.plunkettresearch.com)

This is the website of a company that conducts and reports research on a wide variety of topics. It is a valuable resource for information on sports statistics, such as players’ salaries, the value of different sports franchises, attendance at games, and so on.

· USA Today Salaries Databases (http://content.usatoday.com/sportsdata)

This website presents a lot of detail about the salaries of professional athletes and teams in America’s major sports.

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.1 Personal Inventory

This exercise is designed to guide you through a cost–benefit analysis of sports. Some of the questions in this cost–benefit analysis will require you to do some research; most of this additional fact gathering can be done by accessing sites on the internet.

Begin by thinking about how many sports you follow. The big four are football, basketball, hockey, and baseball. But also think about golf, tennis, track, horse racing, car racing, volleyball, and so on. Think beyond professional sports and include college sports and high school sports. Also think about city leagues, YMCA leagues, children’s leagues, and so forth.

Step 1: Estimate your direct costs. Think about how much time and money you spend following sports and estimate your answers to the following questions:

1. For each sport, estimate how much time you spend going to games.

1. What is the cost of tickets?

2. What is the cost of transportation to the games?

3. What is the cost of parking at the games?

4. How much do you spend on food and drinks at the games?

5. How much do you spend on souvenirs—programs, pennants, and so forth?

2. How much do you spend on items with team logos?

1. Clothing (hats, shirts, jackets, etc.)

2. Items for your car (flags, license plates, bumper stickers, etc.)

3. Items for your desk (cups, pens, calendars, etc.)

4. Sports gifts for others

3. How much money do you spend watching games on television?

1. Cost for special cable or pay television sports services

2. Cost of parties for friends who watch the games with you

3. Cost of food and drinks at sports bars while watching games

4. How much time do you spend in all the activities listed above?

5. How much time do you spend doing the following:

1. talking about sports teams, players, and scores of games?

2. reminiscing about past good times?

3. complaining about bad games, plays, and players?

4. projecting into the future of your team, players’ careers, or games?

Step 2: Estimate your indirect costs.

1. How much money do you spend buying products that are advertised at sporting events?

To answer this completely, you need to analyze all the products advertised on all the sports programs you watch and then find out what percentage of the purchase price of each of those products was spent on advertising. To estimate your answer, think of the major sponsors of the teams you follow and add up all the money you spend each year on those products.

2. How much money has your city spent to support the local sports teams?

Think of the cost of building the stadiums, parking lots, and access roads to the professional, college, and high school sporting events. Try to estimate how much of your taxes goes into supporting all these sports.

Step 3: Estimate your direct benefits.

1. How much satisfaction did you derive last season from the performance of the sports teams you followed? If you are a rabid fan and your teams all won championships, your satisfaction level should be extremely high. But think about the satisfaction you obtained from experiencing individual games and the performances of individual players.

2. How much satisfaction did you derive from displaying your teams’ logos on your clothing, car, desk, and so on? Is it important to you that other people know which teams you support? If so, why? Do you identify so closely with a team that you, as a fan, feel partially responsible when they lose and that you have earned a celebration when they win?

Step 4: Estimate your indirect benefits.

1. How important are your teams to their home cities?

1. What economic benefits do the cities get by having those teams?

2. What public relations benefits do the home cities get from supporting their teams?

3. Do the teams need to win for the city to achieve these benefits?

2. Considering what the cities experience as benefits, how much of that passes down to individuals such as yourself?

Step 5: Compare costs to benefits.

Now that you have thought about the questions raised in the above four areas, make a comparison of the costs to the benefits. Do you feel that the benefits you derive (of all kinds) are more than enough to pay you back for all the time and money you put into being a sports fan?

· If the answer is yes, then what is your most valuable benefit? Why do you value that so highly?

· If the answer is no, then how can you bring this cost–benefit comparison more in line with the value you expect? Is there some way to reduce your costs while still getting the same benefits? Is there some way to increase the benefits without increasing your costs?

_______________________________________

_______________________________________

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.2 Thinking about Implications

1. Broaden your perspective.

1. Think of the ramifications on lesser-known sports venues (smaller colleges, high schools, recreational leagues).

2. Think of the ramifications on things beyond sports, such as the following:

· Local taxes

· Traffic patterns and congestion

· Teaching young kids to play sports

· Taking your family to sporting events

· The cost of advertised products

· The overall economy

· Our sports as perceived by the rest of the world

2. Imagine the future.

1. Think about where the money cycle is likely to take sports five years from now.

· What will be the salaries of top players?

· How many ads will be in television shows and at stadiums?

· What will tickets cost?

2. Think about what the benefits of being a sports fan will be five years from now.

· Do you think the money cycle will be able to grow the benefits as much as they grow the costs?

3. Analyze pros and cons.

1. Begin by making two lists—the pros and cons of the money cycle growing sports.

2. Examine each pro that you have listed. Is there a con embedded in that pro? If so, remove the con element and add it to your con list.

3. Examine each con that you have listed. Is there a pro embedded in that con? If so, remove the pro element and add it to your pro list.

4. When you finish, you should have two pure lists—one list of only cons and one of only pros.

5. Which list is longer? Does the longer list mean that your opinion is on this side?

4. Recommend improvements.

1. What, if anything, should the following types of people do to improve the situation?

· Elected leaders

· Television networks

· Future athletes

· Advertisers

2. If they follow your recommendations, what benefits will result to the sports money cycle? What risks are there for making the situation worse?

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.3 Extending Knowledge

In this chapter, I have presented you with some facts to illustrate the money cycle with sports. Use this information as a jumping-off point and see what research you can do to update and expand on the points in this chapter by considering the following questions.

1. Extend your knowledge. Pick one of the main points in this chapter and do your own research to expand your knowledge and update the information. Some topics include the following:

· product endorsements by professional athletes

· cost of sports stadiums and how they are financed

· comparison of player salaries across sports

· tracking advertising expenditures by sport

· finding the demographic profiles of fans in different sports

· discovering how the games have changed to make them more attractive to viewers

· finding out who the owners of the sports teams are and how they made enough money to be able to buy a sports franchise

2. Analyze advertising content. Watch several broadcasts of a particular sport. Instead of paying attention to the game, pay attention to the advertisements. Keep track of all the ads. Then answer the following questions:

· Which companies advertise the most on particular sports?

· Which product categories are most often advertised by sports?

· Given your answers to the above two questions, who do you think the target audiences are for those big advertisers?

· What kinds of appeals are used in those ads; that is, what are the advertisers telling you about their products and why you should use them?

3. Project trends. Pick one sport and see if you can find information for what the average salary was and what the highest-paid players made in each decade.

· Project that information into the future for one, two, and three decades. How much will the average player be making when you are 30, 40, and 50?

· Break those salary figures down by game; that is, what will the average player and the highest-paid player make per game in the future?

· What do you think your salary will be when you are 30, 40, and 50? How long will it take a pro player to earn what you make in a year?

4. Get a historical perspective on these issues. Talk to your parent and grandparent about sports behaviors 40–50 years ago. Ask them the following questions:

· Did they used to attend sporting events in person?

· Did they follow sports through the media? If so, which sports and which media?

· Are they aware of any changes in their favorite sports over the past few decades? If so, what is their reaction to those changes?

· What is their reaction to the salaries paid to athletes today?

· What is their reaction to the amount of advertising at the games and during media coverage?

ISSUE 3 MEDIA VIOLENCE

Issue: While there are good reasons to be concerned about violence in the media, much of the public criticism is faulty.

· Delineating the Issue

· Public’s Perspective

o Limiting the Scope of Harmful Effects

o Equating Violence with Graphicness

o Focusing on Frequency over Context

· Producers’ Faulty Beliefs

o Violence Is Necessary to Storytelling

o Blame Others, Not Producers

· Your Own Informed Opinion

o Implications for Individuals

o Implications for Producers

o Moving Beyond Faulty Thinking

· Further Reading

· Applying Media Literacy Skills

People seem to have been complaining about violence in the media ever since storytellers have used the media. Criticism increases and decreases in cycles, and currently, we are in a quiet part of the cycle after a lot of criticism during the 1990s (see Table Issue 3.1). But this topic could heat up quickly again at any time. When it does heat up, will you be ready with an informed opinion, or will you be swept away with all the emotional rhetoric that echoes a lot of faulty ideas?

This table shows the timeline of public opinion on the amount of violence in the media from the seventies to the twenty-fifteen.Description

Table Issue 3.1 Public Opinion About the Amount of Violence in the Media

DELINEATING THE ISSUE

The issue of media violence is typically expressed by the criticism that there is too much violence in the media. When we frame the issue in this way, we can analyze it as we did with the two previous issues (media ownership and sports). Such an analysis begins with the recognition that the criticism is an evaluative judgment that requires a person to compare the thing they are judging (in this case, the amount of violence presented in the media) to some standard, which is typically a value that expresses the person’s level of tolerance for violence. Therefore, people who have a low level of tolerance for violence will make a judgment that there is too much violence in the media; conversely, people who have a relatively high level of tolerance for violence will arrive at a judgment that there is not too much violence in the media. Therefore, people’s opinions about whether there is too much violence in the media tells us more about people’s level of tolerance than it tells us about how much violence there is in the media.

Let’s now move our analysis to a deeper level by examining this criticism in more detail. We will look at this criticism from two perspectives—the public’s perspective and the producer’s perspective.

PUBLIC’S PERSPECTIVE

When we analyze criticism of media violence from the public’s perspective, we can identify three faulty beliefs: (1) limiting the scope of harmful effects, (2) equating violence with graphicness, and (3) focusing on frequency over context. Each of these faulty beliefs leads the public to make particular recommendations that they think will reduce the problem of media violence. In the following analyses, you will see that these recommendations have no chance of reducing the problem, and it is more likely that if these recommendations are enacted, they will make the problem worse.

Limiting the Scope of Harmful Effects

If you ask the typical person, “Does violence in the media have any effect?” most people will say yes, recalling a horrible instance when someone copied a violent criminal act that was in a movie or in the news. However, if you were to ask those same people if violence in the media has had an effect on them, most would say no. Thus, most people believe that other people are at risk but think they are free from risk. This difference in perception between oneself and others has been labeled the third-person effect.

A reason for this third-person effect with media violence is that people focus on harmful consequences of the violence. While it is easy for people to recall news reports in which serious acts of violence (murder, vicious assaults, rape) have harmed other people, they are much less likely to recognize how their own exposure to media violence has harmed them. This lack of awareness about how exposure to media violence has been harming oneself is traceable to the public’s limited understanding about the scope of harm that can arise from such exposures. People typically limit their perceptions of harm to aggressive behavior. For example, when parents witness their children imitating aggressive behaviors they see while watching action/adventure shows or World Wrestling Federation, parents can easily observe undesirable behaviors and attribute those behaviors to being influenced by media violence. Yes, aggressive behavior is likely to be triggered by watching portrayals of violence in the media; this has been well documented by hundreds of research studies (see Potter, 1999).

But aggressive behavior is not the only negative effect of exposure to media violence. There are also many other behavioral effects, and there are troubling effects on people’s attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and physiological responses. To illustrate this point, let’s say you watch portrayals of daring criminals robbing high-security banks, shooting at police, and blowing up helicopters that chase them; you are not likely to imitate any of this violent behavior. Now let’s say you watch lots of situational comedies in which the attractive characters are constantly insulting, verbally abusing, and embarrassing other characters in witty ways that trigger laughs; the probability of you trying to imitate such behavior is rather high. The rates of verbal aggression are much higher in the U.S. than the rates of physical aggression. For example, surveys find that one-quarter to one-third of people say they had been bullied in real life and 15% said they had been bullied online (Stopbullying.gov, 2020). Compared to physical aggression, social aggression is more imitable, so we should expect portrayals of social aggression to lead to more negative effects than portrayals of physical aggression. These effects are not only imitations of behavior, they can be negative emotional effects as well. For example, an experiment conducted on middle school children found that those children who were exposed to more depictions of serious social conflicts developed beliefs that people were less friendly, more hostile, and more likely to bully others; these children were also found to be more anxious and less positive about going to school (Mares et al., 2012).

Each of the effects displayed in Table Issue 3.2 has been well documented by research. Notice that some are immediate effects (meaning that they occur during exposure to the media violence) whereas others are long-term effects (they take many exposures over a long period of time to build up to a manifestation). Notice that although there are behavioral effects, there are also effects that are more physiological, attitudinal, emotional, and cognitive. When we take into consideration the full range of effects, it becomes easy to understand that there are likely many effects happening to everyone because of the widespread use of violence in media messages.

Table Issue 3.2

Perhaps the most prevalent effect of constant exposure to violence is an effect that is so subtle that most people overlook it. This is the effect of a cultivated belief that the world is violent and a related fear of being victimized. Of course, real-world violence and crime do exist, but they do not exist to the levels that the general public has been conditioned to believe. The crime rate in the United States increased from 1960 to 1990 and then began falling. Today, the crime rate is the lowest in 40 years and the murder rate the lowest in 50 years (“Good News Is No News,” 2011). While the crime rate was falling throughout the 1990s, a poll taken in 1996 found that only 7% of Americans believed that violent crime had declined in the previous five-year period (Whitman & Loftus, 1996). Also, from March 1992 to August 1994, public perceptions of crime as the most important problem in the United States jumped from 5% to 52% (Lowry et al., 2003).

