3. Influence of mass media

The media has a strong social and cultural impact upon society. This is predicated upon its ability to reach a wide audience which often sends a strong and influential message. The communications audience has been viewed by some commentators as forming a mass society with special characteristics, notably atomization or lack of social connections, which render it especially susceptible to the influence of modern mass-media techniques such as advertising and propaganda.

Journalism ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and of good practice as applicable to the specific challenges faced by professional journalists. While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of – truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability – as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public. Still media bias is one of the most important problems.

Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative. Since it is impossible to report everything, some selectivity is inevitable. Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media. Political affiliations arise from ideological positions of media owners and journalists. The space or air time available for reports, as well as deadlines needing to be met, can lead to incomplete and apparently biased stories.

A great role is also played by such a factor as market forces that can result in a biased presentation include the ownership of the news source, the selection of staff, the preferences of an intended audience, pressure from advertisers, or reduced funding due to lower ratings or governmental funding cuts. Josh Silver from “Free Press” (an organization working to reform the media) mentioned that the modern “media system gives moguls like Rupert Murdoch the omnipotent power to decide what’s news and what isn’t; which lives are important and which aren’t” and “the corporate media is not a watchdog protecting us from the powerful, it is a lapdog begging for scraps.”

So the manipulation of large groups of people through media outlets, for the benefit of a particular political party and/or group of people, bias, political or otherwise, towards favoring a certain individual, outcome or resolution of an event can be considered as the main characteristics of modern mass media.

But the consequences and ramifications of the mass media relate not merely to the way newsworthy events are perceived (and which are reported at all), but also to a multitude of cultural influences that operate through the media.

Marshall McLuhan, one of the biggest critics in media’s history, brought up the idea that “the medium is the message.” He describes the “content” of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As the society’s values, norms and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium.

We sometimes call these effects “unintended consequences”, although “unanticipated consequences” is more accurate. The “unanticipated consequences” work silently to influence the way in which we interact with one another, and with our society at large.