| The concern of this study is the teachings of television news and its pedagogical implications for the youth in a media-saturated society. Under the assumption that television news is the most acknowledged cultural institution in a modern society, the study attempts to disclose the dominant cultural orientations of television news and their pedagogical significance, and to explore the possible directions for contemporary education in coping with the problematics of today's mass culture.;As the initial procedure of such a dialectical understanding, the third part of the study enters the concrete interpretation of the dominant cultural characteristics of television news. Through the thematic interpretation four major issues are identified: the strong visual empiricism in interpreting news events; the conceptual dualization of 'hard vs. soft' items; the closed logic of tautology in news stereotypes; and the narcotizing power of technological competence. By surfacing the positivistic-totalistic assumptions underlying these issues, the discussion in the fourth part is made about the reductive nature of the television's cultural orientations whose teachings only lie in limiting one's view in a very restricted horizon. The essentially lived and disclosive nature of human experience of the world is also discussed as the absent side of television news.;With the concept of pedagogy understood in terms of its fundamental project of human orientation into the open vision of the world, the last part of the study includes pedagogical suggestions for overcoming the problems of current cultural directions preventing this open visioning of the world. In the attempt to go beyond traditional prescriptive education, the significance of interpretive pedagogy that can promote a reflective criticism as well as the possibility of healthy pluralism is explored.;The study has five basic parts. In the first, five major approaches in the field of contemporary media studies are examined in terms of their intellectual and philosophical assumptions. The argument is made that the commonly shared concern over mass media among these approaches is exclusively epistemological and explanatory in the absence of the existential-ontological understanding of media reality. So, in the second part, the question of the nature of human understanding is raised in search for a proper methodological guidance in the study. Some important natures of human understanding are examined on the basis of the discussions in modern hermeneutics. Informed by Gadamer's understanding of the dialectic of question and answer, the key insights for the interpretive strategy of the study are formulated into the open dialectic between 'presence' and 'absence' of the text of television news. |
