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Welcome to the Media Writing Lab at DePauw University. This site features commentary and criticism written by students enrolled in Professor Kevin Howley's Media, Culture & Society course.

Throughout the semester, students organize and publish a weeklong series of thematic essays (500-600 words each) that address some aspect of media and popular culture. Modeled after the Media Commons project, In Media Res, this site promotes collaborative research, interactive learning, multi-modal writing.

The views and opinions expressed in the Media Writing Lab are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the instructor, the Department of Communication & Theater, or DePauw University.

 Instructor: Kevin Howley
Teaching Assistant: David Petrushka
Technical Assistance: Jin Kim

For more information regarding the Media Writing Lab write to us at: khowley@depauw.edu.

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DECONSTRUCTING HOMOSEXUAL STEREOTYPES

By Tess Weigel This year Netflix released a reboot of the Bravo series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy with a new cast of five gay men. The 2018 Queer Eye casts consists of Antoni Porowski, Tan France, Kamaro Brown, Bobby Berk, and Jonathan Van Ness. Each member of the Fab Five has a specialty of food, fashion, culture, design, and grooming, respectively. This reboot of Queer Eye is designed to deconstruct the negative and outdated stereotypes of gay men. In each episode, the Fab Five addresses topics such as homosexual relationships, homosexuality in religion, and minorities within the gay community.  Before 2018’s Queer Eye , only 3.6% of gay males have been portrayed in television against the 94.9% of heterosexual males (Kidd, 2014). While the frequency of the presence of gay men in the media has increased, the negative stereotype of how a gay man is portrayed amongst the plot line in television needs to be reconstructed to represent all different types of gay men. For ex
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NOBODY CAN HIDE FROM MENTAL HEALTH

By Graham Jaeger Mental Health has played a major role in schools across the country for over the past decade. Each and every year, students feel more and more pressure as they have to adapt from their summer into new school routines (Suldo, Shaunessy, Hardesty, 2008). Students suffer from mental health largely because of stress, but other factors such as addiction, rape, and even school violence are heavy contributors as well. A perfect example of mental health issues within high school students is displayed in the Netflix television series titled 13 Reasons Why . Throughout this show, you see depression take over kids lives which ultimately has a huge impact on the rest of the students in the show. 13 Reasons Why received a lot of criticism because suicide rates in teens rapidly increased after the show was released. Many say it was due to the connection they could feel with Hannah throughout the show, and others felt like they were in her position where they felt it was the only
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Nick and Nike

NICK AND NIKE  By John Pasch The 30th anniversary of Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign has already sent shockwaves through the world of mass media. Since 2016, when Kaepernick decided to first kneel for the playing of the National Anthem, he has been the face of the modern day civil rights movement. As of late, Nike, a major sportswear company, which has recently signed a contract with the National Football League (NFL) (Somers, 2018) agreeing to supply game day uniforms, made this controversial man the face of their well-known ad campaign. This controversy has been driven primarily by social media. Even though the actions themselves were demonstrated physically, a lot of the repercussions and feedback have come through different media outlets. A prime example is twitter, with a large online movement combatted by President Donald Trump and company. Colin Kaepernick first began his personal crusade against police injustice in the fall of 2016, igniting a r
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