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How the media affects public opinion
Media influence on public opinion
Impact of media on society
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Giving the People What They Want The state of the media is a matter of contention in today’s society. The conversation usually goes like this: is the media improving in an age where everyone is connected, has a voice, and carries a supercomputer in their pocket or is it becoming diluted and perverted to attract larger audiences. Do people still want to read a 2,000-word profile of Jeb Bush in The New Yorker, or would they prefer to view a Business Insider slideshow with pictures and bullets of the candidate to get the gist of his positions? This question leads to a bigger question: should the news be easy and entertaining or should it challenge and question its viewers and readers prevailing views? Films like “Network” and “Idiocracy” portray …show more content…
The greatest flaw with the media today is its incessant pandering in the attempt to garner popularity. This essay will explore how the media’s desperate pursuit of popularity negatively impacts its quality by examining the current state of cable news, information bubbles, and the media’s transformation of politics into sports. Mike Judge’s film “Idiocracy” portrays a news media fueled by sensationalism that solely delivers content that its viewers find captivating like violence, strong opinions, and crude comedy. The media in the film “Idiocracy” acts as an unseen character that is complicit in the dystopian future that Judge dreamed up by abandoning all sense of responsibility in the pursuit of popularity and profit. In Judge’s film, cable news reigns supreme. One scene depicts a satirized Fox News segment where the lead in graphic is accompanied by heavy rock music and a machine gun animation. The anchorwoman in the scene is wearing sexualized clothing while her male counterpart is not wearing any clothing at all. This type of spectacle that Judge envisions is not far from our current reality. Most of the personalities on Fox News look the same and are generally attractive. Though this scene may seem absurd it is not that far from reality. Both network and cable news have …show more content…
Similar to “Idiocray”, Chayefsky prophesizes a world in which the public only responds to anger, violence, and gimmicks. A world where the only thing media companies are beholden to is the ratings and the bottom line. Newsman like Howard Beale who let the public know what he was thinking, feeling, and informing the audience how they should feel and why they should be outraged. Chayefsky’s prediction of the angry newsman that does not only report the news, but preaches the news and how they feel about it, and how their viewers should feel about it was spot on. Outrage is hot in the media with several famous personalities that are professionally outraged like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly and many more. So many of these professional angry television personalities exist because people like them and watch them more than the more measured, albeit less entertaining newscasters. Politico Magazine ran a story entitled Are Americans Addicted to Outrage? where the authors Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj discuss why the public is so attracted to
Wang’s studies have shown that news industries are now tabloidizing news because it elicits the attention of their viewers. Now the only thing considered as “entertainment” in the news is “crimes, accidents, and disasters”. Wangs writes “News that bleeds seem to still lead the primary broadcasts” (Wang 722). People nowaday only tune in when a disaster has occurred and anything other that is not “interesting”. Unfortunately, people would rather watch Isis in action then heard about Obama releasing innocent victims from prison. The reporter in “Gray Noise” proves Wang’s words true when he records on his lens about a mother who had just lost her
A Bestselling author and co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” is a remarkably confident lady and TV-journalist Mika Brzezinski whose on-air protest between entertainment news & “hard news” received a large number of supports and fans’ responses on 26 June 2007 in which she had refused to read the news about a release of Paris Hilton from Jail rather she considered more important Senator Richard Lugar with President Bush on the war of Iraq breaking news. She stands on these issues rippled over the internet quickly and similar incidents continue on-air on July 7, 2010 on a report about Levi Johnston and Lindsay Lohan over hard news stories with the title “News you can’t use.”
Media finds its central role in the democratic debate in providing information, analysis, and a diversity of perspectives to the public. In recent years, with what is known as a media revolution, the amount of telecommunication outlets has increased dramatically. Often called “a product of healthy market competition,” the media revolution has theoretically expanded the public’s access to a multitude of facts, opinions, and general information (Miroff, et al. 2015). However, with a
Would you lose your journalistic integrity over one million dollars just to increase your audience base? For me personally I would decline the money and not subject my audience to an unwanted change for personal gain. Neil Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, argues that television is all about entertainment and nothing else. Postman makes several points in his book pertaining to televised news as examples. On the evening of January 31 2018, I decided to test Postman’s arguments by tuning into the PBS NewsHour. After putting Postman’s arguments to the test I soon found that they were correct; “if it bleeds it leads”, news anchors are just actors, stories of little value get little air time, and there is an overwhelming disconnect between stories.
“We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line.” There is more to being a great physician than having intellect, clinical experience, and competence in the medical field. A doctor must be daring and genuinely driven to positively impact a patient’s life. A doctor needs stand tall, even in the face of uncertainty.