Where do people get the idea that crime is a problem when they don’t experience any in real life? From the media. The media constantly present stories about crime. There are cable television channels, such as Court TV, that present one high-profile crime after another. Also, the media—through the news—present a constant stream of crime news that reinforces this impression that there is a great deal of terrible crime. Researchers have found a link between exposure to local television news, which is saturated with coverage of crime, and fear of crime (Romer et al., 2003).

Equating Violence with Graphicness

When the public criticizes the media for presenting too much violence in their stories, they are not really complaining about the amount of violence per se; instead, they are complaining about graphic portrayals that offend them. People do not have a counter running automatically in their minds during their media exposures, so at any given time, they cannot tell how many acts of violence they have witnessed in media portrayals. Instead, people continue tolerating acts of violence until one of those acts is presented in such a graphic way that it offends them. Because people do not like to be offended, they wish that they had not been exposed to that offensive portrayal. Thus, the memory of an offensive act or two is what motivates their criticism, not an accumulation of acts reaching a certain number that surpasses people’s tolerance level.

This raises a question about all the violent portrayals that are not offensive. Are they okay to show? The answer to this question depends on whether you are a media scholar or not. Media scholars who carefully analyze media content for violent acts begin with a clear definition for violence. When they see an act that matches their definition, they count it. Therefore, their content analyses of violence are sensitive to their definitions. Take a look at Table Issue 3.3 and try to answer those eight questions. If you answered no to all (or almost all) of them, you share the same conception of media violence as the general public. However, if you were a media scholar, you would likely have answered yes to all (or almost all) of them. Media scholars would answer yes to all these conditions because they know from research that people can be affected in a negative way when continually exposed to these conditions. In contrast, the public would answer no to all these conditions because they are not likely to be offended by portrayals in those conditions.

The public’s conception of media violence is limited to physical violence that is depicted in a serious (unhumorous) manner and that results in severe physical harm to the victims that is presented graphically. Audiences’ judgments about the degree of violence in a television program or movie are related much less to the number of violent acts than to the degree of graphicness (Potter et al., 2002). For example, people might not think an action/adventure movie with wall-to-wall car chases and gunfire is more violent than a drama in which one character is unexpectedly shot and we see the bullet tearing through flesh and bone. A single highly graphic scene in a movie is much more likely to trigger the perception that the movie is violent than a movie with a constant stream of car chases, gunfights, and explosions where the victims were never shown in a graphic manner.

The public’s conception of violence is key to whether the depiction is offensive or not. If the depiction dwells on graphic elements such as blood and gore, then the depiction is likely to offend viewers and trigger complains. Thus, producers avoid offending audience members by sanitizing the violence. Producers know that if they remove the graphicness of violence by rarely showing harm to victims, audiences are much less likely to be offended. Research studies have repeatedly shown that audiences tolerate this sanitized violence but when the portrayal is unusually graphic, it interrupts viewers’ flow of enjoyment and viewers experience strong negative emotions (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972; Diener & De Four, 1978; Diener & Woody, 1981).

Another key element in the public’s definition of violence is that humor is a camouflage. It appears that when humor blankets violence, the public does not see the violence. This is taken for granted by all kinds of people. An anecdote will illustrate this: A few years ago, I was meeting with the staff of the Viacom Standards and Practices Department in New York City. These seven women are charged with previewing the content to be aired on Viacom’s cable channels of MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon. I was watching a music video while the seven women in the room explained how they screened music videos to determine if those videos met their standards or if, in their judgment, there were things in the portrayals that would offend viewers. For an hour, the women showed parts of music videos and explained how they asked the various music groups to remove or tone down certain images that they felt were demeaning to women. When I was given a chance to ask a question, I said, “What about violence in the music videos?” Several women were eager to answer that they were sensitive to that issue and that the videos did not have any direct scenes of violence, although violence was implied in certain lyrics. Then I asked about violence on Nickelodeon. There was a rather long pause as the women looked at me as if I were a third grader who had just claimed that two plus two equals seven. One of the women looked very puzzled and said, “But there is no violence on Nickelodeon.” I returned the puzzled look and replied, “What about your Saturday morning shows such as Bugs Bunny and Ninja Turtles?” Her puzzled looked turned into a big smile as she said, “But those are not violent. Those are cartoons!” Were these women naive? No, they had a highly sophisticated understanding of violence—as defined by the general viewing public. These women knew that the public was not concerned by the actions—even the most brutal— portrayed in cartoons.

What is the reason for humor camouflaging violence? It appears that humor tends to remove the threat of violence in viewers’ minds. For viewers to consider something as violent, they need to feel a degree of personal threat. This insight can be found in the work of Barrie Gunter in Great Britain. He reported that viewers’ ratings of the seriousness of violent acts were higher as the fictional settings were closer to everyday reality in terms of time and location. In contrast, “Violence depicted in clearly fantastic settings such as cartoons or science-fiction were perceived as essentially non-violent, non-frightening and nondisturbing” (Gunter, 1985, p. 245). Other researchers also report that people were much more concerned with acts that had a higher probability of occurrence (meaning the likelihood of the act happening to them in everyday life; Forgas et al., 1980).

The public is also not concerned about acts of aggression and violence that result in nonphysical harm, such as verbal acts of aggression in which characters inflict emotional, psychological, and social harm on their victims. Studies have shown the occurrence of verbal violence is far more prevalent—up to three times more frequent—than physical forms of violence (Greenberg et al., 1980; Martins & Wilson, 2012; Potter & Vaughan, 1997). For example, Martins and Wilson (2012) conducted a content analysis of the portrayal of social aggression in the 50 most popular television programs among 2- to 11-year-old children. Results revealed that 92% of the programs in the sample contained some social aggression. On average, there were 14 different incidents of social aggression per hour in these shows—or one every four minutes.

In summary, viewers who watch an average amount of television are likely to see one act of violence per week that is highly graphic in its depiction of serious physical harm. This is the basis for their criticism that there is too much violence in the media. However, the average person is likely to view over 100 acts of physical violence per week—almost all of it sanitized or camouflaged with humor. Add to that another 200–300 acts of nonphysical aggression in the form of hate speech, harsh insults, put downs, and the like. Yes, there is indeed a great deal of violence throughout the television landscape—far more than the average person perceives.

Focusing on Frequency over Context

A third faulty belief held by the public is that the problem is keyed to the amount of violence instead of the context of the portrayals. Thus, this criticism makes the argument that the harm to individuals and society would be reduced if the amount of violence presented in the media were reduced. The underlying assumption here is that harm is key to the frequency of the portrayals. This belief is faulty because frequency is secondary to the primary factor of context. It is the way violence is portrayed in the media that signals to audiences what the meaning of violence is, and that meaning is very influential in bringing about effects.

To illustrate this point, consider the following two scenarios. In the first scenario, there are two brothers who are selfish, petty, and physically ugly. Although they are weak, they each have a gun, which they use to extort money from hardworking mom-and-pop store owners in the neighborhood by pistol whipping them. At night, they mug people and beat them up for fun. The victims of their violence are shown suffering all kinds of harm—fear, financial hardships, and physical pain. Eventually, the brothers are arrested and put in jail, where they are beat up by larger, stronger criminals. Their punishment is shown in detail as they work their way through the criminal justice system and are sentenced to long prison terms.

In the second scenario, the two brothers are young studs who are witty and highly intelligent. They spend their days hacking into private databases to find medical doctors who overcharge for their services and insurance investigators who cheat people out of their rightful benefits. At night, they capture their targets and take them to their secret laboratory, where they torture them with high-tech devices and illegal pharmaceuticals to get them to confess to their criminal behavior. While it is obvious that the targets are being tortured, the audience never sees any blood or gore. Afterward, it is implied that they kill their targets and carefully dispose of their bodies. They are eventually arrested and brought to trial, but the police are not able to find much evidence of their crimes so a jury finds them not guilty.

The first scenario is closer to what happens in real life. The audience is not likely to identify with the brothers; instead, viewers are likely to be disgusted by the violence, and they are likely to have a good deal of sympathy for the victims. Audiences who watch this program are not likely to want to imitate the actions of the brothers or to commit violence themselves. In contrast, the second scenario more closely follows the typical patterns of violent portrayals found in the media; that is, the perpetrators are glamorized and the violence is sanitized. People who watch these kinds of portrayals are more likely to believe that violence is often a good way to solve problems.

Would a reduction in the frequency of portraying violence in the media lead to fewer negative effects? Let’s answer the question by considering the two scenarios. Recall that the first scenario follows a morality play context in which the violence is portrayed as being disgusting, the victims are shown suffering, and the perpetrators are punished. People who watch this type of portrayal are not likely to increase their desire to imitate it if they watch more of this type of show; therefore, reducing the number of portrayals of this type would not reduce viewers’ desire to imitate those actions. However, if most media portrayals follow the pattern in the second scenario, then increasing their frequency would also increase the probability of stimulating negative effects in viewers, because viewers would be more likely to learn that violence is a good way of solving problems, that it is justified, and that only bad people experience harm.

Let’s return to the question: Would limiting the amount of violence in the media reduce the probability of negative effects? As you can now see, the answer depends on the context of the portrayals. If the violence is portrayed as being glamorized and successful, then a reduction in the frequency of these portrayals would likely reduce the probability of people imitating the portrayals. However, if the violence is portrayed as being disgusting, harmful, and punished, then the way to decrease the probability of people wanting to imitate this type of portrayal would be tincrease the frequency. Context matters.

Given all these faulty public beliefs about violence and its effects (using too limited a scope for assessing effects, equating violence with graphicness, and focusing on frequency more than context), the public is routinely underperceiving the amount of violence in the media and underperceiving the types of harm that can follow from such exposures both in the short term and especially in the long term.

Producers’ Faulty Beliefs

Producers of media messages also exhibit faulty beliefs, which contribute to the problem. One of these is that violence is a necessary part of storytelling. A second faulty belief is that their violent stories should be held blameless when someone commits horrible acts of violence in real life and blames media exposure. Let’s examine each of these faulty beliefs.

Violence Is Necessary to Storytelling

Violence is widespread throughout storytelling. Children’s stories depend on violence (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel, and on and on). Much of our most revered literary writers present violence (e.g., all of Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies present multiple acts of violence). Violence plunges characters into life-and-death situations and thereby heightens conflict and action, which are necessary storytelling features. However, there are other ways to attract audiences, other ways to heighten conflict, and other ways to arouse audiences. Violence is a tool of storytelling, but it is not the only tool.

While there are certain audiences that enjoy stories with violence, there are other audiences that do not. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that many people think that violence reduces their enjoyment of stories. For example, Weaver and colleagues (2011) said, “It is widely assumed that children like violence in cartoons, but this assumption has not been supported in existing studies that show nonviolent programs are liked just as much or more than violent programs” (p. 49). They conducted an experiment to test this claim and found that violence had no relationship to whether children liked cartoons; they found that boys liked action in their cartoons and that violence could heighten the action. For girls, violence did not increase their enjoyment of the action or of the cartoons. In a meta-analysis of this literature, Weaver (2011) found that violence has been found to decrease enjoyment of television programs among most people; that is, most people do not like violence and try to avoid it.

There is, however, a subset of the population that enjoys violence and searches it out. For example, violent video games have been found to attract people who have a high need for violence. These games satisfy that need and, over time, playing these games serves to reinforce those needs and make players more aggressive both in their game playing as well as in their real lives (von Salisch et al., 2011). There is a market for movies and videos that feature high rates of violence (e.g., action/adventure, horror), so producers are likely to continue providing stories that satisfy this need.

Producers may be overestimating the public’s need for violence in stories. One way to gauge this is to look at the kinds of video stories people produce when they have an opportunity, which is what YouTube allows. In a content analysis of the top rated and most viewed videos on YouTube, it was found that the percentage of videos with violence was far less than on commercial mainstream television, with content analyses consistently showing that across commercial mainstream television programs, about 60% contain some violence while on YouTube, only 13% of videos were found to contain violence (Weaver et al., 2012).

Blame Others, Not Producers

When a high-profile act of violence occurs—such as a teenager firing guns in a school or a movie theater—and the news media place it squarely on the public’s agenda, many people blame the media. Media producers and programmers try to shift blame to the parents, gun sellers, or someone else. The belief that violent occurrences in society should be attributable to one and only one source is faulty. High-profile violent events are the result of many different kinds of influences over time. No one factor is sufficient, so the search for one place to assess blame is faulty. Therefore, when the public blames only a Hollywood producer for triggering a real-world act of violence, that criticism is faulty. Likewise, Hollywood producers who claim they are blameless for their portrayals of violence are also making a faulty claim. Blame needs to be shared.

YOUR OWN INFORMED OPINION

Now that you have seen some faulty public perceptions and some faulty producer beliefs, it is time to work this understanding into your own opinion about media violence. Let’s begin with examining the implications of this faulty thinking so that you know what to avoid. Then you need to move beyond the faulty thinking.

Implications for Individuals

The way the public conceptualizes media violence is faulty. It is important that individuals broaden their perspective in order to realize that the context of portrayals is more primary than the frequency of those portrayals. When the context sanitizes the violence, it doesn’t eliminate it; instead, by sanitizing violence, producers are merely masking its presence so that audiences will not be offended. But we should be offended by violent actions. We should see the suffering it creates in victims. We also need to avoid ignoring violence that is camouflaged by humor and violence that is more social and verbal in nature. In short, we need to broaden our conception of violence to match our broadened conception of effects.

