Reed's G Band Media Log

That Manipulative Media

Obviously the media affects politics, because the media affects people’s opinions, especially what they think about the world around them. Just as a biased person will only tell you things that are biased, the media only tells you what it chooses to. However, the problem isn’t that the media is biased, because really everything in the world is biased. For that matter, human nature is to have opinions and be biased. And in the same way, everything in the world affects people’s opinions: every movie you see, book you read, news show you watch, painting you contemplate, or sport you play affects how you think and what you think. So, therefore, the problem is not that the media manipulates us, because everything manipulates us somehow, but that it manipulates us in a negative, destructive way. And by manipulating society, the media manipulates the people who create the politics, thereby manipulating politics themselves.

The Media affects politics by manipulating society to become impulse driven, materialistic, apathetic strangers who only care about the things that benefit them (mainly themselves, their possessions, and the people that they like). If you’re different from the rest of society, then you are a stranger, and as a stranger you are a threat, a threat who shouldn’t be listened to, trusted, or respected. Now, this affects politics because our elected officials are elected by people who want impulsive, irresponsible, greedy and vengeful leaders (hence, our current administration).

U.S. Foreign Policy (and internal policy, for that matter) is a direct result of a society manipulated by the media. The U.S. looks out for the U.S., at the expense of the rest of the world (admittedly, many other countries have similar goals). And, because, for whatever reason, the media has manipulated society to be impulsive and vengeful, the majority of Americans support the way our country acts, without casting a critical (or even comprehending) eye towards it. For example, the Americans who were killed in Falluja a couple weeks ago: this was an atrocious event, but most headlines did not grieve for those who had died. Instead, they declared (in all capitals, of course) ‘MURDERERS!’ The newspaper headlines, however, did not say “Oh Sh*t! How did America f*ck up Iraq so badly that Iraqis are massacring innocent citizens?”

It isn’t bad that the media affects politics, what’s bad is that the result is a self-destructive, ignorant government (as well as a self destructive, ignorant society). To end this long ramble, I want to quote the Boondocks, a comic strip (which, admittedly, is also biased and manipulative). In the strip, the main character, Huey, is sitting and watching T.V. after September 11th. “Isn’t it interesting how all the different news channels have cool titles and logos for their coverage?...Let’s see: Channel 2 is ‘America’s vengeance,’ Channel 12 is ‘America at War,’ and Channel 33 is ‘America Strikes Back,’” he says. “How about ‘America stops and thinks about why some people hate us?’” I think that this epitomizes the problem with American society- a society which has been created by the media that manipulates it.