Both CNN and Fox News influence these immense populations with how each utilize pathos, ethos and logos in the topics discussed during the broadcasted show. For example, Fox News 's audience seems to be primarily conservative, while CNN’s audience seem to be more liberal (Engel). So each network’s stories “focus on the issues that” conservatives or liberals “want to watch and talk about” (James). These topics are used to develop a more conservative or liberal fan base in the respective news networks. As the dominant news network on cable television, Fox News impacts the greatest quantity of citizens, bringing in an audience of over two million for primetime (James). Therefore, Fox News influences the largest percentage of Americans listening to news networks by effectively using these manipulative literary techniques. However, CNN has a younger audience than Fox News (Carter), which contributes to CNN’s audience growing from 350,000 a night, in 2013 (Agee), to 629,000 viewers a night (James). CNN and Fox News compete with each other to influence the greatest amount of people and the public’s opinion of current events. Each network appeals to pathos, logos and ethos differently and similarly to coax the greatest amount of listeners each night.
In “Reporting the News” by George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lineberry, the main idea is how the media determines what to air, where to get said stories that will air, how the media presents the news, and the medias effect on the general public. “Reporting The News” is a very strong and detailed article. The authors’ purpose is to inform the readers of what goes on in the news media. This can be inferred by the authors’ tone. The authors’ overall tone is critical of the topics that are covered. The tone can be determined by the authors’ strong use of transitions, specific examples, and phrases or words that indicate analysis. To summarize, first, the authors’ indicate that the media chooses its stories that will air
In his editorial "Words Triumph Over Images," Curtis Wilkie blames today’s media for being “reckless” and “a mutant reality show”. He believes that television and radio are “unfiltered”, which causes the quality of journalism for newspapers to be unmatched. Yet, it is unfair to label all media that is not print as lesser because the quality of any media relies on the viewers and the individual journalists, and in drastic situations like a hurricane, reporters may have many road blocks. Any of these aspects can affect the quality of journalism, which invalidates Curtis Wilkie’s claim.
In Medical Checklists Waste Time and Money, Max Rebarb calls medical professionals to stop using checklists in their workplaces. He considers the use of checklists to be unnecessary, costly, time consuming and ultimately a burden on health care systems. Flaws in the author’s statements includes: failing to remember that health care professionals aren’t perfect, forgetting that following lists can be time and cost effective, and disregarding the main goal of healthcare. As in many professions, checklists can actually be extremely valuable assets to a healthcare team.
It is not uncommon to hear people complaining about what they hear on the news. Everyone knows it and the media themselves knows it as well. Some of the most renowned journalists have even covered the the media’s issues in detail. Biased news outlets have flooded everyday news. We find that journalism’s greatest problems lie in the media’s inability for unbiased reporting, the tendency to use the ignorance of their audience to create a story, and their struggles to maintain relevance.
Much is being discovered when the public, also known as the consumers and recipients of the news, share their views on journalistic practices. One might suggest that traditional journalism has, in due course, come to an end. Although, there are definitely problems that the public runs into with public journalism taking over. A few of those arguments include their content, the journalists, and the effects that it has on their public audience.
As Americans we take pride in our liberating government. But, it is essential to ask how much we, the general public, know about our democracy. Because of the representative structure of our government, it is in our best interest to remain as knowledgeable as possible about political affairs so that we can play an active role in our democracy by voting for candidates and issues. The media, which includes print, television, and the internet, is our primary link to political events and issues. (For the purposes of this essay only print and television will be considered.) Therefore, in order to assess the success of our democracy it is necessary to assess the soundness of our media. We are lucky enough to have a media, in theory, free from government influences because of our rights to freedom of press and freedom of speech, but we are still subject to the media’s interpretation and presentation of politics, as is the danger when depending on any source for information. So, we must address how the media informs us; how successful it is at doing so; and how we should respond to it.
In order to understand new media, one must first have a solid background of the old media. The old media traces its origins back to the “elite or partisan press [that] dominated American journalism in the early days of the republic” (Davis 29). With the advent of the penny press around 1833, the press changed its basic purpose and function from obtaining voters for its affiliated political party to making profit (Davis 29). With more available papers, individual companies competed with each other with “muckraking journalism”—investigative journalism exposing corruption—and “yellow journalism”—sensationalist journalism that completely disregarded the facts (Davis 30). The press continued to evolve its journalistic approaches and next shifted to “lapdog journalism,” r...
Althusser (1971) explains that, as an ideological state apparatus, media doesn’t use pressure as a way to bind society together under one dominant ideology, but instead uses the will of the people to make them accept the dominant ideology. However, media is also used as a way for people to challenge the dominant ideology. Newspapers, for example, will have articles that openly criticise and oppose the dominant ideology for what it is, whilst at the same time providing perspectives and opinions on different ideologies (such as feminism) that society can believe in. Although these alternate ideological perspectives exist, they are usually overlooked and only ever reach small audiences. Ideology can also help us understand the media because of the way in which it distributes ideology.
In trying to attract new audiences, news media have begun to transition from reporting to becoming a form of entertainment. With the meteoric rise of social media’s role as a news source, the fight for an increase of diversity in the media, and the ever-growing desire of immediate content, the future of responsible journalism is more important than ever. Ask yourself, why do I think the way I do? Where do my political views originate? How do I prove them? Most likely, it is due to the biased portrayal of issues in the media and the politicization that accompanies what we consume. Now, compare your views to your preferred news reporting entity. More than likely, they are the same.