The way the public defines violence creates an irony. The kind of violence that upsets people the most is precisely the type of violence that they need to be exposed to more. In contrast, it is the violence that most people do not complain about—or even perceive—that is doing them the most harm. When people are shown violence, they should be offended and they should complain. Such a reaction is appropriate to violent actions; it shows that viewers are sensitive to violence. When they do not complain, this is a clear indication that they have been desensitized to violence. There is a great deal of violence portrayed in the media, and the overwhelming majority of it is not met with complaints; thus, most people are desensitized to almost all of the violence they continually witness on television.

If a show presents a highly graphic act of serious violence, people will be offended and complain that this type of portrayal is too violent and has no place in media messages. Their intention is to pressure the programmers to eliminate this type of content. The implication is that if the graphicness were reduced or if it were shown in a humorous context, the action would not be offensive to them.

When television programmers hear complaints about too much violence, the inclination of many creative types is not to reduce the number of violent acts; instead, their typical response is to sanitize those acts. This means making the violence less graphic by showing less harm to the victims or to mask the harm with humor. Sanitized violence leads viewers to believe that violent acts are not such a big deal. The less harm shown to the victims in television stories, the smaller the chance that audiences will be offended; but at the same time, this sanitized violence is desensitizing viewers, so people are losing sympathy for victims in real life. If producers eliminated all the acts of violence that people complain most about, they would likely cause more harm to society.

Another irony is that while people are complaining about too much violence in the media, they are missing 99% of that violence because it has been sanitized, camouflaged, and limited to only physical violence. Thus, they are focusing on violence that is less imitable and less likely to cause harm. The complaints are too narrow and focus on the wrong problem.

Implications for Producers

Producers of media messages are in the business of creating audiences so they can rent those audiences out to advertisers as well as sell access to their messages. They realize that there is a market for violent messages. But many of these messages create harm to individuals and society. While many of these harms cannot be attributed solely to media portrayals of violence, those messages are a contributing agent. We need to take an ecological approach and realize that societies are complex organisms that are sensitive to a wide range of factors.

We also need to take an economic approach and treat media organizations as businesses that consume resources and transform those resources into products that sometimes include harmful byproducts (see Hamilton, 1998). For example, if the media were a manufacturing plant that were dumping harmful pollutants into the public water system or air, the Environmental Protection Agency would identify this as an economic problem and pressure the manufacture to reduce the pollutants and pay a fine for the cleanup. If a steady stream of violent messages is attracting a particular audience that is predisposed to violent behavior in real life, then the companies providing this stream of messages that satisfy and reinforce that behavior should have an economic obligation to allocate some of their resources gained through the sale of these messages to the cleanup of the byproducts of those messages.

Moving Beyond Faulty Thinking

In order for your opinion about media violence to be informed, you need to move beyond faulty thinking. You can start this process by working to broaden your perspective on what kinds of portrayals constitute violence in the media. Try to write out a definition of violence in one sentence. When you finish, check your definition against the eight questions in Table Issue 3.3. Have you broadened your definition beyond that used by the general public? Is your definition as broad as the definition used by media scholars?

Table Issue 3.3

Next, let’s see how well you can apply your definition by conducting an analysis of media content (see Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 3.1).

Now that you are sensitive to patterns of violence in media content, let’s shift your attention to the possible effects from exposure to that content. Look at the six scenarios in Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 3.2. You will need to use the various descriptions of media effects as general principles and compare them to the scenarios in a process of deduction. When a scenario fits the definition of a particular effect, then you can conclude that the scenario is an example of that effect. Make those deductions now, then come back to the next section to see how your conclusions compare to mine.

Let’s see what you concluded in Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 3.2. I will present my conclusions, but what you should realize is that if your conclusions differ from mine, that does not necessarily mean your conclusions are wrong. Perhaps a scenario triggered you to think of something you experienced in your life and thus you elaborated the scenario with many additional details. If those extra details support your conclusion, then feel confident in your conclusion.

Here are my conclusions. For the first scenario, I see a fairly standard imitation effect. In this situation, it is harmless, unless you get really carried away! But what is happening is that the viewing is getting you involved in the mayhem. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. You are moving into a fight-or-flight mode. When you see your partner in a similar condition, you agree that wrestling would be a fun thing to do.

The second scenario presents a temporary fear reaction. The movie has planted strong images in your mind and a strong feeling of fear in your heart. Although your bedroom and surroundings are familiar, on this particular night, there is something else in the room. That something else is not really a monster in the flesh but an apparition in your mind. This apparition can make your palms sweat and your heart pound—not very conducive to sleep!

The third scenario is likely a reinforcement of attitude effect. Most of the images the movie presented are probably not new to you. Although you have never seen a gang war in an inner city, you have been exposed to these images through previous media exposures. And you have already held the attitude that inner cities and African American teenage males are dangerous. These are both stereotypes, of course. The stronger the stereotypes, the less likely you are to seek out real-world information to see if your attitude is distorted.

The fourth scenario is an attraction effect. You have a history of arousing and pleasurable experiences with past action/adventure films, especially those starring Steven Seagal.

The fifth scenario is a cognitive effect of generalizing patterns. Your recollection of several stories about local murders has led you to see a pattern. You can’t recall many murders five years ago or when you were a child, so you see a trend to the pattern—there is an increase in the murder rate in your town. What may be happening is that the actual murder rate in your town is down (the murder rate in the United States as a whole has been declining over the past decade), but the local news is getting better at presenting gruesome images that stay in your mind longer.

The sixth and final scenario is likely a desensitization effect. After watching so many acts of violence in the media, a simple fall seems like nothing. Also, because the victims of the serious acts of violence in the media rarely show any pain or harm, you think, “How can a silly slip hurt a young boy?”

The key to seeing value in your interpretations lies less in how often you agreed with me and more in how well you were able to apply the skill of deduction. In this case, you needed to have a set of good general principles in the form of clear definitions for a wide range of possible media effects. Then, you needed to analyze the detail in the scenarios to find matches with the definitions. Finally, you needed to reason logically using the particulars and general principles to arrive at your conclusions.

Keep working on your skill of deduction as you continue to confront this issue as well as other issues. To be in a good position to do this, keep checking your general principles for their validity. When you encounter particulars (usually media messages themselves or elements within them), conduct an analysis to make sure you really see what is there. Try to be logical—rather than intuitive—when reasoning out your conclusions.

Further Reading

Bushman, B. J., Huesmann, L. R., & Whitaker, J. L. (2009). Violent media effects. In R. L. Nabi & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media processes and effects (pp. 361–376). Los Angeles: SAGE.

This chapter presents a relatively current review of the empirical literature on the effects of exposure to violence in the media. The authors focus on studies that take a strong psychological perspective and use the methods of experiment and survey.

Cantor, J. (2009). Fright reactions to mass media. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 287–303). New York: Routledge.

This chapter reviews the literature on how violence and related media content have been found to trigger fear reactions in audiences, especially children.

Jordan, R. H., Jr. (2017). Murder in the news. Amherst: Prometheus Books. (253 pages, including endnotes and index)

This book presents the “inside the industry” story about why murder is so prominently covered in the news. The author is a journalist with four decades of experience as a television reporter and anchor in Chicago, which has often been called the murder capital of the country. This is an easy-to-read report of an important issue in journalism in which the author uses lots of anecdotes to illustrate the reasons why murder is covered so often compared to other crimes and other more important events.

National Television Violence Study. (1996). Scientific report. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. (568 pages, including index)

The National Cable Television Association funded this $3.3 million project to examine the prevalence and context of violence on American television, the effects of warnings and advisories placed before violence programs, and the effect of public service announcements advocating the avoidance of violence. Some of the chapters are very technical and contain many statistics. But the overall report is the most comprehensive analysis of the issue of violence on television to date.

Potter, W. J. (1999). On media violence. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. (304 pages, including index)

In this book, I provide an in-depth analysis of the scholarly literature that deals with the effects of exposure to violence in the media.

Potter, W. J. (2003). The 11 myths of media violence. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. (259 pages, including index)

This book begins with a chapter illuminating the current state of public debate over media violence and ends with a chapter reflecting on the prognosis for change. In between are 11 chapters, each dealing with a faulty belief about media violence. Taken together, these myths lock people (the general public, people in the media industries, media regulators, and media researchers) into a maze of unproductive thinking. These myths include the following faulty beliefs: There is too much violence on television, the media are only responding to market desires, and reducing the amount of violence in the media will solve the problem.

Sparks, G. G., Sparks, C. W., & Sparks, E. A. (2009). Media violence. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 269–286). New York: Routledge.

This chapter presents a brief history of the media violence controversy and then moves on to review the research and theoretical work that tries to explain the phenomenon of violence in the media and how it affects audiences.

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 3.1 Analyze Media Content for Violence

1. Watch a television show that has a reputation for presenting a lot of violence. Use your definition and see how many actions fit your definition. Count them.

o How many acts would you have counted using a definition that was based on a no answer to all eight questions in Table Issue 3.3?

o How many acts would you have counted using a definition that was based on a yes answer to all eight questions in Table Issue 3.3?

2. Watch another program with violence; this time, pay attention to how the violence is portrayed.

o How much of the violence is committed by bad characters and how much by the good guys?

o How many of the violent acts are punished in the scene; that is, is the perpetrator stopped in their actions or sanctioned in some way?

o How many of the violent acts show realistic harm to the victims?

o How many of the violent acts are portrayed as being justified?

o What does this pattern of context tell you about whether committing violence is good or bad? That is, what are the producers of this program teaching you about whether using violence is good or bad?

3. Watch a situational comedy and count the number of acts of verbal violence—that is, verbal put-downs, slurs, insults, and comments designed to embarrass another character.

o What kinds of characters commit the most acts of verbal violence? Are they the main characters? Are they attractive?

o What happens to characters who commit acts of verbal violence? Are they punished or rewarded (by laughter) or neither?

o Are the victims of verbal violence shown as being harmed? If so, what kind of harm, and how long does the harm last?

o What does this pattern of verbal violence and its context tell you about whether committing verbal violence is good or bad?

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 3.2 Can You Identify the Negative Effects?

1. Do you or your children feel like wrestling after watching several hours of cartoons or the World Wrestling Federation?

2. After watching a horror movie late at night by yourself, do you have a difficult time relaxing and falling asleep? Do you lie awake in bed thinking that you should get up and check the locks once again or perhaps leave a light on in the hall?

3. You have seen a violent movie that takes place in an inner-city ghetto. African American teenagers were dealing drugs and killing rivals with guns. You shake your head and think, “Inner cities are such war zones. I’m glad I don’t have to travel through one of them!”

4. You are thumbing through the newspaper and notice that a new Steven Seagal action/adventure film has recently been released. You feel excitement and can’t wait until you get to see it.

5. You are watching the evening news and you hear about two brutal murders that took place last night in your town. You think back and remember previous newscasts about murders in your town over the past year. You conclude that the murder rate is sharply increasing.

6. You see a teenage boy slip on a puddle in a supermarket and fall down. You think, “Silly boy. It’s his own fault for not looking where he was going. Besides, he’s not really hurt.” You walk away and don’t give it another thought.

Descriptions of Images and Figures

Back to Figure

This time line starting in 1970 until 2015, with the various events from each year indicated as a point on the time line between that year and the next, is tabulated below:

The year 2015 is indicated at the end of the time line.

ISSUE 4 PRIVACY

Issue: The changes in media technologies have made it easier for marketers, governments, and criminals to invade your privacy.

· Delineating the Issue

· Criminal Threats to Your Privacy

o Stealing Private Information

§ Direct Theft

§ Indirect Theft

§ Economic Purposes

§ Political Purposes

o Hijacking Computers

o Destroying Information

· Noncriminal Threats to Your Privacy

o Monitoring Activity

o Collecting and Selling Information

o Spamming

o Controlling

· Public Opinion and Regulations

o Public Opinion

o Regulations

· Your Own Informed Opinion

o Map Your Expectation of Privacy

o Information Assessment

o Threat Assessment

o Privacy Strategy

§ Remove Private Information

§ Correct Inaccuracies

§ Subvert Invasion of Privacy Practices

§ Limit Cookies

§ Download Software to Protect Your Computer from Threats to Your Privacy

§ Continually Monitor Threats

· Further Reading

· Keeping Up to Date

· Applying Media Literacy Skills

The issue of privacy has grown significantly over the past three decades. When information was stored on paper, the files that recorded that information could be locked away and kept private. The information about us was scattered across all the people and businesses with whom we interacted. We expected each of those people and businesses to respect our privacy and trusted that they did not share our private interactions with others unless we gave them explicit permission to do so. Thus, we were able to exercise control over who we gave our bits of information to and who could share which bits of information.

The proliferation of digital technologies has given everyone new tools to record, store, and share information. While these new tools increase our efficiency in generating and sharing information, they have also made it easier for all kinds of entities to invade our privacy. For example, we are now able to use digital devices to interact more quickly with financial institutions, stores, governmental agencies, and even our everyday friends. However, with each interaction, we are creating information that is recorded, stored, and often shared with various third parties in many ways that take place without our awareness.

