Abstract
Television and its impact on the moral values have been a hot topic among academics the last few years. Most attention for the relation between morality and television comes from authors in the field of media studies using an active audience approach to explain how people might actually learn something from the stories television tells us. While George Gerbner (1999) was afraid these television stories would decrease specific cultural values by teaching people a rather limited set of values, contemporary research is much more positive. Media studies’ approaches to popular culture have more often than not celebrated the active audiences and its uses of media as something good and revolutionary (cf., Hermes, 2005). The studies discussing television and its relation to the audiences’ morality comply with this positive tone. Using a constructivist perspective, within this field the use of television stories for the construction of a moral comprehension is investigated. These studies are, as will be discussed in the next paragraph, convincing.
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Krijnen, T. (2009). Understanding television and morality – Integrating media studies and media psychology. In: Holtz-Bacha, C., Reus, G., Becker, L.B. (eds) Wissenschaft mit Wirkung. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91756-6_8
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