Blog 12 – My Thoughts on the Influence of Media

There are many different forms of media around us…chances are, you have probably clicked this article through a form of social media too.

However, what I shall focus on in this article is the issue of media itself and it’s impact on the general public. It’s not the positives and negatives, just my insight…

I’m presuming that The EssWhyDee Blog has an older demographic – If you are under the age of 20, please navigate away from this page now. Oh shit. That doesn’t include myself by the way. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write the rest of this blog post and whatnot.

Only kidding, you’re all welcome to read it.

Basic things that we all know about the media:

Actually, you guys can Google that yourselves, or Bing it, or even Yahoo! It. Wait, do people even use anything other than Google nowadays? Hmm interesting blog topic for the future I think…

I like the media, and that we in Britain (don’t know about anywhere else) have free choice when it comes to what we want to watch, what we want to listen to, what we want to read and of course how we react to it.

• We can watch BBC News, RT News, CNN, Sky News, etc
• We can read The Guardian, The Sun, The Mirror etc
• We can listen to Different radio stations

Although I’m fond of the freedom that we share, I do believe that there are blatant biases…

In a way it’s better that these biases are laid out quite obviously as it gives us, the general public, better understanding of what we are viewing, thus helping us to CHOOSE what we want to view more effectively and according to our own beliefs.

I’ll give you an example. Apparently The Sun newspaper swayed the UK general election by around 30% in 2010. Now that is a HUGE amount to sway an election by  for anybody’s standards. Is it good that these huge companies have that much power over us?

A lot of us wouldn’t think they had that much impact. (Don’t cite me on the % by the way, I’ll try to find a source)

But in the end, we are allowing to be dictated by what others think and are led on by what we are “supposed” to believe.

Only if everyone just thought for a moment for themselves, invested a little of their precious time into educating themselves with facts rather than jumping guns and assuming everything they read/watch is 100% correct.

One last example before I go.

In the conservative manifesto for 2010 it clearly stated that they were going to cut the deficit by lowering government spending. This all sounded great at the time with the state of the economy. But when they started allowing for student fees to be un-capped and started to cut government spending, a lot of the British public were infuriated at how benefits were being reduced and so on.

The fact of the matter is that it is important to have knowledge on issues that are presented to us via different forms of media

Remember, A lot of those who complained and bickered actually voted for this to happen….

Where’s the sense in that? (Dido song reference)

But in the end, It doesn’t even matter (Linkin’ Park song reference)

It’s your own decisions and your own viewpoints that matter…

Remember We ALWAYS have a choice. Free Your Mind.

Peace,

Syd

You can now find me on Google+

Related articles

• Who do you influence? (rama.chakaki.com)