Media culture and contemporary society

Media Culture

My opinion of traditional news has definitely changed. I am more critical of the news now that I understand theories of framing and agenda setting. For the most part, news outlets play to their target audience, the audience that they intend to deliver to their advertisers. This definitely helps to frame the way that they present the news and present their arguments. By framing issues the way that they do, news agencies can impact on how people think about the facts that are being presented. This can affect the way that people think about certain issues.

News organizations can definitely influence our political decisions. When people vote, they do so on the basis of their understanding of the issues and where the different candidates stand on those issues. Much of this information is disseminated through the news media. The news media therefore plays an important role in educating the public prior to voting. When the news media shows bias in its framing of issues or positions, it impacts on that thought process. For example, when a politician makes proposals to solve the budget problem, but those proposals are useless from an economic perspective, but the media frames the proposal as being serious, that makes people think that there is a serious proposal. The media needs to educate people better, for example pointing out the flaws in such a proposal so that the people are voting based on good knowledge and not knowledge that has been randomly selected and presented in an uncritical way. If the media chooses only to present facts, it should help to educate voters on how to interpret those facts so that issues are more properly understood. Right now, the way that media frames issues, it seems that the media does a poor job of helping voters to understand issues and positions properly. This results in some low-quality people being elected, which ultimately harms our nation.

2. Media literacy helps us to be critical of the messages that media sends and the way that those messages are framed. However, media literacy messages can be disrupted by a number of means. The first is that media literacy messages are sometimes suppressed, so that the intended audience does not receive the message. This can lower the degree of media literacy, so that people are generally less critical about what they see and hear. People therefore become more trusting of the media, and this reduces the effectiveness, for example, of public service messages or even of the news. If we consider the relatively low number of people who study media literacy and communications, this highlights the fact that very few people actually become educated about media literacy issues.

Another way that media literacy messages are suppressed is by having them changed. When this happens, the message is not received as intended. The recipient of the message does not learn as much about media literacy as he or she should. This disrupts the ability of the recipient to understand and be critical of the media to which he or she is exposed.

Beyond the cognitive dispositions, there is emotional disruption when framing guides us to have an emotional response to media literacy messages. This is challenging, because the recipient must overcome the temptation to be guided by emotion when evaluating the messages that are in the media. Understanding the role of emotional manipulation in media messages is an essential skill to develop to improve one's media literacy.

3. A media stereotype that embodies all three reasons is the budget crisis concept. While there is a long-term budget issue, it is far from being a crisis and certainly not in the short-term. However, the media has latched onto this narrative. The message is simple -- there is a budget crisis. The message has been repeated, and has become a talking point for everyone from partisan wags to politicians of all stripes. This lends the issue credence, merely because people can understand the headline talking point and they hear it so often. The stereotype is believable as well, as there is a budget deficit.