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Deconstructing Media Literacy

Here's part of a middle-school “wrestling unit” from the state of Maryland (by Renee Hobbs), and our commentary below.

Directions: The gladiatorial combats of Ancient Rome were media events. [Note 1] Read each passage, then answer the questions that follow.

Passage A: In Rome in 264 B.C, the sons of Junius Brutus honored the death of their father with gladiatorial combat. The fighting continued for nine days, the period of mourning. This may have been the first "game" ever, blood of the living shed for blood of the dead.

Passage B: If transported back to Rome, modern-day Americans would find much of Roman entertainment extremely violent; especially the thousands of gladiator contest and animal fights sponsored by Trajan to celebrate his military victories . . . Emperor Trajan once staged gladiatorial games for 123 consecutive days where some 5,000 combatants and 11,000 animals were killed. Some upper-class Romans were appalled at the brutality of the games but justified them as a means of directing popular anger away from the elite. A much larger group defended the gladiatorial games as useful lessons in bravery and courage in the face of death.. . . Vast sums of money were needed . . . Only the emperor could afford to pay the costs of training gladiators and transporting of animals from countries as far away as India and Africa. Hence the games were a means of displaying the wealth and power of the emperor and through him the power of the Roman people themselves.

Passage C: Some advertisements were worded in very general terms, announcing merely the name of the giver of the games with the date. Sometimes when the troop was particularly good the names of the gladiators were announced in pairs as they would be matched together. Example: The Thracian Pugnax, of the gladiatorial school of Nero, who has fought three times, will be matched against the Murranus, of the same school and the same number of fights. [Note 2]

Passage D: From our point of view a gladiatorial combat is perceived as bringing death to one of the combatants; but it can equally be seen as giving a condemned man an opportunity to regain his physical and social life. . . . The posters advertising games found at Pompeii suggest that those who had the fighting skills to survive their first four or five matches might well become popular enough with the public to avoid being killed altogether . . . Furthermore, it was in the interests of the editores, the professional organizers who trained gladiators, to keep their expensively trained professionals in service for as long as possible.

QUESTIONS

1. Which passage suggests that gladiatorial combat was a way to exalt the emperor’s power?

2. Like all media messages, media events are carefully constructed with an audience in mind. Who was the intended audience for the gladiatorial combats and which passage(s) reveals how the games were staged?

3. Which passage suggests the Roman people had different points of view regarding the games? Which passage suggests that modern-day people might misinterpret the violence of the games? [Note 3]

4. What role did money play in staging gladiatorial games?

###

Some comments by Carrie McLaren

[ 1 ]
Calling gladitorial combats "media events" is ludicrous; mass media did not exist‹at all‹in Ancient Rome. Printing was developed at least two centuries later. If one wants to call a hand-lettered sign "mass media" so be it, but as media without any kind of supporting system or capitalist economy, its differences with our media far outweigh similarities.

[ 2 ]
To experience a Roman gladitorial game was to see it unmediated. Live. No one would have equated a poster with the event itself. In contrast, people conflate wrestling with television; "watching wrestling" usually means watching TV. Instead of addressing this important distinction‹a perfect opportunity for media literacy‹the exercise erases it.

[ 3 ]
Which passage suggests that the author of this curriculum wishes to defend wrestling from its critics? And what makes this a media literacy lesson, anyway? Half of the questions are reading comprehension, and not one of them suggests that students consider how gladiator games differed from contemporary entertainment (like, for example, people were actually killed during gladiator games). This embarrassing excercise makes it easy to see why media literacy is perhaps better known as media appreciation.