Many of these third parties are information-marketing businesses that pull information from many different sources to create databases that contain a huge amount of information about the details of our financial transactions, our friendships, our health, our whereabouts, and the thoughts we express. One of these companies is Acxiom Corporation, which operates more than 23,000 computer servers that are constantly collecting, collating, and analyzing more than 50 trillion unique data transactions every year. It has collected extensive data on 96% of American households and has amassed profiles on 700 million consumers worldwide; each of these profiles contains at least 1,500 specific bits of information per individual, such as race, gender, phone number, type of car driven, educational level, number of children, the square footage of the home, portfolio size, recent purchases, age, height, weight, marital status, politics, health issues, occupation, pet ownership and breed, and even whether a person is right or left handed (Goodman, 2015). Acxiom generates more than $1 billion a year selling this information to governments, other businesses, and individuals (Acxiom, 2018).

Few of us are aware of how much information has been collected about us or how easily it is made available to marketers, governments, and anyone else who wants to buy even the most intimate details of our lives without our knowledge. Thus, privacy has become one of the most important issues of media literacy. On one side of this issue are all the businesses, governments, and organizations that crave unlimited information about everyone so they can maximize their strategies to shape the attitudes and behaviors of others. On the other side of this issue is us, the public. Because we have been relatively unaware of how much privacy we have lost, we have been slow to engage with this issue. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to show you what has been occurring over the past few decades that has enormously scaled back your privacy.

DELINEATING THE ISSUE

Privacy is the secluding of personal information by individuals about themselves. In everyday language, privacy is characterized by a set of four ideas. The first idea is that people do not want to share all information about themselves with everyone; there are some things that they want to keep to themselves. Second, privacy is a variable condition; that is, a person might want to share certain information with some people but not with others. For example, we want our friends to have our phone numbers and email addresses, but we want to keep this contact information away from telemarketers and other advertisers who might target us with a flood of unwanted messages. We want our physician to have a complete history of our medical conditions, but we do not want to share this information with the public—and maybe not even with our friends or parents.

Third, individuals own their personal information and should be able to control it. If another person or organization takes control of an individual’s personal information without the individual’s permission, that is an invasion of their privacy. Fourth, when we share some private information with another person and set boundaries on sharing that information, we expect that person to respect our boundaries. For example, when we give information about ourselves to our close friends, we expect them to follow a fundamental principle of fairness that they not share that information with a third party unless they first ask our permission or, at least, they tell us that they have passed that information along to a third party. Many of us expect the same treatment when we interact with businesses; that is, when we buy something from an internet retailer, we expect the retailer to respect our privacy and not share information about this transaction with other businesses.

All four of these ideas are routinely being violated by mass media businesses as well as other organizations and individuals. Three factors make this widespread violation possible. First, the technological advancements of digitizing information along with the high-speed transmission capabilities made possible by computers and the internet have allowed all kinds of people to gather information easily, store it, transform it, use it, and sell it to others. Second, regulations and laws to protect privacy favor businesses that want to acquire your information over consumers who want to protect their privacy. And third, the level of public awareness about this issue is very low; that is, few people understand the extent to which they have lost their privacy.

The issue of privacy is essentially the competition between threats and protections. At the present time, the threats are many and the protections are few, so the threats are far ahead in this competition.

One major source of these threats is from criminals. These are the individuals, rogue gangs, and all kinds of organizations that hack into secure databases to steal information and even entire identities of people. They also disseminate viruses that infect databases by disabling their use. The other major source of threats to our privacy is an assortment of noncriminals who coerce us into giving up our privacy by finessing our permission—often without us knowing it—to collect massive amounts of previously private information to use for their own marketing purposes and/or sell to third parties. There are many organizations that continually invade our privacy in noncriminal ways, such as financial institutions, vendors (both internet and brick-and-mortar stores), and governmental agencies.

In this chapter, I will show you a wide range of threats to your privacy that are happening every day, and then I will show you some ways you can protect your privacy in the digital age. We cannot rely much on governments to pass laws and regulations to protect our privacy because governments have been very slow to act compared to the speed at which our privacy is evaporating. These threats to our privacy are so new and evolve so fast that regulators are only now beginning to experiment with various restrictions and laws to try to protect us without violating the rights of legitimate businesses. In the meantime, you need to understand what these threats are so you can take steps now to protect your privacy while regulators are figuring out what to do.

CRIMINAL THREATS TO YOUR PRIVACY

There has been a dramatic rise in cybercrime. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) created the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2000, it received 16,840 complaints. In 2019, it received 467,361 complaints with reported losses exceeding $3.5 billion (FBI, 2020). While many of these cybercrimes are committed by individuals or small groups of hackers, some are committed by groups working for foreign governments. For example, in 2019, 41% of the world’s cyberattacks was traced to hackers in China. “The purpose of the hacker attacks of China is mostly to hack the networks of the U.S.A. and its allies” (Ergu, 2019).

The cost of cybercrime has been growing dramatically. In 2001, cybercrime caused $17.8 billion in damage, and this increased to over $600 billion by 2017, driven mainly by increases in attacks of malware, especially ransomware (McAfee, 2018). A Forbes article reveals how estimates of the cost of cybercrime are typically underestimates of the real cost because those estimates are limited to the direct costs to companies for restoring their databases after an attack as well as the costs of buying protective services to prevent future attacks (Eubanks, 2017). Those cybercrime estimates ignore the follow-up costs, such as how much money and time individuals must spend to recover from a company’s data breach as well as the hacked company’s loss of reputation, which can lead to a loss of customers and the reduction of the company’s attractiveness to investors. When all of these expenses are considered, the total cost of cybercrime is more like $6 trillion per year globally (Cybersecurity Ventures, 2020). When we break this enormous cost down and realize that this computes to $790 per person in the entire world, we can see that cybercrime is a huge problem!

In this section, we examine the threats to your privacy when people and organizations who have no rights to access your information get this information illegally by using malware. Criminals use these malware tools in three major categories: stealing private information, hijacking computers, and destroying information.

Stealing Private Information

We all have information that we want to keep private, but if it is stored on a computer, a mobile device, or in the cloud, criminals can steal it. In this section, we will examine first how cybercriminals can steal your private information both directly and indirectly. Then, we will examine why criminals want this stolen information.

Direct Theft

Some cyber criminals steal private information directly from individuals by interacting with their victims on their own computers. The two most prevalent techniques used are phishing and spyware. When cybercriminals use the technique of phishing, they send a message to a victim and pose as a reputable company. Phishing is typically initiated by criminals sending an email or instant messaging. These messages direct users to go to a fake website that looks a lot like the real website of financial institutions, retail stores, or governmental agencies that the users trust. Once the unsuspecting user gets onto this fake website, they are asked to provide private information. For example, you might get an email from someone who says she is a security officer at your bank and she wants to help you increase the security on your accounts at no charge to you. She urges you to click on a link she has provided. When you click on the link, a screen comes up that looks similar to the sign-on screen for your bank, but it is really a website constructed by the phisher. You are asked to sign into your account and then to provide additional information (name, address, phone number, and social security number) to confirm that it is really you. After you provide this information, she says you have passed the security check and she is satisfied it is really you. Then she asks you to list your bank account numbers so she can increase the security on them. When you provide this information, you are not increasing your security; instead, you are destroying your security by giving all this private information to a phisher.

Another commonly used phishing scam is for thieves to set up an electronic auction site where people bid on items (Lee & Light, 2003). The people who “win” this fake auction are told to send their name and address so the merchandise can be mailed. The recipients are told to wait until the merchandise arrives and check it out before paying for it, so the recipients are conned into believing they are dealing with a reputable company. But the merchandise never arrives and the thieves get away with the victim’s name and address.

Cybercriminals can also access your private information by getting you to download spyware onto your computer or mobile device. Spyware is a small program that is typically downloaded automatically onto your computer when you open an email attachment. Once the spyware program is on your hard drive, it begins collecting information about you without your knowledge by recording keystrokes, sites visited, and even personal information such as credit card numbers, email addresses, passwords, and so on.

Indirect Theft

Cybercriminals can steal enormous amounts of your private information without ever accessing your computer or even contacting you in any way. They hack into huge databases and steal your information—along with the information from millions of other individuals. Because private information about you exists in hundreds—and perhaps thousands—of different databases, cybercriminals have many sources. Every time you have engaged in any kind of financial transaction (with a bank, insurance company, governmental agency, retailer, etc.) or social interaction (emails, uploads, downloads, postings) online, that company stores that information in a data file and likely augments that information on you by buying additional data about you from other vendors. Most (but not all) of these companies try to protect their databases by using software that creates a firewall. However, it has been estimated that 41% of companies that have more than 1,000 sensitive files including credit card numbers and health records do not have firewalls to protect their databases (Sobers, 2018).

Hackers regard these firewalls as challenges. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (2020) reports that since 2005, when they began monitoring hacking activity, there have been 8,806 separate data breaches made public, and this totals more than 11.5 billion personal identification records hacked. The number of breaches has been growing each year and is expected to continue. According to 2017 statistics, there were over 130 largescale, targeted breaches in the U.S. per year, and that number is growing by 27% per year (Sobers, 2018). See Table Issue 4.1 for a few high-profile examples.

This table shows the timeline of the recent security breaches of consumer information over the last twenty years.Description

Table Issue 4.1 Recent Security Breaches of Consumer Information

The cost to a company that has been hacked is staggering. In 2017, cybercrime costs accelerated, with organizations spending nearly 23% more than in 2016. In companies with over 50,000 compromised records, the average cost of a data breach is $6.3 million. When larger companies are hacked, the costs are much larger. For example, Equifax had to spend $4 billion to recover from its database being hacked in July 2017 (Sobers, 2018).

While hackers exhibit many purposes for their criminal activity, those purposes can be simply classified into two groups: economic purposes and political purposes.

Economic Purposes

Hackers motivated by an economic purpose hope to convert the information they steal into money. They can do this by either selling the information to other criminals or by using the information themselves to steal the identity of the people in the database they have hacked.

There is a robust market for stolen information on the dark web. There is now so much information available for sale that the prices for some data are remarkably low. For example, the credit reporting bureau Experian says that people can now buy a social security number on the dark web for as little as $1, medical records for as little as $1, credit or debit cards for $5, bank information for $15, a valid driver’s license for $20, diplomas for $100, and U. S. passports for $1,000 (Stack, 2018).

When criminals have a few bits of information about you (your name, birth date, and social security number), they can steal your identity. Identity theft is the using of key pieces of private personal information about an individual to assume that person’s identity by applying for all kinds of economic resources (credit cards, loans, housing, licenses, etc.) and consuming those resources without paying for them. When the bills become due, the vendors contact the real person and expect payment. The real person, of course, did not make any of these purchases or benefit from any of these consumed resources but is still expected to pay back the vendors because those transactions were made in that individual’s name. The victims of identity theft have only three options: (a) pay all the charges, (b) refuse to pay the charges and have their credit rating destroyed, or (c) try to convince vendors that they did not make any of the purchases, which is extremely difficult because it requires victims to prove the negative when the vendors have evidence that the purchases were made in the victims’ names.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received 650,572 complaints of identity theft in 2019. These complaints were typically filed by people who had some private financial information stolen from them, which was then used to open credit card accounts in their name without their knowledge (FTC, 2020). Approximately 85% of victims of identity theft found out about the crime due to an adverse situation, such as being denied credit or employment, notification by police or collection agencies, or the receipt of credit cards they never ordered. Only 15% found out through a positive action taken by a business that carefully monitored the activities of its customers and noticed when it appeared that fraudulent purchases were being made.

Although victims are finding out about the crime more quickly, it is taking longer than ever—up to a decade—to recover fully from identity theft. Victims struggle with credit scores that are unfairly low and this causes them to have to pay increased interest on loans, higher credit card fees, and higher insurance premiums. Victims must battle with collection agencies and credit agencies that refuse to clear their records despite substantial evidence of the crime. The emotional impact on victims is likened to that felt by victims of more violent crimes, such as repeated battering, violent assault, and even rape. Some victims feel dirty, defiled, ashamed, embarrassed, and undeserving of assistance. Others report a split with a significant other or spouse and not being supported by family members.

Political Purposes

Not all hackers have an economic purpose; some have a political purpose: They breach a company’s firewall to access private information to exert power over that company. These crimes are referred to as hacktivism.

One form of hacktivism is when political activists break into an organization’s “secure” databases for the purpose of publicly embarrassing that organization. For decades, the Chinese government has been sponsoring an ongoing campaign of stealing sensitive information from all kinds of businesses and governments and then using that information to embarrass those organizations (D’Innocenzio & Collins, 2013, p. B4). These Chinese hackers broke through Google’s firewall and accessed the Gmail account information of senior U.S. government officials, Chinese political activists, officials from Asian countries, journalists, and military personnel. Another example is when agents for the North Korean government hacked into Sony after the film company released the movie, The Interview, which was a satire on the leader of their government. The hackers extracted about 100 terabytes of information, then uploaded unreleased movies to a file-sharing website and threatened to make internal memos and emails public, which could embarrass many people at Sony (Altman & Frizell, 2015).

Private individuals also turn to hacktivism to embarrass their own governments or businesses when they believe those organizations are conducting nefarious activities in secret. A popular site where hacktivists publish stolen data is WikiLeaks, which is an international organization founded by Julian Assange in 2006. For example, in 2016, someone hacked into the protected files of the Democratic National Committee and published 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments from the top strategists in the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton on WikiLeaks. When this information was made public, it embarrassed the Clinton campaign to such an extent that it has been blamed as the reason Clinton lost the election. Hacktivists have also used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing information hacked from the private files of various organizations of the U.S. government, including the Army (specifically, a manual for dealing with prisoners at Guantanamo Bay), the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hackers have used WikiLeaks to publish stolen information about scandals around the world that governments have tried to keep secret (Lohrmann, 2017).

