About the Strategy

Discussions and activities related to the messages found in media are extremely important in our increasingly media-rich world. As the saying goes, "seeing is believing," and even the most media-savvy high school student can have a difficult time disbelieving a pictorial representation of a current or historic event. Students who are themselves adept at altering electronic images or know enough to be dismissive of modern advertising pitches may still believe that what they see in a textbook image, newspaper photograph, or an old film reel is accurate and without bias.

So how do you effectively interpret and evaluate visual media to determine the photographer's intent and whether he or she was trying to impart a particular message to the audience?

Rely on a variety of criteria:

• Is it accurate?
• How effective is it?
• Does it show bias?
• How relevant are the facts?

Consider the context in which the image or film was created.

• What time period does it reflect?
• In which time period was it created?
• Based on your knowledge of history, what may have been changed or omitted?
• Who is the audience for whom it was intended?

Knowing this information can help you identify ways in which the image or film may have been altered or staged for a particular effect or purpose. The extent to which this occurred can sometimes be discovered in the contextual pieces that accompany the media (e.g., text describing an image or commentary during video footage), or in the images in the media itself. As you discover this, you can try to decide whether or not this affects the validity of the image, or what else it tells you about political, humanitarian, or other concerns during this era.

To guide your evaluation of media, begin by developing a viewing tool. This tool is a list of media analysis questions that help you determine how a particular image or film meets the criteria for authenticity. These guiding questions must also be general enough to be useful and transferable to any pictorial media.

Here are some examples:

• What was the photographer's or filmmaker's goal/point/purpose in making this image? Did the creator of this image have an agenda or motive beyond simply capturing the scene?
• Does anything appear out of context or out of place in this image/scene? Why?
• Are people's expressions, positions, and movements consistent with what they appear to be trying to do?
• Does the image make logical sense?