Media And Its Influence On Political Opinion
Kyle Chang writes:
Media has been used as a propaganda tool to garner the support of people. Media and its relation to its audience is thus of utmost importance for policy decisions, especially in a democracy where government is “for the people.” Optimally, the media is an unbiased representation of reality and the people decide how they feel about an issue.
The institutions that control the media are media outlets: CNN, Fox News, Reuters, NYTimes, Wall Street Journal. Their funding is supposed to be strictly separate from the news they report. But this is often not the case. In addition, the motivation to obtain a good story leads to unwanted consequences.
For example, it’s common for politicians to practice “quotation approval” when being interviewed for news reports, meaning that politicians will be able to censor their representations before their quotes go to press. In effect, this means that politicians can effectively use the media strategically because they control the flow of information. The fact that most have a position on staff named “media relations” points to the strategic nature of the press.
Individuals have a tendency toward conformity. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch conducted experiments in which the participants were asked to choose a line segment out a few options that matched the length of an original segment . However, the participant was the last to answer in a line of confederates, who unanimously answered with the incorrect response (in one version of the experiments). The result was that many of the participants would choose the clearly incorrect answer for the sake of conformity.
Now, the diagram, as shown above, offers an obvious answer to a simple question. But this is not the case with knowledge about politics and policy. Concerning complex issues, where there is no clear-cut answer, I posit that independence will be even harder to come by than in the Asch experiments. The upshot is that there will be a stronger tendency toward conformity in an individual’s political views. Of course, within this assumption, one has to decide to what or whom an individual is conforming.
On the topic of political opinion, conformity and influence has often been in relation to traditional media forms—TV, newspapers, magazines, radio. And even within this relationship between individuals and the media, there are different paradigms to view influence. The old paradigm is the “plugged-in monad” model, in which audiences are holed up in their houses with a radio or a newspaper as their sole source of information, the sole source of view influence.
The Pew Research Center reports that fewer news reporters are widely popular (2007 as compared to 1997) . To maintain their popularity, many of the top news reporters have catered toward more particular audiences , though with a smaller market share, nonetheless. In addition, there is a rise in perceived media bias, supporting these findings.
Also of note in the changing media landscape is the advent of social media. Social media is mediated by its companies: Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, WordPress, but actually created by its users, who serve as both the producers and the audience. In conjunction with the new variety of media sources, we can again question the effect of conformity with one’s peers on political views.
I plan on writing about the rise in niche media and its relationship to social media.
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