Hijacking Computers

A second major criminal threat to your privacy is the hijacking of your computer, which occurs when hackers take over the control of your computer. One form of hijacking is the use of ransomware, in which hackers freeze your computer so you cannot use it. The frozen screen explains that hackers now completely control your computer and will not unfreeze it until you pay a ransom. Typically, hackers will avoid doing this to individual computers and instead target the servers in large companies where they can demand much more money as a ransom to unfreeze all the computers throughout the organization’s computer network.

The use of ransomware is growing at an alarming rate. Ransomware damage costs exceeded $5 billion in 2017, which was 15 times the cost of the previous year. By 2019, the cost of ransomware had increased to $11.5 billion as ransomware attacks hit a business every 14 seconds throughout the year (Sanders, 2020). The industry with the highest number of attacks by ransomware is the healthcare industry; attacks there are expected to quadruple by 2020 (Sobers, 2018). Ransoms average around $2,500 each, but there are some companies that paid as much as a million dollars to cybercriminals that held their computers for ransom (Cook, 2020).

Another form of hijacking is when criminals hack into your computer and link it up with other hijacked computers to create a botnet. A botnet is a network of infected computers (bots) that is remotely controlled by hackers who put these computers into round-the-clock service sending spam, phishing for credit card numbers, spying on internet traffic, or logging users’ keystrokes. Some of these botnets have been found to send out 30 billion spam emails per day. Almost all of this is done without the knowledge of the individuals who own the computers in the botnet (Sarno, 2011).

Yet another form of hijacking, which is done by advertisers, is to take over your homepage with a browser or to implant a search engine on your computer’s hard drive. This appears innocent enough, but this browser or search engine is designed to direct you only to certain advertised websites. One example of this is SearchCoolWeb, which provides a page with all kinds of interesting topics that you can click on to play games or go shopping. Although this page looks like a service designed to help you in your internet surfing, what really is taking place is that your browser is being hijacked and your internet browsing is being controlled by the hijacker, who directs you to certain websites while preventing you from accessing other websites.

Destroying Information

A third type of criminal activity involves the use of viruses to destroy information stored electronically. A computer virus is a small string of code (typically 2 to 4 kilobytes) that inserts itself into a normal software program, often affixing itself to file extensions that end in .COM or .EXE. The string of viral code hides itself among the normal code and is latent until it is activated, at which time it begins to destroy your stored information either by erasing lines of existing data, by reformatting large sections of your memory, or by erasing file addresses on your directory, thus making it impossible for your computer to find those existing files.

Computer viruses are highly contagious. Each time an infected computer interacts with another computer, the virus gets passed along. Because most viruses remain hidden, users have no idea they are passing around the virus until it is too late.

The number of viruses has grown dramatically in less than three decades. In 1986, the National Computer Security Association estimated that there were only four known computer viruses. By 2000, it was estimated that there were over 50,000 identified viruses. In 2011, Symantec Corporation (which markets Norton Utilities computer software) estimated that there were over one million viruses (“Number of Viruses,” 2011). A short four years later, it was estimated that there were one million computer viruses being introduced worldwide each day (Harrison & Pagliery, 2015).

One of the most serious recent viruses, called Wannacry, infected over 400,000 computers in at least 150 countries in 2017 before it was recognized and programmers could write code to protect computers from this particular virus. Wannacry cost the users and companies of the infected computers a combined $4 billion to recover from this single virus. Users who installed updated software to protect them from the Wannacry became immune to further attacks of that virus; it was tabulated that there were 5.4 billion attacks of that virus within its first few months of use (Sobers, 2018).

NONCRIMINAL THREATS TO YOUR PRIVACY

In contrast to the criminal threats to your privacy presented above, the threats that I present in this section are legal. They are legal because whether you know it or not, you have given permission to companies that allows them to access information about you that you typically think of as being private. Every time you download an app or sign up for online services (e.g., provided by a bank, insurance company, retailer, etc.), you are asked to agree to a long list of terms that are expressed in legalese spread over many screens. When we click on the “I Agree” button, we are giving that entity the right to monitor all our activity on that service, to collect additional information about us to help the company provide a “more personalized service” for users, to use all that information as they provide that service to us, and to share that information with various “third parties,” which are other entities that you have not dealt with directly—and may never have even heard of.

These companies tell users that they need to collect and use all this private information to make our experiences with them better in some way. For example, when you set up an account with online retailers, these companies monitor all your shopping behaviors with them and may even buy additional data about your shopping behaviors on other websites, information about your financial decisions, lifestyle, and attitudes (as mined from social networking sites). These retailers then use this information to narrow your choices down to a manageable number by telling you that they are making your buying experience more efficient for you by presenting you with those products you are most likely to buy. This filtering process gives them a great deal of control over what options you get to see. While these companies are not trying to harm you, their filtering actions limit your choices, and this serves to reinforce your existing buying patterns rather than helping you explore alternatives that may result in better choices. Thus, in order for you to recognize the extent of this potential harm, you need to understand how these entities monitor your activity; how they collect and sell information about you; how they inundate you with commercial messages, even to the point of spamming; and how they control your experiences on their digital platforms.

Monitoring Activity

Every time you use your computer or any digital device that can connect to the internet, your activities are being monitored. For example, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) continually monitor which websites you visit and for how long. Other companies use this monitoring technology to watch what you do and say when you visit their websites and digital platforms.

The monitoring of digital activity is made possible by what is known as a cookie, which is a tiny computer file that is planted in the memory of the devices you use to access the internet. Most people only have a fuzzy idea about what a cookie is or they have no idea at all. Computer cookies were invented in 1994 by Netscape, an early internet browser. Netscape users were told that the use of cookies would make their internet searching and buying experiences more efficient. For example, when a person accessed a site that required a sign-in name and password, Netscape would allow people to save this information in a cookie that could be automatically activated whenever the user wanted to sign on to a restricted site without having to type in their user name and password each time. Also, when users of online stores put purchases in their cart, this information was entered into a cookie that kept track of their purchases. Thus, shoppers could click from page to page, choosing items to buy, while a virtual clerk kept track of the items by listing them in a cookie along with the user’s name, address, and credit card information. Cookies stayed on the user’s hard drive so that when the user went shopping again, their information was automatically accessed, making it more convenient for the user to not have to reenter all their payment and mailing information. Also, because the purchasing information was stored, it was easy for the internet vendor to access the information and direct consumers to certain items. Vendors could also upload this information to their own computers, where the information could be collated with information uploaded from other users’ cookies. In this way, the vendor could build a large database to use to look for patterns of consumer behavior.

How to Check Your Computer for Cookies

When Netscape first developed cookies, it did not tell consumers how they worked. Eventually, some users began to suspect that their privacy was being invaded by Netscape; it was somehow recording information about them and storing it on their hard drives. When news articles reported on the cookie technology in January 1996, a firestorm of criticism erupted when Netscape users finally realized that their privacy was being invaded without their knowledge. Officials at Netscape were surprised by the criticism and initially dismissed it. For example, Alex Edelstein, Netscape’s product manager for Navigator 2.0, declared that cookie technology was an insignificant issue and would “blow over” (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000). But it didn’t blow over. In subsequent public opinion polls, many people who understood what cookies were continued to criticize their use. In a 2000 poll, more than half (54%) of internet users said they believed that websites’ tracking of users was harmful because it invaded their privacy. Only 27% said tracking was helpful because it allowed the sites to provide information tailored to specific consumers, but another 27% said they would never provide personal information (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000).

Under pressure, Netscape offered an opt-out policy that allowed users to disable cookies. While this was a welcomed feature that people could use to protect themselves from being monitored constantly, Netscape did not make it easy for users to find out how to opt out of cookies; a user had to dig two menu screens down in the browser to find the place to opt out of cookies. Also, Netscape set the default choice as opt in, which meant that all users were agreeing to be monitored unless they could figure out how to opt out. Thus, users who did not know what cookies were or that they had the option to opt-out still had no control over cookies.

Other companies began using cookies and some even let users opt out, but it was not easy for users to learn how to do this. For example, Microsoft built in cookie controls in its more recent versions of Internet Explorer. Internet users are now alerted when a site tries to place a third-party cookie—one that could help track their activities all across the internet. But even with these new tools provided by internet browsers, only about 10% of people were found to set their browsers to block cookies because many people still do not know what cookies are or how to prevent them (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000).

Some shocking uses of cookies have come to light. For example, Pharmatrak, Inc., a Boston technology firm, acknowledged tracking consumers’ activities on health-related sites without informing the public (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000). Some agencies of the federal government have also been found to engage in monitoring private individuals by using cookies. The federal Office of National Drug Control Policy (the so-called drug czar’s office) was found to be using cookies to track internet users’ drug-related information requests. The FBI developed Carnivore, a device that silently intercepts all traffic to and from a suspect’s email account without the person’s knowledge or permission. It is similar to a wiretap without a court order.

The use of media technologies to monitor your activities is not limited to your use of computers; it extends to phones and other mobile devices. Every time you make a phone call, an entry is made in a database that indicates the number you called and how long you were connected; with mobile phones, records are also kept about where you called from. With GPS technology, people can find where you are even when you are not making a phone call and advertisers can use this information immediately. For example, Placecast uses GPS tracking data on smartphones to track potential consumers and send them enticing offers when they get close to a particular store.

The digitization of information along with the popularity of mobile devices and other wireless connections has made it possible for organizations to monitor virtually all your activities. Every time you use a credit card or check to pay for something or scan a store card for discounts, those purchases are recorded. Now there are smartphone apps that let you buy merchandise on your way to a store so that you just walk in and pick up your purchase and have your bank account automatically debited for the purchase price. This is a big move toward paperless transactions (“Money? There’s an App for That,” 2011). Unlike cash, purchases made with cards and phones leave electronic evidence that can be collated with other databases so that a full picture of all your purchases is assembled and sold to marketers who want to know your buying habits.

Many companies provide services that monitor where you are every minute of every day. If you have a mobile device, it is likely to have a GPS tracker that tells your service provider where you are at all times. Phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T already have these data about where you travel each day and all the calls you make and to whom. They sell these data to city planners, commercial interests, and others. Other companies (such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+) have check-in features that broadcast your location to people in your network. Facebook created Facebook Offers to allow companies to track users they think are potential customers and send them coupons and announcements for special deals on their products. Facebook users can then click on the offers, which lets people in their network know what products they are buying (Tucker, 2014). Marketers love this because they know consumers exert a strong influence on one another.

There are also companies that sell tracking devices so you can monitor the activities of people around you. For example, Navizon sells a device that can be plugged into a wall outlet and monitors every phone using Wi-Fi within a given area (Tucker, 2014, p. 17). The Banjo app will tell you the names of nearby Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram users.

Companies also sell us devices to help us monitor our own activities but then collect those data and sell it to marketers. For example, Apple, Nike, and +FuelBand sell smartwatches that track users’ movements, sleep, and heart rate, among other things. Jawbone has been selling a device that has already recorded users’ sleeping (130 million hours), walking (more than 1.6 trillion steps), and eating (180 million items of food) patterns and sells this information to marketers (Walsh, 2014).

Companies continue to develop new technologies to gather even more information on consumers. Many manufacturers are now embedding sensors into their products to allow them to monitor the use of their products. With cars, insurance companies can now monitor the driving styles of their customers and offer them rates based on their competence (or recklessness) rather than their age and sex (“Building with Big Data,” 2011). Google has taken street-level photographs of every house and business in every neighborhood on earth, and satellites take pictures of your house in enough detail to show what is in your backyard. Cameras are everywhere to record your movements in public when you drive, when you are in stores or public buildings, or when you are walking down the street.

While many of these technological innovations offer considerable benefits to us, they also seriously invade our privacy. Many of these invasions occur without our knowledge. For example, in November 2011, news broke that a company called Carrier IQ had installed software on 150 million phones that accesses users’ texts, all histories, internet usage, and location histories without users’ knowing consent. In February 2012, it was revealed that the apps people had downloaded from Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Instagram, and other platforms were found to be uploading contact information from iPhones and iPads (Calabresi, 2012). Businesses regard the digital mobile network as a global system for tracking human beings and collecting information about them. So does the law enforcement community, which also has easy access to your phone conversations, if you use mobile devices. While landline phone information is protected as being private and law enforcement agencies need a warrant to tap into your landline phone calls, this is not the case with cell phones. A 1986 law has a loophole that allows warrantless searches of stored communications. In 2011, there were 3,000 legal wiretaps of landline phones; in the same year, there were 1.3 million taps on cell phone tracking data from federal, state, and local law enforcement (Calabresi, 2012).

With the internet and cell phones, employers have a much easier task of monitoring the activities of their employees. For example, Dow Chemical Company monitors its employees and fired 50 employees after a search of their email revealed pornography or violent images. A survey found that more than 75% of employers say they monitor how their employees use their computers (checking websites and using email) and also monitor their phone calls (Levy, 2006).

