News Media and Media

Media & Public Opinion

There are many people that might think or even assert that the media plays a passive role in reporting the news and that there is not a causal link between what is depicted or reported in the media and what is then seen and witnessed within the press and other media spheres. However, this cannot be further from the truth. This is not to say that everyone is influenced and shaped in large part by what the media says. At the same time, to suggest that the public is not guided or urged in a given direction by what the media does or does not do would be less than true. While the media is often referred to with insults or pejoratives, they possess and wield a major role in American society and that power is sometimes misused to a great degree.

Analysis

There are a couple of dimensions and directions that one could go with the analysis pertinent to the thesis and the rest of the introduction of this report. However, the author of this brief treatise will focus on a few things in particular. First of all, while the scope and size of the media's influence has always been quite large for as long as there has been a national media and television service, the sources of news used to be much more constrained and focused. Indeed, even after television came online, it was basically a few radio stations per market, a newspaper or two and the network television shows and that was about it. Indeed, throughout history there was a candidate for reelection to President of the United States, that being Lyndon B. Johnson, that acquiesced in his dreams to get reelected once he discovered that Walter Cronkite, the pre-eminent media giant at the time, had decided that Johnson was not worthy of re-election. As the saying loosely went, he had lost America if he had lost Cronkite (Clark, 2016).

Since then, there have been two market shifts that have turned the media sphere on its ear. The first was the emergence of cable and, to be more specific, cable news. It started with CNN and later expanded to include several NBC networks including CNBC and MSNBC and Fox News. Around the same time that this was mushrooming, the internet came into play in a big way and created the second shift that will be mentioned. This would be the "new media" that is typified by sites like Huffington Post, Gawker, the Young Turks and so forth. However, the catalyst for all of those new media outlets really had to be the Drudge Report (Glass, 2013). That site's claim to fame was blowing open the Bill Clinton affair controversy in the 1990's. Since then, even some tabloids, usually the fodder for jokes and aspersions, have broken or chosen to cover stories that the media, for whatever reason, has not. The National Enquirer and their coverage of John Edwards and his tryst with another woman while his wife was dying of cancer is just one example (Clark, 2016).

Anyhow, there has been a concurrent shift and patter that has been seen with the expansion in the size and scope of who is involved in the news media, who is involved in the wider media in general, what is required to assert presence in the media sphere and what said media does. Mentioned before was the fact that the cable news sphere is now dominated by Fox News, different variants of NBC and CNN, the latter being the true progenitor of the cable news paradigm. In any event, it is deemed by many that those news networks are becoming less and less about news and more about entertainment, ratings and shilling a particular political point-of-view. For example, Fox News is accused of being part and parcel of the right wing of American politics and its people. On the other hand, MSNBC, one of the child networks of NBC, is deemed to be the same thing for the Democrat/left wing of the United States. CNN would seem to be left of center a lot of the time as well.

Even if there is some hard news being reported on those networks, and there is, there is definitely some truth to that. Indeed, the prime time network schedule for those networks is made up of unapologetic partisans that are absolutely pushing a particular point-of-view. To be sure, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and so forth on the Fox News network are definitely right of center. On the other hand, Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton are of the left wing and they are prominently featured on MSNBC. Fox News used to have a left-wing counterpart for Hannity so as to create a Crossfire-esque television show but Colmes was eventually sent packing in 2008 and Hannity got the time slot to himself (Calderone, 2008). On the other end, anyone that knows Al Sharpton's past knows the significance of his presence on a news media network or within any sort of political discussion.

The above discussion and recitation of facts brings us to the point of this paper and that would be the influence of media on the people. The author of this report, based both on personal opinion and what has been witnessed in the American social sphere as of late, would certainly concede that the media does have its point-of-view to bring across to the media and they have indeed been successfully in influencing American discourse and opinion along the way. Indeed, the public shift on gay marriage and marriage equality in general is most likely in large part due to the media's reporting on the topic and the fact that they mostly advocate, not suppress, the idea that gay people and bisexuals should be able to marry who they wish (Colwell, 2016). However, there are two things that are involved when it comes to the media and the people that also have to be explored and considered. First, the influence that flows between the parties is bidirectional. In other words, while the media influences the people and what they do, the inverse is true as well. Second, the media sometimes goes too far when it comes to its advocacy and there are some situations where they should probably stick to the hard news or at least present both sides in a dispassionate fashion and let the people decide (API, 2016).

