Mass Media Essay

1228 Words3 Pages

Our mass media has developed drastically over the last century, and each change has influenced American culture. Understanding media and the role it plays in society is key to forming educated opinions and having control over the media’s influence and the information it presents. It is for this reason we must ask ourselves, “Are we in control of the media, or is the media in control of us?”. Popular culture itself now helps shape our world views and create a basis of judgment otherwise absent from our personal experience. Besides, people who were tuning in to the radio, watching television, and reading the newspaper were now exposed to more marketing campaigns, visual violence, sexuality, suffering and relief, and celebrity idolization than ever before. As of today 90% of media that we read, watch, or listen to is controlled by six media super giants: Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, NewsCorp (i.e. Rupert Murdoch), Comcast, and CBS. Compare this to almost 30 years ago in 1983 where as 90% of media was controlled by over 50 different companies (Critchfield). This gross lack of diversity in public opinion and information exposure has steadily diminished the perception of minority populations by failing to give equal and fair representation. The key components presented in this paper will address further the history of unequal distribution of power in the media, ask whether different races are being fairly represented as individual groups, and discuss the power of media over our culture and the difference in coverage between countries. In addition, I will help to provide a subsequent plan of action to relinquish its influence in our daily lives.
As of today, the top 10% of wealth outweighs the other 90% combined (Domhoff). This...

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...ed racism have survived due to the sustained power of the need for media. So, how do we strive to overcome this current system? Although the solution may seem quite utopic, we must strive ourselves to self-informed free-thinking creatures of our surrounding influence and question information given rather than taking it by the word. In our age we have the amazing ability to cross reference and dig deeper into a story, or a piece of information presented. Many forms of “news”, sitcoms, and commercials we see today still perpetuate these false beliefs and it is our duty to be active in the re-civilization of our society, evoking an almost Don Quixote sense of mentality. Due to the power over the general public the media and its members have to control how we view the world, collectively the general public must take back control of their own identity and integrity.

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