Mass Media Both
Reflect and Affect
Politics, Society
and Culture
The media industries provide information and
entertainment, but media also can affect political,
social and cultural institutions. Although the
media actively influence society, they also mirror
it, and scholars constantly strive to delineate the
differences.
For example, when the advertising industry
suddenly started using patriotic themes to market
products after the U.S. military moved into
Iraq in 2003, was the industry pandering to the
public, or were advertisers proudly reflecting genuine
American sentiment, or both? Did the spread
of patriotic advertising themes silence those who disagreed
with the government? What role did the mass media play in
setting the political agenda? If you were a scholar studying
the mass media, how would you view these developments?
This is an example of the difficulty scholars face when
analyzing mass media’s political, social and cultural effects.
Early media studies analyzed each message in the belief
that once a message was sent, everyone would receive
and react to the message in the same way. Then studies
proved that different people process messages differently—
a phenomenon described as selective perception. This
occurs because everyone brings many variables—family
background, interests and education, for example—to each
message.
Complicating the study of mass media’s political, social
and cultural effects is the recent proliferation of media outlets.
The multiplying sources for information and entertainment
today mean that very few people share identical mass
media environments. This makes it much more difficult for
scholars to determine the specific or cumulative effects of
mass media on the general population.
Still, scholars’ attempts to describe mass media’s
political, social and cultural roles in society are important
because, once identified, the effects can be observed. The
questions should be posed so we do not become complacent
about media in our lives, so we do not become immune to the
possibility that our society may be cumulatively affected by
media in ways we cannot yet identify.
“Marketers used to try their hardest to reach people at
home, when they were watching TV or reading newspapers
or magazines. But consumers’ viewing and reading habits
are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best
way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their
eye at literally every turn,” reports The New York Times.