Not only do commercial businesses collect massive amounts of information on all of us, so too do law enforcement agencies. These agencies claim that they are only monitoring criminal activity when they use their cameras and devices to surveil emails and cell phone activity. However, because they do not know ahead of time which crimes will be committed, when, and by whom, they end up monitoring everyone all the time. And when their own monitoring devices don’t provide them with enough information, they pressure commercial companies to provide them with the additional data. For example, in 2013, AT&T received 300,000 requests from law enforcement agencies for information relating to both criminal and civil cases. While most of these (248,000) followed the law by including subpoenas, many did not. In 2009, Sprint disclosed that it has even created a law-enforcement portal that gives police the ability to ping (without a warrant) any one of Sprint’s mobile phones in order to locate users in real time—a feature that was used more than 8 million times in that one year (Goodman, 2015).

Few people realize how much governmental agencies have been invading our privacy by continually monitoring our activities in all kinds of ways. This is why the WikiLeaks story was so shocking to the public. In March 2017, WikiLeaks published nearly 9,000 pages of documents detailing CIA hacking tools that have been used as cyberweapons to allow them to invade privacy, such as hacking into smartphones, smart television, Wi-Fi routers, and computers—anything that is connected to the internet. Using a program they call “Weeping Angel,” the CIA had been secretly recording conversations through the microphones built into these devices. The CIA was also found to be accessing private information on supposedly secure apps before those apps could encrypt the data (“Surveillance,” 2017).

Collecting and Selling Information

Companies are now using digital technologies to do more than simply monitor our internet activities; they are also recording all kinds of information about us and selling that information to all kinds of third parties such as organizations, governments, and businesses. This is legal, even though you are not likely to know that you have given many companies permission to do this.

An industry of third-party companies has grown dramatically as new companies acquire information from numerous sources and collate that information into huge databases. For example, BlueCava has compiled a database of the usage of every computer, smartphone, and online-enabled gadget in the entire world and linked those data to information about their users. For this massive task, it uses programs such as Phorm; Phorm mines the activity of ISPs using a method called deep packet inspection to analyze the traffic that flows through their servers and builds a comprehensive profile of each customer’s activity on each ISP (Pariser, 2011).

Search companies such as Google and Yahoo have been collecting data on all your searches for years (Levy, 2006), and these companies are encouraging you to make even more of your personal data available to them as they update their customer agreements. Facebook is a prime example of an internet service that has grown very sophisticated in monitoring you. Facebook makes a copy of everything all users post on its platform; this includes photos, text, audio, video, links, personal information, and even every email. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained that Facebook not only owns the right to use this material but that it retains the right in perpetuity, even after users quit the site (Sarno, 2009). In 2011, Facebook added a facial recognition feature, which was presented to users as an added bonus of using the site; that is, users could pass a cursor over a photo of a picture of a person they do not recognize and the person’s name would pop up. This, of course, is also a major benefit to Facebook itself because this feature makes it possible for Facebook to keep better track of who your friends are and what you say to each of them. With innovations such as facial recognition, Facebook has become the repository of identity for much of the internet (“Trolling for Your Soul,” 2011).

Facebook has been very successful in collecting everything it can about you and then selling marketers access to it. Facebook’s annual revenue in 2007 was $153 million; this increased to $70.7 billion in 2019 (Clement, 2020a). How did it generate that income when it doesn’t sell anything to users? The answer is that it sells information about its users to all kinds of marketers. When Facebook prepared to go public in 2004, it had to disclose its financial records as a requirement to issue publicly traded stock. In those initial financial documents, Facebook estimated that each of its users was worth $80.95 to the company. Over time, as Facebook monitored how much information it was collecting from users and how much they were selling that information for, Facebook revealed that each profile page was worth an average of $226 in income to Facebook. The worth of these pages increases as users add more information about their relationship statuses, age profiles, and interests (TFG, 2020). While Facebook does not charge users to set up an account, it does require users to grant them permission to collect all posted information and use it in any way it wants. When Facebook’s chief operating officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about his view of user privacy, he said that “privacy is no longer the social norm,” which means that Zuckerberg did not believe that people cared about their privacy so it was permissible for him to collect and sell all the data he wanted about Facebook’s users (Goodman, 2015, p. 71).

In April 2018, Zuckerberg was called to testify in front of the U. S. Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees on privacy and data mining. During the five-hour session, when he was asked about what Facebook does with users’ information, he said, “Yes, we store data . . . some of that content with people’s permission” (Watson, 2018), although he continually emphasized that Facebook was concerned about protecting the privacy of its users. He repeatedly denied that Facebook sells user information to advertisers but said that Facebook uses that information to help advertisers place their ads in Facebook in a highly targeted manner. So, while Facebook may not sell the information itself to advertisers, it is clearly selling access to that information.

Zuckerberg, however, does appear to be very concerned about this issue when it comes to his own privacy. In 2013, he bought the four homes surrounding his house in Palo Alto for $30 million and then tore them down to create a privacy barrier around his home. Also, he has taped over camera lenses on his computers to prevent them from recording his sessions (Oremus, 2018). And during his congressional testimony, when asked by Senator Dick Durbin if he would be comfortable sharing the name of the hotel he stayed in last night, Zuckerberg replied, “No. I would probably not choose to do that publicly, here. . . . I think everyone should have control over how their information is used” (Watson, 2018).

Because Congress is now very concerned with privacy, Zuckerberg is being forced to make the public and potential regulators believe he is being responsible about protecting the privacy of Facebook users while at the same time trying to maintain his existing business model that has made him a billionaire by aggressively using the private information of Facebook’s many users. While Zuckerberg is now choosing his words very carefully, other internet moguls are more frank. In December 2009, when CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt about privacy concerns resulting from Google’s increased tracking of consumers, Schmidt replied, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know about, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” (Goodman, 2015, p. 77).

Some companies that collect information from their customers promise not to sell it but then are later forced to do so. For example, in 2000, Toysmart.com filed for bankruptcy, and the FTC forced the company to sell off customer data to the highest bidder. The firm had promised site users that it would not divulge information gleaned from tracking users’ activities on the site, but a court-appointed overseer believed the customer list was a valuable asset that could be sold to help pay off the firm’s creditors. In this case, the court ruled that it was more important for a bankrupt company to partially pay back some of its creditors than it was to protect the privacy of its customers.

Spamming

The use of the media to invade your privacy with unsolicited and unwanted messages that are designed to get you to buy a product or service is called spamming. It is especially focused on email accounts but also applies to text messages sent to your phone and all kinds of attention-getting devices (pop-ups, banners, etc.) that clutter webpages as we surf the internet.

Spamming can be considered an invasion of our privacy because we have not given spammers our email addresses or invited them to correspond with us. When we get an unwanted message from a spammer, we feel somewhat violated as we wonder how they got our email address and why they think we would possibly be interested in any of the products they want us to buy. And spam can be regarded as a major irritant if it dominates our emails or slows down our email servers.

Each year, the amount of spam increases. In 2004, it was estimated that 15 billion pieces of spam were sent every day, and this number accounted for over 60% of all email messages (“Can Spam,” 2004). By 2020, 300 billion emails were being sent each day and 54% of them were spam (Clement, 2020d). That means the average email account was receiving about 100 spam messages every day. Fortunately for us, most email providers have good spam filters that are continually updated so that most of this spam is filtered out and we do not have to see it. However, the danger with spam filters is that someone else is deciding what is spam and therefore you may end up filtering out some messages that you might want to read.

Spammers operate on a hit rate of 25 sales per 1 million emails. Therefore, they are motivated to increase the number of messages they send. When spammers send out 30 million emails a day, they are achieving an exposure rate about equal to major advertisers who spend several million dollars a week to use the traditional media to expose their targeted consumers to their ad messages.

The key to becoming a successful marketer through spamming is to have access to millions of valid email addresses. How do spammers get millions of valid email addresses? One way is to buy lists; spammers can buy 100 million email addresses for as little as $2,000. A second way is to hack into a large company’s database and steal the addresses. Or they might hack into a company’s private email directory and steal those email addresses. Sometimes they rely on both methods. For example, in the summer of 2004, AOL, after fighting a daily battle with spammers who were clogging their service with unwanted emails, found out that one of its employees had sold AOL’s list of 92 million email addresses to a spammer for $100,000. The spammer used the addresses to promote his online gambling business, then sold those addresses to other spammers for tens of thousands of dollars himself (Gaither, 2004b).

ISPs are especially wary of spammers because a sudden surge of hundreds of thousands of messages can slow their systems down, and a flood of a million messages can crash their systems. Slow service and crashed systems anger customers, and customers of an ISP that has frequent slowdowns and crashes will switch to another ISP that is faster and more reliable. Therefore, ISPs have been forced to hire large staffs of technical people to identify spammers and write programs to quickly filter out as much spam as possible.

Spammers fight back. For example, in the spring of 2013, Spamhaus, an anti-spam watchdog group, was almost destroyed by a massive denial-of-service attack in which spammers jammed Spamhaus with so much information that it shut the service down (Satter, 2013). Another example of spammer retaliation was a 2003 attack on Monkeys.com, which is a website that was publishing blacklists of spammers. After a year and a half, spammers had had enough of Monkeys.com; they continually inundated the website with a mass spam email assault for 10 days until the website had to close down. The owner of Monkeys.com said, “I underestimated both the enemy’s level of sophistication, and also the enemy’s level of brute malevolence” (Gaither, 2004a, p. C1).

Another example of spammers fighting back against controls is when the Alabama Spammers dialed into Earthlink’s high-powered servers and established several dozen connections simultaneously. Earthlink’s spam abuse team spotted the attack within minutes, but it usually takes an hour to identify the accounts and manually terminate all the connections; meanwhile, the Alabama Spammers were able to send out thousands of messages. Earthlink filed civil lawsuits against 100 companies accusing them of hijacking Earthlink customer accounts to send spam under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, which has been used to attack Mafia operations (Gaither, 2004a). The suit contended that in 2003, spam cost U.S. businesses $10 billion. One of the companies named in the suit is OptInRealBig.com and its owner, Scott Richter. This company uses contests and promotions to gather information on internet users and then sells those addresses to other spammers. Richter’s promotions include selling a diet pill named Inferno, a copy of Jennifer Lopez’s engagement ring, Iraq’s Most Wanted playing cards, and an herbal supplement for “penile fitness.” He sends out several hundred million emails each day, making his company one of the largest spammers. Richter does not like the term spammer and says, “We’re a powerhouse in the email marketing world. I stand up for what I do” (Jerome & Bane, 2004, pp. 125–126).

Spammers are not limited to email; they have invaded Amazon with a proliferation of messages in the form of e-books. Users of Amazon’s Kindle get on Amazon to buy e-books and download them to their Kindle. But the offerings for books are being clogged with spam in the form of Private Label Rights (PLR) content, which typically sell for about 99 cents each. Why are these PLR e-books regarded as spam? The answer is that most of these books are written by people who simply take an already published book that is selling well and make a few minor changes to target it better to a different demographic; they do this multiple times in order to achieve a high volume of sales. Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD called Autopilot Kindle Cash that promises to teach them how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word. These books are then listed on Amazon along with more legitimate books and the list of offerings gets enormously clogged with these bogus e-books. How bad is the problem? In 2002, there were 215,000 traditional books published in the United States; people could buy a paper copy from a traditional publisher or bookstore. In the same year, there were 33,000 nontraditional books published (these are typically self-published by individual authors without the use of a book publisher). So, the number of nontraditional books published in 2002 was only 15% of the number of traditional books published in that one year. By 2010, the number of traditional books had grown to 316,000 while the number of nontraditional books grew to 2.8 million or 886% the size of traditional book publishing (“Spam Clogging Amazon’s Kindle,” 2011).

Another form of spamming is adware, which is a small program that is sent to your computer’s hard drive, where it automatically downloads advertisements to your computer and continually displays those ads as pop-ups, banners, in-text links, auto-play video commercials, and other commercial content on your browsers. Additionally, this ad-supported application can initiate redirects to various websites and collect browsing-related information without the user’s permission.

The war between spammers and internet companies has continued to escalate. The internet companies have technicians set up spam traps—called honey pots—to collect spam email and analyze it to figure out what spammers are doing; they then devise anti-spam software to screen it out. In response, spammers buy the anti-spam software to figure out how to get around it. Each week, the sophistication of each side increases as they learn about the creative techniques developed by the other side.

Controlling

The reason marketers, government agencies, and other organizations collect and buy so much information about us is so they can exercise control over what we think and how we act. And they know that the better that information is (tapping into our deepest values, fears, and motivations), the more power they can exercise in the shaping of our attitudes and behaviors. For example, when we shop at a virtual store on the internet, we think we are browsing through all their products, but in reality, those sites are controlling our shopping by using the information they have about us to guide us to certain products and away from others. These sites claim that this guidance is a benefit to us; that is, it makes for a more efficient shopping experience when we are shown only products that are likely to interest us. But much of this guidance is influenced by advertisers who pay the sites to direct our attention to their products. There are now “third-party advertising networks,” which use cookies to track a user’s activities all across the internet and trigger advertisements according to each user’s apparent interests and needs. One of these third-party advertising networks is DoubleClick, which sprang up to oversee banner ads on websites.

It’s not only retailers who exercise considerable control over you; search engines do the same thing. The most sophisticated guidance algorithms have been developed by Google. When we do a search on Google, we think we are being shown the most relevant information on the topic expressed in our keywords, but in reality, we are being directed to a small list of sites that have largely been determined by paid placement. Paid placement is a method developed by Google as part of its search algorithm in which companies can improve their placement when Google presents the results of a search. The more a company pays to Google, the more likely that company will appear at the top of the search list of results.

