Media Values

Back in high school, I spent hours and hours reading pocketbooks. I was a regular client of the school library. I would bring home a novel everyday and start reading as soon as I got home. My mother was so proud that I was so studious. She always saw me buried in a book. She did not realize her studious daughter was hooked into romantic novels.

That kind of addiction continued until my college days. Mercifully, I graduated from reading silly romantic novels to a more mature and serious type of reading materials.

I am really amazed to notice that a good percentage of the reading public (mostly women and teen-agers) are hooked into pocketbooks. It explains very well the proliferation of romantic pocketbooks. There is an audience for it. They really sell. Understandably, Filipino authors ride in the bandwagon. There are a lot of romantic pocketbooks in Filipino now. In Manila, it was a common sight to see teen-agers reading romantic pocketbooks on jeepneys. With traffic jams to reckon with, I guess reading pocketbooks becomes a welcome respite for commuters.

Pocketbooks can become a sort of escapism. It is a convenient form of forgetting (even temporarily) the numerous problems that hound our day-to-day existence. Just like the soap operas seen daily on TV where viewers can easily identify their lives with the heroine of the story, readers of pocketbooks experience the same affinity with the characters of the stories they read. For an imaginative person, printed word becomes alive and powerful.

It is very important to know why we read these particular pocketbooks or why we view certain films or TV programs. Knowing will eventually lead us to become critical reader or viewer. In this way, we can control or shape media instead of media controlling us and molding us according to its image.

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In media, women are often portrayed as weak, subservient and unintelligent human beings. This is true in pocketbooks, in TV programs and most especially in advertising. Watch critically those soap operas on TV and you will understand what I mean. See also those TV commercials on cigarettes and drinks where women are treated like sex objects and decorations.

Aside from this offensive portrayal of women, media also sell distorted values. In media, beauty, riches and power are like gospel values. This is the good news secular media communicate to us.