Mass Communication Specialist (abbreviated as MC) is a United States Navy occupational rating.
Mass Communication Specialists are concerned with public affairs and visual communication. Their role is to present the US Navy to Naval and civilian audiences, through a variety of media. MCs write and produce both print and broadcast journalism, including news and feature stories for military and civilian newspapers, magazines, television and radio stations. They record still and video photography of military operations, exercises, and other Navy events.
Mass Communication Specialists came about from a merging in 2006 of four previous navy ratings: Photographers' Mate (PH), Journalist (JO), Illustrator/Draftsman (DM) and Lithographer (LI).
Since the rates have merged, Mass Communication specialists may be required to perform all the duties of the four former rates. Many work in a Navy Public Affairs capacity where they coordinate public events and respond to news queries from the media.
Famous quotes containing the words mass communication, mass and/or specialist:
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“It is strange to contemplate how little sympathy or encouragement the great mass of people have with one who differs from them in tastes, to the extent of desiring an education, while they are content with little or none.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)