Shaping Opinions through the Use of Mass Media

Abstract
Since the invention of the radio, mass media has ingrained itself into not only American culture, but also world culture. Americans rely on mass media to get the latest news, check the weather, research, and for social networking. Obviously, it has played an influential role in shaping opinions and changing attitudes. Not only does mass media affect culture, but it travels through the social hierarchy all the way down to the individual level. This has dire implications for social interaction. Not only does it affect individuals, but mass media also influences what happens in government. It not only aids in policy creation, but in turn can influence attitudes to reflect the agenda being set.

“He who controls the media controls the message” (Simons, 2008). Today there are several different forms of mass media. It includes: radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. It is a very valuable source for marketers because people rely on the mass media for several different facets of their life. In an average day, Americans are bombarded with over six hundred advertising messages a day.

Because of this marketers have turned to psychology to capture the minds of the individuals around the world. Advertising isn’t just for the adults; there has been a huge surge of growth in marketing to children, mostly because they are easily swayed to hold a certain attitude with a little persuasion.

“The growth in marketing efforts targeting children has seemingly fueled an increase in the industry’s use of applied psychologists working as marketing researchers or consultants to enhance the persuasive effect of children-oriented advertising campaigns” (Wilcox, Kunkel, Cantor, Dowrick, Linn, & Palmer, 2004). Since this is a relatively new development, there is little research on the long-term effects of this new advertiser, psychologist partnership. Marketers aren’t just targeting the older population of children, but also the very young children.
Children who are very young are still in the developmental stage and their brains are not hard-wired to understand the difference between reality and the reality an advertisement presents to the child.

“All advertising to children too young to recognize the persuasive intent of such messages is by its very nature exploitative” (Wilcox, Kunkel, Cantor, Dowrick, Linn, & Palmer, 2004).

It’s not just children who are affected by the mass media. The advertising industry is not the only institution using the mass media to gain the people’s attention. “The pictures in people’s minds about the outside world are significantly influenced by the mass media, both what those pictures are about and what those pictures are” (McCombs, 2010).

In today’s world, there are twenty-four hour news organizations that relay the news all day and night, three-hundred sixty-five days a year. Some of these programs garner audiences of over five million viewers and that’s only one form of mass media.

Americans spend about eighty percent of their time using mass media and it is only increasing. Any person who uses mass media in any of its forms is going to be subject to influence by it.

In order for a mature understanding of advertising messages, two information processing assignments must take place.
First, the individual must be able to understand the difference between commercial content and noncommercial content. Then differentiate the difference between reality and non-reality (Wilcox, Kunkel, Cantor, Dowrick, Linn, & Palmer, 2004). Children cannot differentiate between the two and are vulnerable to advertisements that persuade them to change their behaviors.

There have been studies that show a positive correlation between advertisements targeting children that feature candy, fast food, and snacks and that the advertising increases the consumption of those products (Wilcox, Kunkel, Cantor, Dowrick, Linn, & Palmer, 2004).

Americans collective knowledge is largely based on what is told through mass media. Whatever holds priority in the media organizations strongly influence the priorities of the public at large. Consequently, issues that are heavily emphasized are also heavily emphasized in the public’s conscience. People not only acquire factual information about public affairs from the news media, but they also learn to attach importance to a topic based on the emphasis placed in the news (McCombs, 2010).

In essence, the news media has what is called agenda setting powers. This can be explained by a principal psychological trait of orientation. Within every human is the need to understand the environment surrounding them.

Until orientation is completed, anxiety is the result of the absence of understanding. To reach orientation, people will use the available resources to further their understanding of said situation. “Attitudes and behaviors are usually governed by cognitions- what a person knows, thinks, believes” (Agenda Setting and the Mass Media, 2010).

With such little research into the agenda-setting purpose of news organizations, the resulting consequences have yet to be realized.
Mass media is a crucial cog in the wheel of policy creation. Without the mass media, government could not obtain the necessary public support to further whatever cause it wants to put forth.

Early studies concluded that the media did little to sway public opinion, but because the agenda setting capacity of mass media has become evident, it does indeed play a vital role in mass political decision making (Agenda Setting and the Mass Media, 2010). Two influential scholars in agenda setting research, McCombs and Shaw hypothesized that the mass media may have little influence on the intensity or direction of attitudes, it does indeed had an effect on the salience , or the importance of an item that makes it stand out against other similar attitudes. This holds especially true when it comes to political issues.

In a 1986 Japanese mayoral election, in Machida City, agenda setting was apparent even at the local level. Machida City was then a city of 320,000 residents in the Tokyo business district. The three most prominent political issues were welfare policies, city building, and local taxes. A comparison of the four major newspapers in the area resulted in a positive correlation between the emphasis in the newspapers and the prominence in the top seven political issues in the public mind (McCombs, 2010).

Another example of the government using the mass media to promote a particular view was the Bush Administration. Then President Bush felt that mass media was an essential element for gaining support for American involvement in Iraq. In doing so, his administration chose images that transmitted a positive message and censored the negative ones (Simons, 2008). Not only did the Bush administration use mass media to influence Americans, they also paid journalists in Cuba to provide anti-government messages to the people of Cuba. The United States also has a history of paying off Iraqi journalists to include preferred news items in their publications that stand with the Bush administration’s views on Iraq.

Priming, as defined in the book Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, is “the implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a subsequent stimulus.” Therefore, priming is an important aspect in agenda setting, but is an even more powerful way the media manipulates elections and the shaping of government. “The media, in the modern era, are indisputably an instrument of war” (Simons, 2008).

Research over the years has revealed that the media has a significant direct influence on public opinion that strengthens and activates existing opinion, as well as creating new opinion (Morgan, 2010). The principal reason that the media has such an effect on opinion is because the news organizations cover stories at home and abroad, where “problems that are out of reach and out of sight- the aspects of the world with which mass public does not have regular direct or meaningful contact” (Yin, 1999). The key idea is that the media doesn’t tell the public what to think, but what to think about. Using agenda setting, news organizations choose what issues political figures are judged on, calling attention to some while ignoring others completely (Agenda Setting and the Mass Media, 2010). The appearance of truth and reality exist in the media’s concept of unassailable evidence (Simons, 2008).
To sum it all, “news outlets often misrepresent information in ways that misrepresent the facts” (Law, 2005).

Mass media affects all individuals who use it as well as the bystanders, children. Children, especially, cannot differentiate between what is persuasion and reality. To them, it is all the same. Not only are children affected by mass media and advertisements, but the public at large is also affected. The mass media play an influential part in the creation of public policy and can make or break whatever agenda the government desires to set forth. Elaborating further, mass media has the power to shape opinions and attitudes, for “he who controls the media, controls the message.”