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The Medias Dumber Democracy Essay

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For the average American there is no escape from mass media. It can be found within our news papers, movies, television and internet, which account for most of our news and entertainment source. In Michael Parenti's book, Make Believe Media, the Politics of Entertainment, Parenti attests that this mass media clouds our society's perception of reality by propagating prefabricated images that create and validate a superficial ideological world. Unfortunately, people are denied the opportunity to obtain and interpret information, which impacts our society, by media conglomerates that wish to keep their industry profitable and on the rise. Effectively, the American public's information and entertainment sources are controlled by some ten …show more content…

Thus our notion of people, places, public policy, and even the world can be shaped by the ongoing storytelling within our news and entertainment media. Both children and adults are consumed by the storytelling of those few conglomerates that make up the media industry.

While much of the American public is aware of the media's influential power over our society, many believe they are immune to these influences and therefore underestimate the actual effects it can have within our lives. Parenti believes media can even influences these "immune" Americans through the ideal of political entertainment. This ideal embodies a media with subtle hints of various political, cultural and systematic views that are embedded with in a program's or movie's characters, contents or plots. While this influence may be indirect, much of it goes undetected by the wary public who claim immunity from such media. Furthermore, Parenti argues that such critiques of influential media by the wary public are biased in themselves, stating that, "this editing is itself partly conditioned by the previously internalized images fed to audiences by the same media they are now viewing." Ultimately things ranging from style and social status, to love and relationships and even to our perception of foreign culture is all influenced by media and its conglomerates. They are the ultimate

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