The first of the two points just made is not hard to prove or assert. Indeed, much like MTV shifted from playing music videos (much to the chagrin of many historical fans) and instead have gone to what some would say are mindless and pointless shows like Jersey Shore and others, the idea is ratings for them and they are ostensibly doing what they are doing to get ratings (Zimmerman, 2016). Other networks have mostly followed suit including many that are supposedly educational and informative such as the History Channel and The Learning Channel, or TLC. While some may think that the news channels would avoid this and stick to hard news, that is simply not the case. Surely, Fox News has O'Reilly and Hannity on their networks because they want to attract the right wing of the political viewing audience. Conversely, MSNBC is doing the same thing when they air similar shows, albeit from the left wing, such as Rachel Maddow and Al Sharpton.

The cardinal sin that many assert the news media is reporting is that they allow this bias and partisanship to bleed into regular news coverage including what is covered, how it is covered, the perspective that is used to cover it and so forth. A perfect example of this would be gun control. The mass shootings that have occurred over the last two decades have been tragic but they have also been extremely divisive. Even with the common use of weapons like the AR-15 and so forth, there are many on the right that say that gun control would only punish law-abiding gun owners. Those on the left assert that this is the only way to stop mass shootings. However, there are a lot of guns in the United States and speaking in broad terms in emphatic ways about such a complex situation is simply obtuse. Indeed, there are three hundred million guns in the United States that are in the hands of about one hundred million people. It is also true that some people that lawfully buy guns end up using them to execute people. Indeed, many of the mass shooters in the United States bought their guns legally. On the other hand, the amount of guns that are used after being bought legally by the same person that actually made the purchase is such a small fraction of the gun deaths that exist. Indeed, it's only about ten percent of the whole. The rest are evenly split between black market purchases and situations where the gun used in the crime, whether it be mass shooting or a single victim situation, was bought by someone who then transferred it to someone else. Further, there are people that openly discuss laws and such that would end up with the confiscation of guns along the lines of what the United Kingdom and Australia have done in the last generation. However, this is almost certainly folly as long as the Second Amendment is in place and it would be extremely hard to repeal or change the same. At the same time, even right-wing pro-gun people have to concede that there are indeed mentally ill people that get their hands on guns and there probably needs to be a framework in place to stop those people from buying guns.

However, and as noted before, there are entirely too many people that are hell-bent to push one idea or another and they often ignore the varying and numerous factors that are all in play. Further, there are people (including elected politicians) that are spouting off things on news shows and social media sites like Twitter that are categorially untrue. For example, former House of Representatives member spoke about Orlando gay nightclub shooter Omar Mateen and the gun he chose. He said that the rifle Mateen used shoots off 700 rounds per minute. This is false and for a number of reasons. First, the AR-15 that Mateen used is a semi-automatic...not an automatic. Second of all, semi-automatic means that one trigger pull means one bullet and the clip of AR-15 only has about three dozen bullets (Moorthy, 2016). Even if Mateen wanted to and could have fired his weapon 700 times, he would have to reload about 20 times. This does not mean that gun control and gun problems, for legal and illegal gun owners alike, should not be debated and considered. However, the debate needs to be done fairly and completely and the media is completely botching that in so many ways. This would include giving voice to people that are lying, misinformed or that are cherry-picking what makes their argument looks good. The bigger problem is that some of those people are the anchors and "analysts" themselves. The entire argument should be posed and evidence-based solutions should really be the way to go. Lastly, it has to be based on the laws and culture that exists rather than what the news media thinks it should be (Davies, 2016).