In his fascinating book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, Eli Pariser (2011) says that if you do a Google search and ask your friend to do a Google search for the same term at the same time, the results of the two searches will be different because Google adjusts its search algorithm across individuals based on the individual’s personal interests as determined by their browsing and purchasing histories. Google claims this is an innovation designed to tailor searches to individuals and thus make searches more useful to each user. However, Pariser points out that the effect of this tailoring of searches tends to narrow our exposure to a range of information rather than opening us up to find genuinely new information on the internet. Thus, when our current internet searches are channeled by our past history, then we continue to be exposed to the same things, and this tends to narrow our internet experiences over time.

PUBLIC OPINION AND REGULATIONS

Public opinion is strongly in favor of personal privacy. However, it is difficult for regulators to establish laws that draw a clear line distinguishing what is private and what is public. Although there are a few laws in existence, it is exceedingly difficult to prosecute and punish offenders.

Public Opinion

Privacy has become a much more important issue to the American public in the past few decades. A Lou Harris poll found that the percentage of Americans concerned about their privacy rights grew from 34% in 1970 to 90% in 1998 (Identify Theft Center, 2002). While this issue has slipped in importance, it remains relatively high. In 2020, over 70% of Americans said they were worried about having their personal data stolen from their computers and online networks. To put that in perspective, only 24% are worried about terrorism and 17% are worried about being murdered (Sanders, 2020).

A recent survey of public opinion found that 70% of Americans felt that their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago, with 72% being concerned about how their personal information online is being tracked by companies and 77% being concerned about being tracked by governments. At the same time, 78% say they understand very little or nothing about what the government does with the personal data it collects, and 59% admit they understand very little about how companies collect and use online information about them. And 81% of Americans say the potential risks outweigh the benefits when it comes to companies collecting data (Auxier & Rainie, 2019).

Regulations

While these threats to privacy continue to grow and become more serious, regulators and law enforcement agencies have been very slow to respond adequately. One problem that explains this slow response is limited jurisdictions. All law enforcement agencies have a constrained geographical location to operate within. But internet activities take place in cyberspace. For example, the United States might pass a federal law making spam illegal, but spammers who live outside the geographical boundaries of the U. S. can still send millions of messages to people whose computers are located within the U. S., so it is not clear whether these spammers have broken a law and, if they have, who is in charge of enforcement and what rights the enforcers have to go into other countries to bring the spammers to justice in the United States.

There are areas were governments have begun to address some of these threats with additional laws. For example, in 2003, the United States FTC instituted some regulations that it called the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act and then tightened its regulations in 2008. This act essentially requires senders of email messages to more clearly identify themselves and to allow receivers of the messages to opt out of receiving any future messages from the senders. Also, in the fall of 2004, California passed a law against spyware—the placing of software on a personal computer to collect information about the computer’s owner (Lawrence, 2004). Other states are following suit. However, at this point, the problem of increasing threats to individuals’ privacy is growing faster than government regulation to protect individuals is.

The federal government has been slow to pass new regulations and laws to control these threats because the agencies that are charged with enforcing the existing regulations and laws are having so much trouble with enforcement. It is expensive to track down violators, and when those lawbreakers are identified, they simply move out of the country and thus avoid punishment. For example, the first financial penalties to a spammer were handed down in California in October 2003 when PW Marketing and its owners, Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin, were fined $2 million for sending unsolicited or misleading emails. The spammers fled the country to avoid the judgment (Healey, 2003). Also, on January 1, 2004, a new law took effect outlawing many of the tricks spammers use. In response, many spammers simply moved their operations outside the United States so they could continue with their same business practices and avoid prosecution. The virtual geography of the internet does not lend itself to the traditional ways of thinking about laws and enforcement.

Industry groups are working hard right now to protect the business practices that give them access to all kinds of information about you. If they get their way, they will continue to have the right to plant cookies on your hard drive; monitor your shopping and all other activities; gather unlimited amounts of information about you; send advertising to you through all kinds of media, especially computers and mobile devices; and sell information they collect about you to other advertisers. When these businesses offer you options to restrict their use of your information, they place the burden on you to tell them no (opt-out) rather than accept the burden themselves to ask for your consent (opt-in).

Over the past few decades, the U.S. Congress has held hearings about internet privacy and various legislators have introduced bills, but no significant legislation has passed. However, in the meantime, the European Union (EU) instituted a set of major regulations called the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation; https://gdpr-info.eu/) in the spring of 2018. These regulations were immediately called the world’s toughest rules to protect people’s online data, because they not only give people much more control over their personal information but they also restrict how businesses obtain and handle the information. As for empowering people, the regulations give people the right to request their online data, ask for deletions from those databases, and ask that the trail of information left when browsing social media be reduced. Businesses must also more clearly detail how someone’s personal information is being handled, and it created more limitations on how advertisers are allowed to use personal information. Companies face fines if they do not comply, with tech giants risking penalties greater than $1 billion. Privacy groups preparing class action-style complaints under the new law may put even more legal pressure on companies.

The EU says its 28 member countries are also setting the bar for stricter enforcement of antitrust laws against tech behemoths and are paving the way for tougher tax policies on the companies. The new privacy rules are part of a “strong European tradition” of policing industries to protect the environment or public health, even if it does “constrain business,” said Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s top antitrust official (Satariano, 2018).

These rules have forced major tech companies all over the world to revise their policies to comply so they can continue to do business in Europe. This breakthrough set of regulations has stimulated Brazil, Japan, and South Korea to follow Europe’s lead, with some countries having already passed similar data protection laws. European officials are encouraging copycats by tying data protection to some trade deals and arguing that a unified global approach is the only way to crimp Silicon Valley’s previously unchecked power (Satariano, 2018).

Europe’s proactive stance is a sharp divergence from the United States, which has taken little action over the years in regulating the tech industry. Most recently, the Trump administration has sought to cut taxes and roll back regulation. However, many American tech companies do a significant amount of business in Europe, so they know they need to respond to these new regulations. To meet GDPR’s requirements, Facebook and Google have deployed large teams to overhaul how they give users access to their own privacy settings and to redesign certain products that may have sucked up too much user data. Facebook said it had roughly 1,000 people working on the initiative globally, including engineers, product managers, and lawyers. Also, the Silicon Valley companies are adding lobbyists to influence other European regulations before they spread. Google and Microsoft are already among the five biggest spenders on lobbying in the EU, with budgets of about 4.5 million euros ($5.3 million) each (Satariano, 2018).

YOUR OWN INFORMED OPINION

Living in this digitized world where so much information is constantly being generated and shared has many advantages. These extensive information resources make it possible for organizations to spot all kinds of problems early (about weather, transportation, health, crime, resource shortages, etc.) and help them monitor the strategies designed to reduce these problems. The huge databases about consumers help businesses identify emerging needs in the population and shape the development of products and experiences that have the greatest probability of satisfying those needs. And for us, the individual users of the internet, the rapid sharing of information among these databases makes it highly efficient to complete purchases, get medical diagnoses, travel, connect with friends, and find the experiences and information we want when we want them.

Living in this information-rich world, however, also has many disadvantages—the most serious of which is the virtual elimination of personal privacy. Once we complete a transaction that has an electronic component, we forever lose control over the information we provide in these transactions. The information we provide in an electronic transaction becomes the property of the other party in the transaction and those other parties typically use that information to shape their future interactions with us and often sell that information to third parties. Also, the information you store on your digital devices, which you think are protected by a firewall, can still be stolen by hackers or invaded by viruses.

With this issue of privacy, the essential first step is that you become informed about the risks to your privacy. If you remain ignorant about these risks, you will continue to lose much of your privacy and possibly even your identity. While increasing your knowledge about threats to your privacy is an important step, you still need to take additional steps. In this section, I outline a four-step procedure that will help you substantially reduce the threats to your privacy. The first three of these steps ask you to analyze your current situation with regard to privacy. The fourth and final step shows you how to be proactive in reducing threats.

Map Your Expectation of Privacy

Begin this process by thinking about what kinds of things you want to keep private. The simplest way to do this would be to create two lists—one for private information and one for information you want other people to know. But approaching this task by creating only two lists is an oversimplification, because there are things you may want to keep private from certain types of people while sharing those things with other types of people (Vitak, 2012). So instead of writing two lists, take a piece of paper and draw a donut on it. Think of the hole in the middle as including those things that you regard as highly private—you want no one (or very few people) to know these things about you. Next, divide the donut into sections that represent different kinds of people; think about what kinds of personal information you would like each type of person to know about you. What do you want the people in one section to share with people in other sections? For example, one section might be medical professionals and this section would contain information you want your trusted physicians to know about you so they can make accurate diagnoses of your health problems. Other sections of the donut might be financial institutions, parents, close friends, religious counselors, and so on. The area outside the donut would be for information that you want the public to know about you.

Use these three levels to think about what you expect to keep private and what you expect to share. Your deepest, darkest secrets belong in the center; label this center as private. Label the ring around the private nucleus as situational and think about the kinds of information you want to share in different types of situations (interactions with physicians, banks, family members, best friends, etc.). You may want to refine this by creating subsections. For example, there may be information you may want to share with one family member (e.g., a sibling) but not with others (e.g., parents). Label the outer area as public to indicate the information you want others to know about you.

The purpose of this step is to encourage you to think about what privacy means to you. Is your conception of privacy too complicated? Is it realistic? How much can you trust the people around you to understand and respect your expectations for privacy?

Information Assessment

Once you have clarified your expectations for privacy, you need to examine whether your expectations are being met. The first step is to determine what information is currently available on you. Go to one of the following websites: PeekYou.com, intelius.com, or Snitch.name. Type in your name and see what information others can easily get about you.

Next, search websites where you have accounts or that you frequently visit (see Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4.1). Focus on sites in the following areas: finances, shopping, health care, education, government, and social networking sites (SNSs).

Finally, look at your postings on SNSs: the words and pictures you post, your contributions to blogs, and your history of messages. Are you consistent in the way you share the right information with the right people? If not, what changes do you need to make in your communication practices to alter the kinds of information you have been sharing? If you have been careful about sharing the right kinds of information with each person, ask yourself how much you trust those people to avoid passing along information you wanted them to have to other people (who you do not want to have that information).

Threat Assessment

The next step is to examine how much you can trust your ISPs to respect your privacy. Start with the sites you visit most and look carefully at their privacy statements. All sites are required to provide you with such a statement, especially those that require you to sign an agreement to be granted access to them. Can you understand what those privacy statements are saying or are they written in a way that confuses you? If they are confusing, what does that tell you about the site’s willingness to be honest and transparent with you?

What is the privacy default on those sites? Is the default an opt-out rather than an opt-in policy? With opt-in policies, the default is privacy. Consumers have to do something to grant advertisers permission to send them a message or to record information in a cookie; that is, advertisers cannot send email to consumers or record information in cookies on consumers’ computers unless they first ask those consumers and are explicitly granted permission. With opt-out policies, the default is that businesses have the right to send any information and to create cookies until consumers tell them to stop.

Check to see how generous companies’ opt-out policies are. Some companies allow you to opt out of all data collection, thus giving you a lot of control over your information. However, many sites allow you to opt-out in a very limited way so that the company still keeps the rights to control almost all their information about you.

Businesses overwhelmingly prefer the opt-out option because they can do whatever they want until a person tells them to stop, and few people tell businesses to stop because most people are not aware of how those businesses are invading their privacy. When this is explained to people, 86% of internet users say they prefer opt-in privacy policies (Electronic Privacy Information Center, n.d.).

Most regulations, however, are being crafted to favor businesses. For example, the policy negotiated by the Clinton administration, the FTC, and a consortium of advertisers gave websites the right to track internet users unless the users take steps to opt out of being monitored. These privacy standards were regarded as being so favorable for online advertisers that shares in DoubleClick rose 13% in one day (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000).

Think about what you post on websites that can be accessed by people you do not know. Things you post today can be copied to other sites and they can be copied to still other sites, so even if you erase an image you posted, that image may be out there on the web in hundreds of different places. Even more dangerous, those images (as well as your words, your voice, etc.) can be distorted from the original message you posted so that what is widely disseminated is a distortion that could embarrass you.

Now broaden your scope. Think about all the threats—legal as well as illegal—that I outlined previously in this chapter. Then think about the threats to the neighborhoods on your privacy map.

Privacy Strategy

We cannot depend on other people to have our best interests at heart and protect us. Furthermore, it is unlikely that regulators will ever catch up with the technology that keeps developing new ways to invade our privacy. The responsibility rests with each of us to protect our own privacy (see Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4.3). If we do not do the work to protect ourselves, we will likely have very little privacy left. Therefore, it is important that you develop your own privacy strategy. Below, I will present six things you can do.

Remove Private Information

When you find something about you on a website that you don’t want shared, contact the website to ask to have it changed or taken down. Find the phone number or an email address of the person who has the authority to take down the information. Most websites have a Contact Us link. If you don’t know who runs the site, get into Google and type “who is www.name-of-site.com” in quotes. If it is the site’s policy not to remove content, ask whether your name can be removed from the post or whether content can be blocked from appearing in search engines.

