If You Have Any Questions, Please Contact Caitrin Cardosi Via Email at

This lesson plan can be used in classes covering subjects such as English, Journalism, Ethics, Sociology, Media Studies, or Photography. It was created to be used with the 2013 Poynter Kent State Media Ethics Workshop session, “It’s All Make-Believe…Why ethics in entertainment matters.”

If you have any questions, please contact Caitrin Cardosi via email at .

Why should you care about Entertainment Ethics?

Rationale:

Objectives:

1.To understand why entertainment ethics matter to us a responsible journalists/citizens.

2. To analyze how the public is influenced by popular entertainment.

3. To understand the ethical obligations journalists have to provide credible, verifiable information among competing voices

Procedures:

1)Ask students to discuss the definition of entertainment. Try to push them past simply “TV” or “Movies,” and encourage them to give specific examples.

2)As a follow up, have students discuss why those examples are entertaining. Why are we drawn to both Nicholas Sparks movies and the Hangover movies (or other extremes brought up by the students)?

3)Then, have students talk about pop culture. This could be a discussion about anything from why Miley Cyrus is famous to why people are now wearing fake glasses, or even why intelligent female leads are now en vogue.

4)After the students have given examples and begun to think about the industry, split them into groups and assign each group an age. Instruct each age group to discuss all of the ways entertainment can affect a person of that age in one week.

5)After the groups have had time to discuss their ideas, have each group present its findings.

6)After the groups have presented, ask the students to talk about how the media contributed to those effects. What if the traditional news media hadn’t put Miley’s VMA performance in a position of such importance? What if Twitter trends had to go through a filter and were only educational subjects?What if Facebook and Instagram rated pictures like TV and movies, and parents had the option to set controls?

7)Finally, ask them to discuss if/how those effects could possibly be reversed.

Students should come away from the lesson with a better understanding of the role entertainment and popular culture play in shaping society. The trends and frames that emerge from the choices of entertainment creators shape our reality. As future content creators, be they journalists or musicians, they have a responsibility to think about the consequences of the content they publish.