Summary: This program examines the power of professional pollsters to influence public opinion. Public opinion pollsters and market researchers serve virtually every facet of American culture. Nearly everyone-from the makers of cake mix to television executives and candidates for public office-seeks to become the intimate of our private opinions for the purposes of their own strategies. In the hands of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program looks at the impact of the visual image on news and politics in the electing of Presidents and the governing of America. While projecting a self-serving image has long been an understandable part of American politics, the 1980s produced a marriage of sophisticated news manipulation by political candidates and a willingness of the news media to dance to the candidate's tune. To what...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program looks at a society inundated with visual images. From billboards to bus stops, from rock videos to newsstands, mass-produced images have become the very air we breathe. What is this cultural atmosphere saying to us and about us? Why should we care? Ever since the pioneers of public relations and advertising spoke about the "engineering of consent," social critics have analyzed its...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: The public mind is often deceived by those who manipulate it, and it deceives itself, as well. This program examines how deception has influenced some of the major events of our recent past and how self-deception shapes our personal lives and the public mind. Why do trusted people in public life lie to us and to themselves? Can a society die from too many lies? Do our institutions demand...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Those who stand outside our culture often view it with a lens made more accurate by distance and perspective. An Englishman on intimate terms with America, film producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields ) sees in our movies the reflection of a nation at odds with itself. In this age of the visual image, popular culture can make attractive the vice or virtue that politics...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: The Center for Media and Public Affairs reports that during the 1990s the homicide rate in the U.S. dropped 50 percent, yet homicide news coverage increased by an incredible 700 percent. In this program, the Center's Bob Lichter and the Threat Assessment Group's Greg McCrary join ABC News anchor John Stossel to examine some of the factors that contribute to the exaggeration of risks and dangers...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006