Abstract
The article describes the genesis, purposes and construction of an innovative course relating politics and the media of communication. Focusing on authority, the course (the glory) is designed to assist students to understand, on the one hand, how and why the media depict authority systems, structures, positions, individual authority wielders, and sanctioned policies in particular ways; and, on the other hand, to understand how public officials in the United States and other nations try to use the mass media to enhance their authority. Feature and “documentary” film, videotapes of television news and political campaign commercials are analyzed for their structures, codes, and possible effects. The success of the course is indicated by the range of quality of original, media-using, student projects.
The teacher of such a course encounters a heavy “burden”. It includes administrative difficulties, technical obstacles, and the unavailability of visual material. Facing such problems directly, the Task Force on Audio-Visual Instruction in Political Science of the American Political Science Association (of which the author was a member) issued a series of sweeping recommendations in the areas of information and evaluation of technological resources and media material production, exhibition, distribution, circulation, and preservation. Most of these recommendations have thus far encountered benign neglect.
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