Intellectual Autobiography

Amelia Rae Koethen
Understanding Media Studies, Fall 2009
Intellectual Autobiography


I’ve always enjoyed speaking to large crowds. I MC’d my first event when I was five years old. Well, it wasn’t so much a rehearsed performance as it was that I simply knew the music the Zydeco band was playing at the rustic Maine concert hall my family was vacationing at and felt they weren’t doing a proper job explaining the Creole lyrics to the New England audience. I then proceeded to stay up and sing a few tunes, just for clarification. (You can get away with a lot when you’re five.) This pattern continued throughout my childhood, becoming less precocious and more patronizing with age. A brief stint in gymnastics classes came to an abrupt end when my mother picked me up early from class one day to find me pacing the balance beam performing a lecture series on musical theater to the perplexed parents waiting to pick up their more kinetically inclined children. In short, I was a born teacher. At five years old I had everything figured out, I wanted to be a “smart person” when I grew up; it then took me roughly twenty years to understand what that meant and how to go about obtaining that goal.

From my personal experience, people who come from tough backgrounds have a decision to make- stay angry or make change. Growing up in Albany, New York, I received quite the education in racism, crooked politicians, corrupt cops, violence, and a manipulative local media that in my opinion kept the whole sham system running. Or, as Architect Stanford White would refer to it “Misery, wretchedness, ennui and the devil…of all the miserable, wretched, second-class, one horse towns, this is the most miserable.” (Kennedy, 1) On top of being from a place that Stanford White wasn’t alone in considering a pretty depressing place to hang your hat, my home life was not fantastic. This led to a great relationship between me and my TV. I had a tiny little black and while portable set that I would hide in my closet. My tv helped me fit in at school, helped me know what was going on in the outside world, and exposed me to family dynamics that at times were inspiring (The Huxtables sure did seem great) and reassuring (I am surely not the only young person who watched shows like Married With Children and Roseanne and felt less alone.)

From about third grade to freshman year of high school the only effort I put into school was on not getting picked on and/or beat up; most of the time this involved not participating in or attending class. Things changed in freshman English class when I had Ms. Moscheo. She realized that I had a passion for more modern media outlets, and incorporated it into my assignments. My first attempt at a multi-media project was due to her encouragement. We were reading Fahrenheit 451 and, instead of writing a traditional book review, I created a mock up storyboard for a screenplay based on the book (the one in existence being horrible, if you’ve seen it) and a corresponding soundtrack with detailed descriptions of how the songs were relevant to the scenes in the book as well as the overall theme of the novel. It was the first time I cared about an assignment in about a decade, and I credit this experience with the beginning of my interest in the relationship between different fields of communication and their consumers.

By my junior year I was recovering from my earlier academic set backs and was exploring in greater detail the relationships between music, film, and literature. I was heavily involved in theater, DIY promotion projects for local bands, and even established a film appreciation society. In my senior year of High School I was part of a “career explorations” program where I took education courses and student taught at local schools for college credit. Originally I chose this program because I had an interest in becoming a high school history teacher, but larger issues within the system made me realize that it would be impossible. While working at a public elementary school downtown I chipped in with fellow teachers to buy breakfast for the 30 students in a third grade class who came from families who could note provide for them delivered by a city school bus which did not get them to school in time to receive the government mandated free-breakfast. I worked at an alternative school for children who had been forced out of public school because they refused to take ADD or ADHD medication. Towards the end of the program I ended up substitute teaching freshman English to a group of students at my own high school because the administration couldn’t retain a permanent teacher for these “at-risk” students. I learned early that the education system in America is broken, but I believe that it is only a symptom of a bigger problem. I believe we’ve lost touch with our values. Without a sense of community and civic engagement; I truly believe we’re being lulled into complacency and a complete loss of our ethical ideals by our mainstream media.

When I first went away to college I was completely burnt out on trying to help people. As horrible as it sounds, I wanted to make movie soundtracks and leave the whole “helping people” thing to my Albany friends who have predominantly ended up working in education and politics. But, there were a few problems with this scenario, the first being that I was not then, and am not now, a very good composer. The second being that I felt an obligation; an obligation to my five year old self, to my teenage self, and to the kids I had worked with and struggled with and especially to the kids I knew and grew up with in a system that set them up to fail. So, I changed my major to Mass Communication, Critical Analysis. I felt as if the root of a lot of the problems I faced growing up were related to mainstream media and, more specifically, my local news media. In studying propaganda, media law, advertising ethics and the history of journalism I felt like I was getting part of the story, but not the whole picture. This is when I developed my action plan- to see how many fields of communications I could work in and how they related to each other. In high school I had worked in promotion and even started a community theater company. In college I was active in the local radio station WONY and held an investigative journalism internship at the Albany Metroland Alternative Newsweekly. Post-grad I temped at several offices, the most interesting being an assignment where I managed the telecom for a contracting company, and then settled at the International Council of Shopping Centers (i.e.: the Evil Empire) where I originally began working in member and investor relations, and then received a promotion to a position in the media relations department. This was 2006. I worked with an economist and my primary job was to take his research papers and re-write them to make it sound like the economy was doing great. Not only was this a waste of their money (why pay the guy if you won’t publish his work?) it was unethical and demoralizing. There were times when I would have to keep him occupied so that he would “miss” his interview appointment and my boss could speak for him in his place. The entire 14 months I worked in this position not a single journalist asked me for a research document. Not a single fact-checker called my desk. No one questioned a single source, statistic or sound bite. The majority of my press releases were published word-for-word or (even more horrifying on my beloved friend, TV) read verbatim from my prepared statements by anchors across the country.

Luckily, since I was apparently the only person listening to said economist, I got out of that business before the market tanked and it would have been impossible for me to get another job. Currently I work in advertising finance for Time Out New York Magazine. It’s an interesting world where I feel slightly less morally compromised but still see ethical issues between editorial and advertising departments arise on a daily basis.

This is what led me to create my current action plan, develop the education and the tools necessary to instill some sort of ethical barometer in the future business leaders of America. I am still working out the logistics of what that would entail but I believe that change can easily come from inside the system. I am interested in obtaining the certificate in Media Management and perhaps working in a few more fields of media, but my end-goal is to obtain my PhD in Sociology focusing on mass media or business ethics and teach, research, and perhaps even work as a lobbyist in an attempt at someday leaving the world if not a more ethical place, then hopefully a slightly more media savvy one.



Works Cited:

[O Albany! William Kennedy, 1983, print]