Communications professor Jeff McCall.
COURTESY OF DEPAUW.EDU
Communications professor Jeff McCall (’76) understands media. He knows its intentions and what drives it in our technology filled society today. He’s been on news shows, and has been mentioned in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times. The DePauw had a chance to sit down with McCall and talk with him more about his beliefs and involvement in media.
The DePauw (TDP): First, tell me what you’re involvement is here on campus.
Jeff McCall (JM): I teach in the communication department [and] I supervise WGRE over these years. Campus is an easy place to get involved in at DePauw University. There are a lot of opportunities to do things. I like to work with the students… and do my writing when I get the chance.”
TDP: What do you like about the media, about communications that made you want to go into it?
JM: Working in media is really fascinating. For one thing, it’s always changing. There’s always something new to talk about in the media. The thing that makes me really interested in studying media is really how pervasive and how powerful it is, and it really effects every aspect of our civilization in this day-and-age. People just cannot…escape their mediated lives.
TDP: You write many opinion articles. One of your latest ones was about the Super Bowl. Can you go into a little bit more about that?
JM: Well, the thrust of the article was to point out that, even though we like sports, and we admire athletes, people should keep a perspective that the athletes are not necessarily more important in the civilization than many other people who have important contributions to make. My point was that the media industry helps build up profiles of professional athletes in ways that go beyond sensible proportion. And the media does that, of course, because they’re trying to drive fans to watch the broadcast, and to engage the media with the idea that they can sell the fan’s eyeballs and viewership to advertisers.”
TDP: In five years, where do you think media will be?
JM: I think we’ll see a lot of the way media operates… going forward. Radio broke onto the scene in the 1920’s in a big way, and was really important in American society for a long time, and then there was a thought that when television came around, there’d by no need for radio anymore, or that people would never watch films anymore, because everybody would just watch TV… New media won’t necessarily replace the old, but the old will adapt, and the media opportunities will expand. We will continue to see more media audiences segmented and narrowed.
TDP: What would you rather see happen, if you had the choice?
JM: It’s hard to force media into choices in a world where we have free expression and freedom of the press, but I do wish that Americans had more common experiences in terms of the media…that they were interested in some of the same issues. I would like our society to be more aware of current events, for example…There are particular news hounds that know a lot about those things, but in particular, millennials, don’t score very well on current events type quizzes about what’s going on in the world.