The Pros And Cons Of Mainstream Media

Jim Morison once said, “Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” Mainstream media is divided into three corporations which owns 1,500 newspapers, 1,100 magazines, 900, radio stations, and 2,400 publishers (Social symmetry.org). News corporations have been able to control our minds through the use of the media. Whether we like it or not the fact remains that media has the power to shape our beliefs and how people see things in the world if not locally on a global scale. With that knowledge it’s a shame how we don't stop to think and reflect on how we are all a bunch of sheep being herded by these corporations. News corporations are wrong in manipulating information because they enable us to misrepresent information for what it actually

Now more than ever news corporations care little about the facts but more about the ratings they receive from the story. An example of this is the Trayvon Martin case, a case in which a man named Zimmerman shot and killed a young boy named Trayvon Martin. This story stirred up a lot of controversy around the globe, media only helped by making it worse. In this case, it is more than evident that the media has played its part in being cynical and dishonest by turning a local crime into a national obsession. This issue of Trayvon Martin falsely spiked racial tensions all over the media, when there was no racism evident in the first place. Police had decided to drop charges but mainstream media did whatever they could in their power to bring Zimmerman down, an example of this is the case where NBC manipulated Zimmerman’s own words in a 911 dispatcher call and aired it and reported a reprehensible series of imaginary and exaggerated racist claims, by creating a false impression by manipulating Zimmerman’s own words by splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create the illusion of statements that Zimmerman never actually made. This ignited more demands for his arrest all over social media. Excerpts

The young mind is very malleable and picks up on things very quickly, thus the amount of violence shown affects the perception of young children. For example, parents certainly don’t want their children seeing people picking dead bodies of the street or investigators conducting body counts, because this vivid portrayal of justice may give them a false sense of what is right and wrong. In this case the media has got to be manipulated.

Citations

Casten, Lianne. "The Media Can Legally Lie." Project Censored, 12 Aug. 2003. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

John. "Media Censorship Good or Bad?" Targetgdpi. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Balkin, Jack. "How Mass Media Simulate Political Transparency." Yale.edu. Yale, 1998. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Bilgen, Arda. "Terrorism and the Media: A Dangerous Symbiosis." E-ir.info. E-interntional Relations Students, 22 July 2012. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Gherke, Ryan. "Manipulations by the Media: Lessons to Be Learned from Zimmerman vs NBC." Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog. Marquette University, 30 Aug. 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Leslie. "The Photoshop Backlash: Beauty Is in the Eye of the Editor." Notimpossiblenow. N.p., 25 July 2014. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.

Krashinski, Susan. "What's behind the Culture of Photoshop in Advertising." The]e Globe and Mail. Theglobeandmail, 21 Mar. 2013. Web. 11 Nov.