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Mass media communications include television, national press, radio, film, cartoons and the list goes on. There are many schools of thought that insinuate the general public are controlled by the media and learn from it how and what to think. However, there are others that suggest although fed information and knowledge about the ways in which the world works by the media, the audience is not a weak passive one but one that can actively control what and who to believe.
There are very many aspects of society in which human consciousness can be regulated so it was therefore necessary to narrow this analysis down to one highly significant example. War is always a hotly contested subject and so this discussion will be based on how the media influences the minds of the public on their ideas about war in relation to reality and how aware they are of political powers influence over their opinions. ... It was therefore necessary for political powers who decided to go to war to persuade the coalition nation’s civilians that is was a necessary and just decision. The media were the key to that persuasion. ... Television as a visual media does provide immediacy of events occurring but all footage is specifically selective to present a certain image of what is occurring, and enfeebles the audience’s ability to understand, visualise and realise the consequences of warfare (Carruthers 2000). ... However, it is disregarded how a camera shot from above or below, from near or far can influence how people interpret the material precisely because those aspects determine what the viewer sees as important and relevant material of the war (Schirato et al 2000).
David Morrison (1992) carried out a study which was interested in the reaction of the audience to news coverage by various forms of media. ... All media forms, during a war, serve to permit the merciless treatment of those no longer regarded as fully human, and at the same time eclipse how weapons actually injure flesh, a method commonly put into operation in cartoons (Carruthers 2000).
The American administration and military had drawn from the conflict in Vietnam and the way the visual media highlighted the suffering that occurred there, placing a very negative view of the methods the American military used. The political powers therefore placed even tighter reign on the information flow. ... For the military, working for the governments of the coalition, the problem was less how the journalists would transmit their reports since technology was considerably good quality but more what they would report and how censorship could be put in place over media output (Carruthers 2000). ... The vast majority of those conveyed that they were satisfied with the coverage with the highest complaints about the coverage not being concerned with lack of accuracy or too much bias but mainly concerned with the amount of time the news media devoted to war and how repetitive it was. ... However, this should perhaps be seen as an ‘ideological position on how the news ought to perform according to some principled understanding of the role of the media in an open society’ (Morrison 1992 p12). ... However, the participants in the survey Morrison (1992) carried out saw themselves as tremendously media literate with the ability and lack of naivety to sift false information from the truth.
Approximate Word count = 2658
Approximate Pages = 10.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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