Covert Censorship In Wag The Dog

The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that 's power. The article “Reality TV Goes Where Football Meets the Hijab”, published in the New York Times in November 2011, introduces how the media controls the minds of the masses. Media has become a major issue in our daily lives. We live in a world that we cannot have access to what is going around us, unless we refer to the media. For instance, in our daily routine we usually listen to the news in the morning or at night before we sleep. The news has already been reported and its being delivered to us that fast, but how do we know if what is being said is what is actually happening or if it has been manipulated for political/social reasons? In the beginning of the article, Porochista Khakpour the author of the article, Iranian born American reared, mentions: “If anything made me, an American, it was televisions.” TV, especially the reality TV, resembles the characters and movie stars the way they want to not the way they are. Khakpour said, "Darkness-dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin-always equaled trouble, as if it actually implied a dark side". When we watch TV, most of the movie characters are labeled, either by their gender, religion, or color. Khakpour reaches out to the "outcasts", to prove her point on reality TV shows shaping our beliefs towards each other, especially the "freaks”.

Through media our “consciousness is determined, shaped and manipulated” they have the objective to benefit the beliefs of the bourgeoisie. One thing to take away from the consciousness is that we don’t always know when we are being manipulated and things aren’t always as straightforward as they seem. You may think that a video is for empowering people of low social class. They may state that they are trying to help the poor and disenfranchised people that don’t hold power in society. There may be a PR team that is paid millions of dollars to spin a product that is released in order to put a spin that makes you believe in good intentions. In order to see what the true message is you need to keep yourself a critical watcher who uses their sociological

This conversation with Beatty highlights the relationship between mass media and conformity as an idea has been pushed out to citizens to believe it was correct to say the burning of books and the assignment to an asylum of a perfectly healthy old man, yet Montag starts to think otherwise because he saw firsthand that the man was not quote “insane”. Therefore, it can be inferred that the government in this case is taking advantage of mass media’s ability to spread information to be able to make it the norm for conformity to such unreasonable situations. However, this phenomenon is not only present in Fahrenheit yet universal to our society as

Propaganda is about power and persuasion, and is used for many reasons by the government. This essay will explore the overt means by which the government uses systematic propagation to control the citizens of the society and the subtle ways in which information, independent thought, and their freedoms are restricted through radio and television.

Now I realise it seems a bit hypocritical of me to attack the media’s representation of a news event when I myself am a part of the hype-generating circus we call mass media. However, the voice of my wise, high-school English teacher echoes in my subconscious that we should always be critical of the texts we consume and conscious of the

In class, we have seen many cases of the media manipulating the truth. For example, we were shown five photographs of hurricane Sandy that were actually manipulated, much to the surprise of the public. In addition to this, we’ve seen several situations in which word choice reveals media bias. However in Wag the Dog, the main characters do much more than simply choose biased words.

The power and consequently the responsibility of media, especially mainstream, is something that shouldn’t be underestimated. It often sets the agenda amongst the general public and is the reference point for the majority of the discussion surrounding it. For many, what they see and read in the media forms the basis of their opinions on most important topics. Despite warnings not to, many believe that everything they read in the media must be true.

Throughout society, the mass media constantly changes over time. The mass media play a prominent role in informing the public about what occurs within the world, especially in areas which audiences do not acquire direct experience and knowledge. This essay will argue that the propaganda model is no longer valid as it has become outdated. This essay will also discuss the model in relation to the five filters and draw on Rampton's critique of the propaganda model in contemporary society.

Government and media influencing each other is a tender ethical situation. Initially, it seems simply appalling that any government would either censor or use its media as a tool, but considering the possible benefits of such acts makes the issue more complex. What if censorship saves lives? What if manipulating the media brings a resolution to a conflict?

As discussed in class, one of the most influential agencies of socialization is the media. The way we see ourselves or the way other people see us come from what we are told by others and what we tell ourselves. In the Better world handbook, the chapter on media states that “the way we think and act in our daily lives is inextricably linked to the information we receive about the world” (Jones, Haenfler and Johnson). The chapter continues to discus how information delivered to us can be bias and this raises the issue on who controls the media and what we see through it. The problem with this could be that that whoever controls the media does not necessary have our best interest in mind and the content that is transmitted through the media is profit driven. . In the article “Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong” gives a perfect accept of how easy it is for information to get omitted based on what people what you to know and what they don’t want you to know. From a young age, people decide what they want you to know, so that they can decide on what they want you to think about certain topics whether its American history or something else, its like the

“The media are a primary source of those pictures in our heads about the larger world of public affairs, a world that for most citizens is ‘out of reach, out sight, out of mind’ and what we know about the world is largely based on what the media decide to tell us” (McCombs).

The media influences how people experience social life. Media such as newspaper, television and film, are important sources of information, education and entertainment. It can be used to learn more about the world and the people in it. In this regard it can be said that the media represent, interpret and endorse aspects of social experience (O’Shaughnessy and Stadler, 2005). The media are also implicated in social regulation, or in other terms, the government of society. The media are implicated in government and politics in an obvious way because modern systems of democracy are conducted through the media. But the media have a bigger role to play in government by structuring how society is controlled and maintained.

In the propaganda model media’s function is to inform the public with values and beliefs that will integrate them but if the power is in the hands of state, which means if the state controls the media. It is clear that the media serves the state and their dominant elite. The propaganda and Duncan’s analysis both agree that the journalists that covered the Marikana massacre had critiques and inequality in their reporting. Both Chomsky and Duncan focused on this inequality of power and civil servants. Clearly money and power are able to filter out news that is fit to go to print. This means that government and dominant private interests are able to get their messages across to the

“A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth” – Joseph Goebbels, German Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. This is the exact words of Nazis most famous propagandist in using media as a mass weapon of propaganda and mind control. Could you imagine Germany in 1930s, without Television channel, without the Internet, without every mobile device in your palm, what channel of information will you get? Of course, newspapers, flies, images, celebrities were used as tools for propaganda purposes, designed to provoke a reaction, and ultimately, a form of control over their citizen. Nowadays, with all the advanced of technologies, information can reach everyone in every corner of the Earth, the message is delivered in the subtlest ways, without people’s conscious, has shaped everyone’s decision, or at least shape their behavior toward the decision that the orchestrator want the audience to perceive. With the booming of internet, information sharing seamlessly, we must ask ourselves, the role of media in conveying, shaping the society that we are living in. Let look at few examples of U.S propaganda machine, and later, the particular case of fish sauce in Viet Nam back in October 2016.

This underscores why politicians have long perceived mass media as a veritable channel of disseminating an ideology so that the society can mirror itself against what the media feeds it and thus be manipulated. This further begs the question of whether the media is a contributor or otherwise to societal problems in the face of political ideological dissemination.