Educational Media Reviews Online

We have all heard that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and “seeing is believing,” but we’re often unaware how easy it is to manipulate visual perception. This program strives to open students’ eyes to the biases behind images in print news media, drawing insight from the distinguished Swinburne University lecturer in media and communication, John Schwartz. To illustrate Schwartz’s analyses, Visual Literacy: Images and Meaning takes us behind the scenes of Melbourne’s daily newspaper, The Age, where the viewer is introduced to the pictorial and graphics editors, the photographer, and two cartoonists/illustrators. The commentary of these journalists sheds light on the motivation and processes behind the selection and layout of images for publication.

The goal of this program is to help students to read pictures as “visual text.” They are asked to consider the motivation behind a photographer’s chosen subject matter, focus, and depth of field, or an editor’s decision to crop or juxtapose selected images. Viewers are asked to examine how charts and graphs, used to convey concise analyses of data, may oversimplify the facts, and how headlines can be used to frame a story, for better or worse. Illustrations and political cartoons are also discussed, in the context of artistic license. Too briefly, the video mentions, but does not discuss, the market forces that have driven a formerly text-centric medium to rely increasingly on images to tell, or sell a story.

Interviews with experts, observations of newsroom activities, and descriptive pictorial illustrations are woven into a thirty-minute package that is perfect for use in the classroom, but whets the audiences’ appetite for more. Visual literacy encompasses a very broad area. While this program covers the print news media, viewers may also be interested in additional videos, including Perception: The Art of Seeing, to explore the phenomenon of visual perception, Images in Media, for a look at visual literacy issues in television and film, Illusions of News, for an analysis of the power of manufactured images to shape political realities, and Consuming Images, to examine the psychological power of images in our daily lives.