Negative Effects of Mass Media Essay Sample

We live in a world where social media or just any media in general plays a huge role in our lives. It has reached the point of no return. Some might think this is a good idea, and that could be true to an extent. We have the privilege to get any piece of information in the world in a blink of an eye. Getting in touch with any person we know just takes a click of a button; however, this seems like it might be too good to be true, and unfortunately that is the reality of it. False and twisted information, weak sources and sometimes even blatant lies, are the three main reasons why media influence might not be as innocent as you think. 

Our society has become almost a slave to the media, whether it is digital or printed. Although I must say that the world is slowly but surely getting rid of printed media. It has no place in our almost fully modern and digital bubble. The media still provides us with our daily dose of dopamine. That is quite infelicitous, if you ask me. It is fairly noticeable that we cannot go an hour without feeding our dreadful addiction, let alone a day or two. It is a shame. Do not get me started on the depths and details of the media. It is quite the rabbit hole that is almost impossible to get out of. How can we define the word “media”? Is it everything we see on our phones and newspapers? Or is it just the ads that we see from time to time on those humongous white billboards? Well frankly, to be precise and dead-on, media is basically ‘the main ways that large numbers of people receive information and entertainment, that is television, radio, newspapers, and the Internet.’ (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary n.d.), but does it really stop there? Well obviously, not. As a person who is heavily into politics, I would go as far to say that almost 90% of the accessible media is either twisted to fit a certain narrative or completely false. Getting certain information from random people on the internet or even famous politicians could be dangerous, especially if that piece of information touches a very sensitive matter. We have seen it happen before, and it has never ended well. It never ends well, and it will never end well. The reason for that is, people tend to forget that human are naturally greedy and not just when it comes to money or physical commodity but also when it comes to knowledge, sex, or in this case attention, humans are greedy over basically anything and everything. How does attention have anything to do with media, you might ask? Well, the answer is equitably simple. Politicians feed on the attention that people give them on a daily basis by watching the news, supporting a political party, or even just ranting on Twitter. People are subconsciously giving politicians what they need. Attention. We can do better.

In terms of false or twisted information, one of the major instances that really strikes my mind writing this, is the 2020 American presidential election. That event really showed the mass public how evil politicians can be. It will go down in history as one of the most eye-opening American events. Both political sides were ultimately frustrated yet incompetent to take action. To give you a bit of a backstory, it all started back in the year 2016 when the current former president Donald J. Trump decided to run for the biggest title any American or just any person in the world could have, which is the title of being the president of the strongest and most powerful nation in the world. People were enraged, every political party on the political spectrum reacted differently, but they all had one emotion in common. Shock. Yes, even Donald Trump’s party, the Republican Party. I was personally shocked yet amused by how ambitious DJT was determined to win. It took me by surprise. Donald Trump is a very famous and successful American businessman, yet it took the media less than 5 years to ruin his image. I must admit, though, I was not a very big fan of him; however, as I grew older, my brain matured quite drastically, and I slowly started agreeing with most of what he said. At the beginning, when I first started learning about DJT, I was very much in disgust. You could say, I was not as open-minded as I thought I was. CNN and other news sources twisted every word he said to fit their narrative and agenda for the sole reason that DJT did not share the same beliefs and party as them. In an article that was published by The Chicago Tribune, a Harvard study shows that the media was in fact biased against the former president. The study found that in Trump's first 100 days in office, the tone of the news coverage of the president has been a whopping 80 percent negative to 20 percent positive (Kass 2017).

A prime example of weak sources is the still ongoing pandemic (COVID-19). Us civilians have manipulated and taken a lot of information from weak and unreliable sources, spreading them to everyone we know, and of course some if not most politicians have added their own touch to that. We may have been the reason that so many people are dead, you have some health officials and even scientists who were exaggerating the number of cases or fatalities and on the other hand you have others who were playing it down which caused a certain number of people to either panic or act like there was nothing going on. Our need to spread misinformation has gone out of hand, and it is not helping anyone. It is putting everyone’s life on the line, and we need to be more considerate. It seems like the pandemic is almost over, which in my humble opinion is the best piece of news you could receive today. According to the CDC and multiple sources, globally we apparently have around 182,000,000 estimate COVID-19 cases and 3,950,000 fatalities. Now don’t get me wrong those numbers are astronomical; however, most news sources keep saying that COVID-19 is as dangerous as the Spanish Flu, which not only is that incorrect but also dehumanizing and disrespectful to both pandemics. The Spanish Flu infected around 500,000,000 people and killed 60,000,000 others. It was devastating. The survival rate for each disease is where most news sources should draw attention to. COVID-19 has a survival rate of almost 99% among most adults and 98% among senior citizens and infants. What most people don’t know that you will most likely survive the pandemic, as this disease mostly kills people with preexisting health conditions on top of being a newborn or a relatively old person. There are, of course, certain rare cases where a healthy young adult dies of COVID-19 not to mention that the main and sole reason that most people who get diagnosed with COVID-19 and then pass away is because of other causes on top of the disease not because of COVID-19 alone, only a very small number of people died solely from COVID-19. According to the author Lima in his editorial paper that was published in 2020, the disease is quite easy to recover from, as most people who were laboratory tested, 80% of them showed mildly to moderate signs, that includes some people who had Pneumonia at the time, and only 13.8% showed severe signs, which indicates the mildness of the disease.

Lastly, lies, lies are everywhere, on social media, TV, newspapers, you name it. People are naturally biased, and it is quite rare to see an unbiased person, not that they don’t exist, they definitely do, they are just the minority per se. There is a guy on YouTube that goes under the name “Upper Echelon Gaming”, he made a video not too long ago, back in February 2021, talking about lies of the media and how they could ruin your image in one article and that they mostly do it on purpose to gain attention and how they almost ruined Jordan Peterson’s image. Who is by the way a professor, psychologist and author. It is quite terrifying to think about, yet it’s the truth. The media, regardless of its form, will always try to exploit a person or a piece of information to either gain attention or money. Most information sources are twisted to fit a specific narrative or agenda, and we have to be aware, as anyone one of us could at some point face an experience similar to that.

Finally, it may be concluded that although the media plays a huge role in our lives as we need it to get some very critical information, we have to keep in mind that these news sources are owned by private entities, and they are able to manipulate any information to fit their own personal agendas. According to Encyclopedia.com, In an old study that was conducted by CNN in the late 1980s, it showed that almost all Americans believed that the media and the government were both hiding some sort of classified information from the public eye. Our duty here is to pay attention to every news source carefully, we can take the most important and critical pieces of information without projecting bias toward other people, we don’t need to affiliate ourselves with certain news sources, as the only thing we will be gaining from them is a headache.