Midterm Exam

DUE March 5, 2025 (11:59pm, EST)*
100 Points

The midterm exam is open-notes and comprehensive (covering all course lessons and materials worked through up to the week before this exam is posted). There are two parts: a brief answer part and a longer essay part; the total of both parts (together) should be approximately 1000-1500 words long.

Part I—Brief Answers (50 points)
DIRECTIONS: For each of the below questions, provide a coherent answer of roughly 100 words long. Be sure to use your own words (do not copy and paste or quote the words of others). If you provide an example, keep it brief. Make sure your definition is comprehensive and clear.

  1. What is media literacy?  Be sure to explain the five core concepts of media literacy in your response.
  2. What is yellow journalism? How did it come to be?  What is a muck-rake, and what does it have to do with yellow journalism?
  3. What are the relationships between media convergence, network convergence, and technological convergence.
  4. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model includes five parts. What are they?
  5. What is an autoethnographic text?

Part II—Essay (50 points)
DIRECTIONS: Choose one of the below topics and develop a coherent essay in direct response to the topic. Be sure to cite lessons and other sources. (Demonstrate that you have been going through the lessons and paying attention in class.)

  1. Consider the power of the music industry. What is the difference between community media experience and personal media experience, particularly in terms of music? Consider the experience in terms of cultural relevance. How does determining if a work is responding to (or representative of) high or popular culture affect the experience (in terms of community vs. personal)? Use the case study that you’ve selected to exemplify your response.
  2. Consider the power of the video game industry. What is the difference between community media experience and personal media experience, particularly in terms of video games? Consider the experience in terms of cultural relevance. How does determining if a work is responding to (or representative of) high or popular culture affect the experience (in terms of community vs. personal)? Use the case study that you’ve selected to exemplify your response.
  3. Should newspapers, magazines, radio, film (particularly documentaries), and television provide stories that they think people want or that they think people need to know? What’s the difference? In other words, how does contemporary media live up to the promise of journalism that the United States’ founding fathers found to be so important that they wrote a special provision for freedom of the press into the Constitution?
  4. Consider how technology has historically empowered culture to produce media, particularly: books, newspapers, magazines, photographs, film, radio, and television (but don’t consider social media or the Internet). How does media technology prior to the mid-twentieth century demonstrate empowerment? Is this empowerment for high culture, popular culture, or both? Why? How so?  
  5. Consider how the U.S. government and/or corporations impact the quality of the news reported to us, here in the United States. How much information is censored, and why do you think so (what’s the evidence)? Consider, for example, the fact that Jeff Bezos (creator of Amazon) owns The Washington Post, or the fact that CNN’s Jim Acosta recently quit because he was going to be censored (moved to late-night television). You might also consider how much news is or is not reliable from various sources.

How to Submit Your Midterm Exam to Me

You have several options:

  1. Via KSU Google Document (see “How to Use KSU Google”).
  2. As a well composed email (sent to clrobins@kent.edu).
  3. As a document (PDF or a word processor document) attached to an email sent to me (clrobins@kent.edu”).

How Your Work Will Be Evaluated

  • Your essay will be evaluated for clarity of thought expressed, and it must be thorough—fully responding to the topic. It must demonstrate critical thinking skills, particularly as they are tailored to the communication parameters of the medium/media under analysis (media literacy skills).
  • RUBRIC
    • An A level exam follows the directions for each part, fully.  It responds to the topics fully, with demonstrated depth of thought and logic. The writing is coherent.  It demonstrates having gone through the lesson(s), as well as having thought deeply about the content of what is being taught.
    • A B level exam follows the directions for each part, fully.  It responds to the topics fully, with some demonstrated depth of thought and/or some logic. The writing is mostly coherent.  It provides some demonstration of having gone through the lesson(s), as well as having thought about the content of what is being taught.
    • A C level exam mostly follows the directions for each part, but not completely.  It responds to the topics, but the depth of thought is weak or vague. The writing is mostly coherent, though there are some grammatical or structural errors.   It demonstrates having gone through the lesson(s), but not much more (not much thought put into the answers).
    • A D level exam  barely follows the directions.  It responds to the topics, but the depth of thought is weak or vague, and some of the responses might wander off topic. The writing is mostly coherent, though there are some grammatical or structural errors.  It does not demonstrate a lot of thought or having gone through the lesson(s) sufficiently.
    • An F level exam doesn’t really follow the directions.  It fails to respond to the  topics in any sort of coherent and/or meaningful way.  Sentences are more like notes or rambling gobbledygook.