Media can actually shape a culture or possibly your views concerning a culture or a people. For some time now, the media has presented African Americans as people who are criminals, people who are slaves, and people who are dropouts or possibly video girls. The media has presented young African American children the false reality of becoming millionaires overnight by challenging them to become rap stars or famous athletes. It is sad that the media does not advertise youth excellence as much in the Black community. In the school where I teach, I saw the importance of making my students aware of options that they have in choosing their destiny. – Carr

The bold sentences of this page also draw my attention that “as teachers, when teaching for media literacy, we must be careful to not persuade our students according to our viewpoints but to teach them how to make an educated decision after researching many sources…” Most of time, students and even adults are manipulated by media. We are learned new information or acquire new concepts by what has been broadcasting without personally proving them or even searching for the relative information. Maybe it is because we have never been trained critically thinking or doubting media literacy. We take media literacy for credits.

For example, the paragraph mentioned about how the media shape the African American children who are criminals or other negative images. That is not only in the United States, but also worldwide nowadays due to the strong Internet power. For instance, some of my friends here who are not originally from New York or America never go to certain areas in Brooklyn or Harlem where the notorious high crime regions. They try to avoid these places as much as possible. Whenever they heard I have a close Aunt living in Harlem and I visit her often by myself, they are all surprised and warn me about dangers.

Moreover, media impose ethnicity identify recognition. Namely, African Americans are representatives of gifted at sports. These imposed identify recognition emerged in a variety of formats in daily life everywhere from advertisements, TV celebrities, news examples and etc. These are not only limited in African Americans but also on other ethnicities, such as Asian are good at academics and bad at social, Latino are good at dancing and bad about drug abuses. These is not only a problem of stereotype but also about critical media literacy. However, the reading also points out current issue of education that schools teach students standardized curriculum without critical thinking skill oriented. Critical thinking skills are crucial for human being not only at adolescents but after grownup. How educators include these skills training into curriculum should be a new challenge for current in-service teachers but also for teachers educators.