Did you know, that there are about 1000 billionaires in the world? Did you know that their wealth exceeds the annual income of half the world’s population put together? That means that less than 0.005% of the world’s population owns most of the world’s possessions.
Did you know that access to clean and running water in third world countries has actually decreased and not increased since the 1970s?
Did you know that it took the Church 44 years to ‘forgive’ John Lennon for saying that The Beatles had become more popular than Jesus?
Did you know that The Church had attempted to stop the Harry Potter movies for fear that it might have turned children away from religion and closer to the occult?
I bet you didn’t, but sure enough you knew all about Princess Diana’s tragic story, Michael Jackson’s overdose, and Tiger Woods’ shenanigans.
According to Ozzy Osborne, TV is the most powerful thing that has ever been invented. Whether this stands true or not is a mystery, in fact the full power of the media in general is still unknown. Newspapers can portray villains as angels, and TV can easily turn causes into crusades. The plain truth is that in the wrong hands, any mass medium is as dangerous as the combination of screwed up values and deep pockets.
During the Cold War, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, most were led to believe that the Russian people’s values were dramatically opposite to those of the Americans. The truth is that for the most part, the values of people all over the world are the same. The difference back then, was that the Soviet Union had achieved its main societal values through dictatorship, torture and imprisonment, whilst in America, as with other democracies, this was achieved, without bloodshed, and mostly through the influence of the media which is proficient in disguising the authorities’ preferred values as the natural norm.
In democracies, especially liberal ones like those of the US and Western Europe, the media is one of the main tools of socialization. Whether intentionally or not the media perpetuates social constructs - the process through which people learn and inherit values, norms and beliefs. It is clearly much more effective than anything else because it is usually masked as entertainment and conviction is sublime enough not to require the loss of limbs or other body parts. The media comes across as egalitarian, but as Noam Chomsky once said, a dictator would be full of admiration at the uniformity and obedience of it.
Today we live under the impression that we can get information about anything, and because there’s a myriad of different sources to get it from, we’re also under the impression that we can somehow get an unbiased view. We live under the illusion that there’s too much information and that not much is controlled by anyone or anything. Most would also argue that with online technology, freedom of expression has increased exponentially. Perhaps it has, but surely not at the rate that we’re being led to believe.
Most of the information that reaches us is more of the same, controlled by something or someone, somewhere. Most news items that make it out on the airwaves and into print runs are safe half truths. Proof of this is that most of what we get to know about is not in the slightest way subversive or rebellious, when we all know that the truth mostly always is!
Reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor prove that whatever people pretend to be, their basic values, needs and desires, are practically always the same. New values are hardly ever created, they are merely brought out in the open when under duress, but the insatiability, the hunger for physical contact, and the itch for material gain, which comes out so clearly in these shows, are the same as what one would find in the man in the street.
This argument is usually very successfully used to defend and minimize the effect of the media on society. If we believe that the media does not create values, but simply reflects what is already present in society, then the media is not to blame for anything. However there are various values and stances out there, and it is the ones which the media chooses to favour, that perpetuate and make it into mainstream cultures.
For example, after the September 11th attacks, American media portrayed Osama Bin Laden as the villain behind the attacks. They did this on the instructions of the US government and US military authorities. This in turn shaped public opinion worldwide, gaining the US support on the war against terrorism and their subsequent attack and seizure of Afghanistan.
What if the media had received biased or inaccurate information about the true nature of the attacks? That would have made the public’s support absolutely worthless. And yet, today, the war against terrorism is one of the most fundamental values that the Americans live by, and have influenced most of the world with.
As William Bernbach once said “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”