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Mass Media

Mass media are extremely important agents of socialization because they make visible major and minor features of the culture and are ubiquitous. It is very difficult for anyone who is remotely a social being to avoid being affected by television, radio, newspapers and other print media, or the Internet--all of which bear the symbols, information, history, and content of cultural experience. Exposure to media shapes perceptions because what is presented is perceived to have a reality.

Media content has been found to powerfully affect perception and opinion, and media resources and sources can influence the production of content. For example, the perception of American poverty is that the poor are mainly African American families headed by single mothers--a view reinforced by TV reports that stereotype poverty with that image (Scott and Schwartz 150). That in turn reinforces social expectations of the demographic group being portrayed and those of the public. Racial identity is thus stigmatized in public imagination. Racial cleavages are also fed by programs that valorize the color white and condemn as evil the color black (152). The negative associations with blackness permeate the culture.

According to the propaganda model, there is a connection between media activity and the objectives of certain institutions, including government, which may seek to influence media to support its policies, and corporations, which may seek to use media to support its marketing goals. An example would be the government's use of or benefiting from media content that advances war objectives or ideological arguments. TV news offers policy advocates a forum for advancing the government's views, and to the degree the government's own media apparatus gets into the act it may be able to control the content of news. Here the example would be the restrictions put on news reporting from "embedded" journalists in Iraq. