The Media And Its Effect On Our Views And Beliefs

Media impacts our lives everyday. The average 14-to-28 year-old will be exposed to about 3,000 ads every day. Ben Franklin once said that nothing is certain is this life except death and taxes. I believe it is now safe to assume we can add advertisements to that list now. We are literally bombarded with them. After seeing all the advertisements I am led to believe that they are the most carefully constructed of all human communication, being it the most expensive too. In 2004, according to www.answers.com, advertisement was in excess of $450 billion in the United States alone. It is not our fault though that these advertisements display messages that we cannot perceive. When we see an ad, our conscious mind will filter out the things it cannot deal with and make an acceptable idea or image that is made conscious. This is

Journalism is an industry that provides a source of information and news for the public, while popular culture is a source of portrayal of the image of the journalist. Popular culture provides a glimpse and “shapes the people’s impressions of the news media”, whether it is portrayed in a positive or negative light. There is no denying that popular culture possesses a large effect on what the public perceives and thinks about journalists and the industry through how the characters, plotlines are presented. Sociologists have even argued that “popular culture’s depictions…of real world professions” have a major influence on the public’s realistic perception of that respective field. Thus, it is not a surprise that in the 1930s, journalist organizations deliberately advocated positive portrayals of the press in Hollywood. An example of a film that stands as a positive representation is The Front Page. Although the film presents reporters and editors “lying and hurting innocent people”, the audience is able to fall for their unique charm and charisma—they are brash, fast-paced, intelligent, composed, independent, passionate and investigative. They embody what America ultimately champions: self-reliance, drive for action and accomplishment. However, popular culture also perpetuates negative, unlovable notions that “journalists [are] hard drinking, foul-mouthed social misfits concerned with only twisting the truth”. In novels like John Andross written by Rebecca Harding

Luke Scott once stated, ¨Crime is actually less in places where people own guns. Washington, D.C., is a case in point. It has the strictest gun laws, but who has the highest crime rate in the country? Washington, D.C.¨ Many people in the United States of America own firearms and use them in a proper, safe manner. Yet, gun control advocates pursue in trying to ban and put limits on the purchase and ownership of guns because of rare mass shootings that the media portrays to the general public. The media never shows the public the good that firearms do, the way firearms saves lives and keeps people safe. Gun control advocates believe that minimizing the availability of purchasing guns will decrease gun violence. This is ignorant and not a

Not only is the interest of the owners of large companies pushed out to the public, but also the interest of the companies who pay these media companies in advertising to citizens to sell their goods. Advertising is an important influence in what the public sees in media and has a direct influence on the public’s interest in the product (Rinallo, Basuray; 2009). Companies such as Nike and Coca-Cola can pay networks such as ABC and FOX large sums of money to advertise their companies through their programing. As Herman and Chomsky explain, networks such as ABC and FOX are selling their audience to these companies (1988). Media outlets such as FOX News depends on funding to make a profit and since there is no system in place where the funds

“The media 's 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. Because they control the minds of the [people]” (Malcolm X). The message of this Malcolm X quote is that society can control the mind of the individual. This is true. For many years, society has influenced everyone worldwide both negatively and positively. That is because society has the ability to control the individual’s decisions. They can control the individual in making their decisions that could affect people’s lives worldwide; it also has the ability to control their decisions that could affect the individual’s life. You might be thinking “But why should we care about this topic? This doesn’t seem really important to us” well it’s important because we all can relate to this as everyone has been influenced by society at least once in their lifetime. Just ask yourself this. Have you ever simulated a role model that you had by just copying the actions that they do just because you wanted to be just like them? Have you picked up habits from society that is around you like family or peers that has affected you in your life? Have you ever maybe tried something you found from your family members or from the Internet to get your personal needs? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are involved in this conversation. But there’s a problem. There’s an argument going on about this topic. The controversy of this topic

However, according to most of the commercials they did before, their advertisements are well known for sexual humor and exaggerated scenarios and exaggerated scenarios that play into male fantasies. Significant changes about the campaign has changed in the year of 2014. The way how the company promoted the Axe Peace fragrance line gave a new idea to the public with its content and meaning behind.

I often wonder about our humanity given the current state of affairs in our nation and abroad. America has been a powerful and abundant nation through a lifetime of wars and financial crisis but today is a different time for many of us. What is the media producer’s role in our very own implosion? What is our, the “media user” role in it?

One can view the media as a site of change, but also as means of perpetuation of ideologies and norms. Media use images, words, characters and representations to convey ideas and values(Geraghty, 2000). Media representations are constructed and play an important role in conveying ideas and ideologies. The media always had an important impact on people’s perceptions about the world. In previous generations, even during the last two decades of the 20th century, the great majority of the social forces that were affecting our self-perceptions and thus our personal identities were parents, schools and communities. The media usually sent healthy messages about who we were and about the world we were living in. Any bad influences that of course

Mass media is perhaps the most powerful tool in the world for creating, changing or perpetuating society’s ideas about an issue or group of people. It works both blatantly and subconsciously by deciding which issues are important, how to frame those issues, who to show as affected by them, and, increasingly, providing personal commentaries on the matters at hand. Because the majority of media outlets are owned by corporations dominated by white heterosexual men, many minorities are portrayed in ways that perpetuate negative stereotypes – if they are portrayed at all. Even though men have made great strides in regards to power, but with the black male they continue to experience both misrepresentation and underrepresentation in the modern

Popular opinion credits media with great power to shape not only what the average individual thinks about, but also how they think about those subjects. Recent research in the fields of Political Science, Psychology, Economics, and Communications supports this opinion.

Identifying whether an audience is Passive or Active is not always as black and white as it seems. Scholars agree that an Active audience is defined as an audience member that is not simply receiving information and believing it (such as a sponge), they are active in their interpretation of the text, meaning they are able to dissect the text and come to their own conclusions. On the contrary, a Passive audience member simply soaks up all information shown to them in a media text without any user interaction, just as the creator of the media form intended. Different scholars have differing theories on how the media influences the minds of all who consume it, and it is impossible to tell which theory is correct. However most theorists agree that one theory may fit one audience member, but not the other. For example, one viewer watching a program such as 60 Minutes or A Current Affair may believe everything being said wholeheartedly and without interpretation, however another might be skeptical or decide to research the story for themselves. The three theories that are prominent when debating Passive vs Active are the Hypodermic Needle/Magic Bullet theory, Agenda Setting theory and the Uses and Gratifications theory.

After September eleventh, news coverage was main cause a rise in Islamophobia feelings. With terrorist attacks from Middle-Eastern based groups, like ISIS and al-Qaeda, a sense of fear has grown among the American people. A major cause in this rise is the media’s influence on people opinions. The media can get people to feel almost anything they want through pictures, videos, etc. News sources focus on Middle Eastern conflicts, putting Muslim’s in an unfavorable light, and news outlets show pictures of terrorist groups, such as ISIS, to represent the Muslim population. Acts of discrimination, racial profiling, and racism against Muslims, also classified as Islamophobia, has seen a major increase because of news coverage.

Throughout history, we have seen the wrongdoings of western societies and the resulting influence of their actions in several different countries across the globe. Their actions have led to prejudice and manipulation of the present history. Numerous people do not comprehend that the actions taken in the past from these western countries are the reasons for the chaos and turmoil in societies such as those in the Arabic culture. Misconceptions about Arabic people and their beliefs have originated due to past policies that were implemented upon them, the media perception, and lack of cultural knowledge. The media has popularized several negative attributions and encouraged the spread of animosity toward Arabs worldwide. Preconceived stereotypical ideas of Arabic cultures can be attributed to the misunderstandings of the Islam religion and the impact of colonization.

It took a supercomputer 2,274 speeches made by President Barack Obama from the year 2009 to the year 2014 recorded by 275 different media sources in order to determine which sources were biased (Ehrenberg). Imagine an average human trying to determine whether a specific media source should be trusted or not. All of these media sources use information in order to sell an idea. The media’s records of these speeches could include a biased opinion on President Obama’s presidency. American’s perception of reality is drastically altered due to media bias. Media bias is defined as “the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media” (“Media Bias Law…”). Media bias has been apparent since

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