Influence of Media on the Ideas of People
An essay on the influence of mass media on the ideas of people
The mass media including television, radio and newspapers have a massive influence in shaping the minds of people. Let us pause for a moment and examine the statement made. The statement written above claims that the minds of people have been shaped and moulded by the media used to communicate information to the masses – not as much by the message being communicated. In essence, this means that these channels of mass communication either magnify the influence of the message being communicated or bear within themselves the power to influence the ideation and decision-making abilities of people. To put it in everyday language, the mass media has the power to take an average bedtime story and drive millions to the point of suicide. When understood in this sense, I am in complete agreement with this concept.
This is not a concept merely based on ignorant assumptions, but is an idea that history itself has borne witness to. Travel with me back in time, seventy two years ago in the first week of November, when Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on The Air performed a radio broadcast version of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. The broadcast, enlivened with simulated but realistic-sounding journalistic reporting, told the story of a Martian invasion that was presented as actually underway in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. An absence of commercial interruptions convinced some of the listeners that the drama was in fact a nonfictional account, and ensued in reports of panic – the New York Times front page headline read “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact”. Scholars claimed that as many as 1.7 million listeners (the portion of the six million estimated to have heard the broadcast) “believed it to be true,” of whom 1.2 million were said to be “genuinely frightened, some even considering suicide.” Surely, this instance demonstrates the ability of the mass media to toggle with the brains of its
The mass media including television, radio and newspapers have a massive influence in shaping the minds of people. Let us pause for a moment and examine the statement made. The statement written above claims that the minds of people have been shaped and moulded by the media used to communicate information to the masses – not as much by the message being communicated. In essence, this means that these channels of mass communication either magnify the influence of the message being communicated or bear within themselves the power to influence the ideation and decision-making abilities of people. To put it in everyday language, the mass media has the power to take an average bedtime story and drive millions to the point of suicide. When understood in this sense, I am in complete agreement with this concept.
This is not a concept merely based on ignorant assumptions, but is an idea that history itself has borne witness to. Travel with me back in time, seventy two years ago in the first week of November, when Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre on The Air performed a radio broadcast version of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. The broadcast, enlivened with simulated but realistic-sounding journalistic reporting, told the story of a Martian invasion that was presented as actually underway in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. An absence of commercial interruptions convinced some of the listeners that the drama was in fact a nonfictional account, and ensued in reports of panic – the New York Times front page headline read “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact”. Scholars claimed that as many as 1.7 million listeners (the portion of the six million estimated to have heard the broadcast) “believed it to be true,” of whom 1.2 million were said to be “genuinely frightened, some even considering suicide.” Surely, this instance demonstrates the ability of the mass media to toggle with the brains of its