Even if you are able to remove information about yourself on all the websites you have identified, it is still likely that there will be information about you in existing databases; that information will be sold to other companies that will use it in the future. To eliminate this type of threat, go to primary data brokers (such as Intelius) and search for yourself on these sites and ask to be removed. Primary data brokers collect information from public records. Also, go to secondary data brokers (such as Spokeo) and search for yourself on these sites and ask to be removed. Secondary data brokers aggregate information from primary brokers and add data collected from social networks and other online sources. Go to the site of a privacy company such as Abine, which maintains a list of 25 major data vendors and has instructions about how to opt out of each of them.

Be vigilant. Search for yourself on people-finder sites every few months to make sure data collectors have not added you back again. For more instructions, go to a site such as Account Killer, which shows you how to delete your profiles on the big networks.

Correct Inaccuracies

There are places where you want there to be information available about you—accurate information. When you find inaccurate information, contact the website to get those inaccuracies corrected.

Remember that what you have posted yourself is your responsibility. For example, if you posted a compromising picture of yourself in full party mode on your Facebook page last year and now you think it is “inaccurate” because that is not really who you are now, you can remove those images but Facebook will retain a copy and there may also be many other copies that visitors to your site have made over the last year.

Subvert Invasion of Privacy Practices

Very few digital companies will allow you to download an app or set up an account without asking you to agree to allow them to collect information about you. If you do not agree to these terms, then those companies will prevent you from accessing their services. What savvy users have been doing to protect their privacy in such situations is setting up bogus accounts by agreeing to the vendor’s insistence on collecting information about them but providing fictional names and information about themselves. Surveys have shown that 24% of internet users said that they have provided a fake name or false personal information to avoid giving a website real information, 9% of internet users have used encryption to scramble their email, and 5% of internet users have used “anonymizing” software that hides their computer identity from the web sites they visit (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000).

When you join a new site such as Gmail, provide as little personal information as possible. When an account will not let you leave fields blank, fill in that spot with fake information. If you must provide an email address, create a new email account in order to complete the registration; when you get the email confirmation, cancel the email account. Check your account settings and make sure your profile is private and can’t be found in search engines. You might want to use a pseudonym but remember that there are companies (such as PeekYou) that collect information about all of your pseudonyms, so this technique may not work.

Limit Cookies

The single most effective thing you can do to check for risks of invasions to your privacy is to check your hard drive for cookies. Although 95% of internet sites use cookies (Hill, 2015), cookies themselves are not inherently bad or necessarily invasive to one’s privacy. But they open the door for widespread abuse. In the most comprehensive and extreme cases, an internet company could build a profile of a user that combines information about her purchases, her taste in music, the investment information she seeks, the health issues that concern her most, and the kind of news stories that seize her interest. When you allow cookies to exist in your hard drive, a hacker could get into your computer and, by reading the information in your cookies, infer a great deal about your interests, finances, health, personality, and lifestyle. However, most people do not know how to protect themselves, and 56% of internet users did not know what cookies were, much less how to avoid them. Only 10% of internet users have set their browsers to reject cookies (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2000).

Set up your internet browsers to disallow cookies as the default. Allow cookies only from sites you trust, such as your online bank, which will require cookies for you to log onto your account and access your money. You can check your internet browser to see what cookies have been automatically downloaded to your computer (see Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4.2). It is likely that there are many cookies stored on your computer. Look at the list. Some of the names of the cookies are clear enough to tell you who is responsible for putting that cookie on your computer, but some of the names are very cryptic and tell you nothing about who is responsible.

Download Software to Protect Your Computer from Threats to Your Privacy

While major ISPs—such as Google’ Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and your own university that provides you with an email account—have large staffs who work every day to identify threats and filter them out, it is still a good idea to download software to protect your own computer. There are several companies (such as Norton and McAfee) that sell software that you download onto your computer’s hard drive to create a firewall to screen out all kinds of threats, especially spam, spyware, and adware. Or you could go online and find software that you can download for free. This is called freeware and there are many services available for download, but these are usually targeted to one threat, such as spyware only or adware only. If you decide to try freeware, make sure you go to a reputable site that includes product reviews, so that you know you are downloading something that will help you. If you do not check out the software first, you may end up downloading a program that appears to offer protection but is really an adware or spyware program rather than a program that protects you.

Continually Monitor Threats

Do not take your privacy for granted. If you are not vigilant, the powerful forces that are continually trying to invade your privacy will increasingly be successful. Be skeptical about requests for information about you. Do you know who is asking for this information? If so, do you trust that person or organization? On social networks, be very careful about accepting requests from strangers. Those requests may come from advertisers, spammers, or even predators. Never give out information you want kept private unless you know who is asking for it and what their privacy policy is.

It is especially important to monitor your financial transactions to make sure the purchases that are charged to you are purchases you have made. Keep up to date on looking at all charges on all your credit and debit cards and deductions to your checking account. Also, monitor your credit history to see if unauthorized individuals or companies are accessing your information. Now all 50 states give residents three free credit checks each year from the three major credit reporting bureaus. Go to http://annualcreditreport.com to check on your credit. See who has been accessing your credit information. Do you recognize those people and businesses, such as your bank, places where you have applied for employment, and the like? If not, then there may have been attempts to steal your identity.

In conclusion, the guidelines I have provided will require a good deal of work. Think of it as making an investment in your peace of mind. The investment is relatively small compared to the effort you will need to expend dealing with the negative consequences later.

Further Reading

Bossomaier, T., D’Alessandro, S., & Bradbury, R. (2020). Human dimensions of cybersecurity. Boca Raton: CRC Press. (199 pages, including glossary, references, and index)

This book provides a good overview about how users of digital services experience threats to their privacy. The authors use findings from social science research to explain why these threats exist and how users can take steps to avoid many of these risks.

Calvert, C. (2004). Voyeur nation: Media, privacy, and peering in modern culture. New York: Basic Books. (274 pages, including endnotes and index)

This book clearly shows how our culture has become obsessed with voyeurism, which has been made possible by technological advances in surveillance along with a governmental Big Brother mentality. Also, the legal system has not kept pace with this phenomenon, so our privacy is being severely limited. The author is a professor at Pennsylvania State University and an expert in media law, privacy, and their interrelation.

Goodman, M. (2015). Future crimes: Everything is connected, everyone is vulnerable, and what we can do about it. New York: Doubleday. (392 pages, including endnotes and index)

Written by an expert in law enforcement, this book presents many startling facts about how privacy in America has largely dwindled to almost nothing because of the availability of the technologies that we have come to depend on and take for granted. After presenting (in 16 chapters) an overwhelming case for how our privacy is being invaded, he presents a short four-page appendix with a few suggestions about what we can do to protect what little privacy we have left.

Jones, M. L. (2016). Ctrl+Z: The right to be forgotten. New York: New York University Press. (267 pages, including endnotes, bibliography, and index)

Written by an academic, this book is an examination of the legal issues in the United States and other countries concerning the public’s right to privacy. It focuses on the European idea of people’s right to be forgotten and shows how this idea needs to be enacted in legislation in countries around the world to give people more options about how they can protect themselves from invasion by digital media.

MacKinnon, R. (2012). Consent of the networked: The worldwide struggle for internet freedom. New York: Basic Books. (294 pages, including endnotes and index)

While this book is primarily focused on showing how countries around the world, including the United States, use laws and policing to prevent people from openly sharing information, it also tells many stories about how those governments as well as businesses use the internet to invade people’s privacy without their knowledge or consent. In her last chapter, MacKinnon presents a detailed plan for how people need to stop taking their rights for granted and instead work to build what she calls a “netizen-centric” internet.

O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction. New York: Crown. (259 pages, including endnotes and index)

The author is a mathematician who has worked at hedge funds and startup companies developing predictive models using data mined from the internet. In this book, she argues convincingly that these models are harming all kinds of people and institutions because of the way they value certain things and ignore other factors. She presents many examples from education, business, voting, and health care to illustrate that when big corporations use big data to drive greater profits, many individuals are discriminated against without their knowledge or consent. Also, these models tend to limit opportunities for certain kinds of people and lead them down a path toward greater risks to their health, financial well-being, and success in work.

Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you. New York: Penguin Press. (294 pages, including further reading, endnotes, and index)

The author is an internet activist who criticizes how certain web services (particularly Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, and Pandora) are recording your browsing information and using it for commercial marketing purposes.

Solove, D. J., Rotenberg, M., & Schwartz, P. M. (2010). Privacy, information and technology (2nd ed.). New York: Aspen Publishers. (320 pages, including index)

Written by three law school professors, this book takes a strong legalistic approach to the problem of protecting people’s privacy when they access media messages.

Tucker, P. (2014). The naked future: What happens in a world that anticipates your every move? New York: Current. (268 pages, including endnotes and index)

The thesis of this book is that Big Data—information that companies collect about everything you do—will lead to a better future for everyone despite the almost total elimination of personal privacy. The author argues that the use of Big Data will improve research on health, crime prevention, education, and personal relationships.

Keeping Up to Date

· Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://www.eff.org)

This is a nonprofit organization that bills itself as the “first line of defense” when the public’s freedoms in the networked world come under attack. Founded in 1990, it champions the public interest by defending free speech, privacy, and consumer rights. Go to the official website and click on the Privacy tab (under Issues) to get updated information on litigation and news stories, resources, and research papers.

· Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC; http://epic.org/)

Established in 1994 in Washington, DC, EPIC is a public interest research center with the mission of focusing public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and protecting privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values.

· National Cyber Security (http://nationalcybersecurity.com/)

This website offers a range of news stories and is updated every 60 seconds. The stories focus on the activities of hackers and the law enforcement efforts to stop them. It also monitors government actions and offers tips to help readers protect themselves from invasions of their privacy on internet platforms.

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4.1 Information Assessment

1. Analysis: Search websites to inventory the information that is available about you.

1. Financial:

§ What information do financial institutions (banks, credit unions, investment companies) provide about you on their websites?

2. Shopping:

§ Do you have store cards that enable you to get discounts at checkout?

§ Have you set up accounts on merchants’ websites (Amazon, Macy’s, etc.)?

3. Health care:

§ What information does your health insurance carrier provide?

§ Do you have a website account with your physician, clinic, hospital, etc.?

§ Do you have a website account with a veterinarian for your pet?

4. Educational institutions:

§ What records does your high school and college make available online?

§ Do you have a student loan account?

5. Government:

§ What information do local, state, and federal governments provide? (Examples include agencies that levy and collect taxes [Internal Revenue Service, social security, etc.], licensing agencies [driver’s license, car registration, certifications], property registrations [ownership of buildings and land, liens, zoning variations], policing agencies [arrest records, criminal registries, etc.], and voting lists.)

6. Social:

§ What information about yourself have you shared through email?

§ What information about yourself have you posted on SNSs?

§ Are you a member of social organizations that require membership and have a website? If so, what information have those organizations gathered about you?

§ Do you have a personal blog or website?

2. Grouping: Once you have listed the information available about you, organize it into groups to create your desired privacy map.

1. Purely personal: What information do you want to keep most private? This is the information you don’t want to share with anyone unless it’s your very best friend.

2. Limited sharing: This is information you are willing to share on a limited basis.

3. Public information: This is information that you are willing to share with everyone.

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4.2 Threat Assessment

1. Evaluation: Use your desired privacy map as your standard and compare the information available on you to that standard.

o Some of that information may meet a standard.

· Some information you think should be public is now available to everyone.

· Some information that you feel should be available to only one type of individual or company is on a website that requires a password and can only be accessed by people whom you think are okay.

o Some of that information may fall short of your standard.

· You have put information on a public website that you feel should be limited to only certain kinds of individuals.

· A website you trusted to limit the availability of information about you has violated that trust.

2. Analysis: Get onto those websites that have information about you that you think is especially important to protect (financial records, health history, etc.).

o Find their privacy statements and analyze all the legalese to see if you can understand your rights.

· What does the site promise to protect?

· With whom will the site share what kinds of information?

· What is their justification for this?

o How well do you feel your information on each site is protected from access by criminals who may try to steal your personal information, assume your identity, or change some of your information?

Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4.3 Developing a Privacy Strategy

Synthesis: Now that you have analyzed your world to identify what information is available about you and have evaluated the appropriate levels of privacy for different kinds of information, you are ready to synthesize all that information in the formulation of a strategy that will help you immediately reduce threats over the long term continue to keep those threats to a minimum.

You must create your own plan given your particular needs; however, I will guide you in that task by providing five suggestions:

1. Remove private information from places where it is currently available.

2. Correct any inaccuracies in information that you want to continue being made available.

3. Continually monitor threats. Monitor updates to companies’ privacy policies. Check with credit monitoring bureaus to see that you credit score has not changed. Check public sites to monitor what information is available on you (Google your name or use http://PeekYou.com, http://www.intelius.com, or http://Snitch.name).

4. Download software to protect your computer from threats to your privacy (antivirus software, anti-spam software, ad blockers, spyware checkers).

5. Set up your internet browsers to disallow cookies as the default. When companies require cookies in order for you to access their services (such as banks), make sure you know and trust the company before allowing cookies.

Descriptions of Images and Figures

Back to Figure

This time line starts from the year 2000 and ends in 2020 with the years marked out on it in intervals of five years. Various events from each year indicated as a point on the time line between that year and the next, is tabulated below:

The year 2020 is indicated at the end of the time line.

The text on the left reads:

Sources: AOL is sued, 2006; D’innocenzio & Collins, 2013; Loobkrok, 2017; Online reputations in the dirt, 2011; Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2018; Rodriguez & Pierson, 2011; Sobers, 2018.

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!