Tim Jarjoura
Andrew Wood
Creative Minds: Term Paper
10 Dec 2018
Mainstream Media and its Influence in the World Today
In today’s world, we as people are living in a more and more technologically consumed society. One huge aspect of all this technology is the media, and the frequency of its use, which is rapidly rising with each new generation. There are more ways to see what’s going on around the world, and the preferred method of looking at these issues is always going to be visually. This ultimately has led to the media’s ability to majorly influence societal views and opinions. So this makes us wonder, how exactly does the mainstream media influence opinion, shape world-views, and serve particular financial interests?
One major way that the mainstream media influences world views and opinions is through politics. A huge impact of this is by influencing political opinions of voters. Not surprisingly, the voting behavior of people who are actively interested in politics is probably not changed by the media. Committed Democrats and Republicans selectively learn what they want to from media sources, and typically choose to believe what they already have strong beliefs in. However, the media can sway people who are uncommitted or have no strong opinion in the first place. Since these voters often decide the results of elections, the power of media in elections can be substantial.
The media also influences political opinions by determining the behavior of candidates and officials. Many good politicians have learned that they can succeed in getting elected and in getting things done if they know how to use the media. President Franklin Roosevelt was famous for his "fireside chats", in which he soothed the pain of economic depression and war by talking to citizens over the radio. This was only the beginning of what began a new era of media control. Another huge example of this was the fact that President Ronald Reagan's skills as a film and television actor enabled him to communicate very effectively with American voters. Nowadays, it has gotten to the point where government officials and candidates for office carefully stage media events and Photo Opportunities. Critics believe that too much attention is focused on how politicians look and come across on camera, rather than on how good a job they are doing in public service.
Therefore, the media’s influence in politics ultimately results in setting the public agenda. Most Americans learn about social issues from print or electronic media. The fact that the media focuses on some issues and ignores others can help set what gets done in government. Media sources have often been accused of emphasizing scandals and high-interest issues at the expense of duller but more important political problems. This is even more prevalent now with the impact of social media like twitter and facebook. The government's priorities can be rearranged as a result.
Another notable attribute of the media in the world is its impact on war. The impact of television coverage of the Vietnam War was meaningful, but probably in a different way than is usually explained. The traditional view basically stated that Americans watched the news in horror and were pushed against the war by graphic and misleading portrayals of the war.
However, that interpretation is simply not supported by the Gallup polls conducted throughout the war. Many of the examples used to support the traditional view, including the exposure of the My Lai Massacre and a broadly published photograph of several Vietnamese children, one naked, fleeing a village mistakenly napalmed by the South Vietnamese, did not impact the next poll at all.
This is not to say, however, that the traditional view of the media’s impact during the war is useless. Television coverage, graphic and uncensored for the first time, probably did decrease support for the war over a long-term period. It showed the true costs of the war to people in the U.S., who increasingly concluded that Vietnam was not worth the price they were paying.
The traditional narrative also holds true for the Tet Offensive. The shock of media coverage forced Americans to view the war in a new way, and they did not like what they saw. Approval ratings for President Lyndon Johnson and his handling of the war dropped more than 10 percent. The number of people in the U.S. who self-identified as a “hawk,” or supportive of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, dropped almost 20 percent. By June 1968, 72 percent of the country believed the United States was either “losing” or “standing still” in Vietnam.
Another extremely important topic that media, particularly social media, has an effect on is the perception of climate change. Social media use is an important area within climate change communication, however, research on the topic is quite nascent. Major perspectives on social media are discussed frequently and existing research is outlined on different areas of climate change perceptions, including opinion, knowledge, and behavior, identifying how research on communication in social media forms has been applied to each area.
Social media embeds news and information about social issues in a social context, which provides a personal context for individuals. Information is filtered through friends, and sites such as Facebook provide information based at least partially on an individual’s previous information habits. In addition, social media use is often conducted in visual form, with half of social media users sharing or reposting news stories, images, or videos, and climate change is effectively communicated visually. In short, social media personalizes social issues in several ways, so it is an appropriate lens through which to analyze climate change opinion.
Analyzing social media use raises the question: how much or how often do people actually discuss the topic of climate change over social media? According to Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 7% of Americans share information about global warming on Facebook or Twitter, and 6% of Americans have posted a comment online in response to a news story or blog about global warming. These numbers are quite a bit lower than the frequency of discussion offline. About 35% of individuals in the United States report discussing climate change with family or friends at least occasionally. Therefore, individuals are not widely discussing climate change in social media spaces, but evidence suggests that a small percentage are.
Given that weather is a primary topic that personalizes the abstract issue of climate change for people, it is worth examining the the amount of time that people discuss it over social media. Weather-related information consumption is moving online, even if television is still the primary source people use to seek out information about the weather. A quarter of the population in the United States checks the Internet at least once a day for weather information, and of those who are already Internet users, weather news leads the topics they will read about online.
Evidence shows that people do talk to others about extreme weather events, and more than 30% of people in the United States who have experienced an extreme weather event talk about it over social media. More than 20% of Americans report sharing about a weather experience over social media, and nearly 2 in 10 (19%) have shared a photo of the event they have experienced. The vast majority of people in the United States who have experienced one of these events have talked about it offline with someone else either in person (89%) or over the phone (84%). This evidence shows that communication with others about extreme weather events is much higher offline than online. Nonetheless, people are discussing weather online. It is possible that as people make connections between weather and climate change, discussions about climate change online will increase. Indeed, one study that examined tweets in the United States provides evidence that people mention temperature anomalies and climate change together.
Analyzing social media also provides a setting to examine what opinions and sentiment members of the public have about climate change. One study that examined sentiment in Twitter posts showed that people talk negatively about the climate-related topics of natural disasters, oil drills, and climate bills but talk positively about climate rallies, green ideas, and a book release. Both “climate change” and “global warming” tend to garner more negative tweets, such as global warming being catastrophic, than positive tweets, such as weather being more pleasant due to climate change. The difference between negative and positive tweets, however, is greater for global warming than for climate change. In all, there are a range of topics people associate with climate change in their social media discussions that tend to reflect a negative tone, although not exclusively a negative tone.
In today’s world, we as people are living in a more and more technologically consumed society. One huge aspect of all this technology is the media, and the frequency of its use, which is rapidly rising with each new generation. There are increasingly more ways to see what’s going on around the world, and the preferred method of looking at these issues is always going to be visually. This ultimately has led to the media’s ability to majorly influence societal views and opinions, these definitely including politics, climate change, and war; and it is in our hands to be sure it has a positive long term impact.