HOW DOES THE MEDIA INFLUENCE OUR THINKING?

HOW DOES THE MEDIA INFLUENCE OUR THINKING ?

Media: Treated as singular or plural, the main means of mass communication regarded collectively. Definition from Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Maybe you’d like to think that the “Media” form no more than a channel of communication, neither benevolent nor destructively purposeful in their transmissions, other than to describe the world as it is. More so today than ever before, we use the term “Media” to cover a wide range of communication organisations, methods of transmission, various forms of governance and individual contributions. Over the different kinds of medium (TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, the Internet and social media) the purpose of these avenues of communication becomes blurred. What’s the difference between communications labelled “News” and that which we call “Sales & Marketing”? Isn’t everybody trying to sell something? The question we’re asking tonight seems to suggest that there is a single entity with an incorporated view and agreed goals. If that single media was filled with a purpose, it might be to just keep us distracted or to get us to focus on the less important things in life. That would allow their masters to carry forward with their own plans. George Orwell might have seen that coming back in 1948. No doubt there are idealistic journalists who start out with the ideas of freedom and truth, just as there are politicians and police officers who start out with ideals of democracy and law.

It would be disconcerting for us to find out just how susceptible we are to external influences in general. Just from the fact that we are human beings, we seem to be programmed to make immediate assumptions and jump very quickly to conclusions, rather than use that conscious part of our brain to sift through evidence. Thinking slowly is hard. It’s difficult for us to just say “I don’t know”, when there isn’t enough in the way of factual material to go by. Rather than leave a vacuum, our brain tells us that something we’ve heard or seen must be just so, since it’s all out there in plain sight, in a newspaper, on a blog, a tweet or on the television. Press freedom needs to be carefully maintained, but also scrutinised, to make sure it’s the freedom to report on facts that are of interest to our democratic processes and not just to relay messages from political or other dogmatic organisations.

We non-professional media mortals may have found a way to retaliate using the Internet, but it is also susceptible to post-truth propaganda. The losers’ version of events must fight like a spermatozoon to have any effect on nascent history. Is it just endless chatter hung out on the airwaves, or is it really important for us to understand?

QUOTES:

“A long life in journalism convinced me many presidents ago that there should be a large air space between a journalist and the head of a state.” Walter Lippmann

“After Watergate, which happened when I was in college, I became increasingly inspired by journalism as a way to change the world. It sounds corny, but to wake the public up, to serve a higher cause.” David Talbot

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands” Oscar Wilde

“Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive” G.K. Chesterton

“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses” Malcolm X

“The media's power is frail. Without the people's support, it can be shut off with the ease of turning a light switch.”Corazon Aquino (President of the Philippines 1986-92)

“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.” Robert Bresson

“I hope we never live to see the day when a thing is as bad as some of our newspapers make it” Will Rogers

“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one” W A. J. Liebling

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx

“I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror... As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.” Bertrand Russell

“The media know exactly what they’re doing, focusing our attention on Arsenio’s hairdo. We need to keep our brains brimming with rubbish. If we didn’t, we might think about things.” Cynthia Heimel

“Here in the news media, our focus is on speed. When we get hold of some new and possibly inaccurate information, our highest priority is to get it to you, the public, before our competitors do. If the news media owned airlines, there would be a lot less concern about how many planes crashed, and a lot more concern about whose plane hit the ground first.” Dave Barry (Boogers are my Beat)

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