Allison Wright, Media Studies professor, as well as Publisher and Executive Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, works tirelessly to educate her students on media ethics. The media ecosystem (print, broadcast, digital, etc) is ever-present and has a tight grip on society, but Wright’s students are learning how to break through.
Wright teaches her students that media companies comprise people who naturally have biases. “We all have our biases; some of those are unconscious,” said Wright. To break through these biases that media conglomerates may exploit, Wright poses hard-hitting questions that consumers must face: “What is the goal of the people who are bringing us this news? It's not just news, it could be music – who's making this media? Why are they making it? And what do they want the consumer to get out of that?” To help her students navigate these questions, Wright challenges them to question what they consume and to think critically about different forms of media, from podcast episodes on workforce diversification, to the use of captions in interviews and examples of biased framing in the news.