Media Limitation and Manipulation

Part 3/5

Domestic Media

All social, political and economic policies and debates are communicated through our media. Therefore, the breadth of our democratic experience is largely defined by the structure of the media and its content. This may not be an immediate cause for panic in itself, but consider this alongside the centralisation of corporate media ownership and the picture becomes a lot more worrying. If a handful of companies control the vast majority of what we constantly see, hear, and read about 24hrs a day, then the breadth of our information and democratic experience can become considerably concentrated and narrowed.

News does not come down to us raw and unadulterated. Rather, it is ‘processed’ and structured in terms of what topics are selected, how information is filtered, what is emphasized, what is ignored, how an issue is framed and how a debate is structured. Such tailoring gives Western news a specific ‘character’ to which we have all become accustomed.

As author of The Press and Foreign Policy (1993), Bernard Cohen, points out, it’s not so much that the media tells you what to think, it’s that they tell you what to think about. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, for example, holds in excess of 130 Newspapers worldwide, including the most widely circulated English newspaper in the world, The Sun. As companies such as News Corporation are in competition with the likes of AOL Time Warner, Murdoch’s company will decide to turn many of these newspapers into profitable sensationalist journalism, focusing on the three themes of sex, crime, and sport (Herman and McChesney 1997).

Criteria for much news in general is about what can shock and rouse our emotions as opposed to what is actually informative and useful to society. Crime; sex/money scandals; bizarre/extremist opinions or behaviour; and anything to do with celebrities, occupy a large space within our mass media. Such attention-grabbing topics are also framed in ways that restrict our thinking even further. Violent crime reports, for example, take the form of concise horror stories, creating endless villains and victims out of our citizens rather than discussing the social problems that lead to such incidents. It is as if unemployment, inequality, poor education, and lack of moral sensitivity in society have nothing to do with such crimes. Our universities are, of course, filled with experts in such social sciences, but media professionals are largely uninterested in using their knowledge to create an intellectual platform to suggest ways in which we can minimise such offences in the future. Instead, politicians give simple solutions to appease the masses, while disregarding the opinions of experts. Moreover, there have been many studies which show that certain social problems, such as terror, violence and sexual crimes, have been heavily exaggerated. While other studies show that more serious issues – many regarding the environment – are not emphasised enough or are completely ignored. Unsurprisingly, research shows that people who engage with the mass media most are more frightened of the outside world and have less trust for other people.

International Politics

Media also has a strong influence on people’s political opinions due to the majority of sources coming from government and other official establishments. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky argue extensively in their book Manufacturing Consent (2002) that the modes of handling material by the mass media serve political ends and maintain existing political and corporate power structures. War is a typical concern for such authors. Political scientist Michael Parenti, for example, points out that “whenever the White House proposes an increase in military spending, press discussion is limited to how much more spending is needed… are we doing enough or need we do still more? No media exposure is given to those who hotly contest the already gargantuan arms budget in its totality”. Typically, two choices are presented to the public but a third option that challenges the status quo is not.

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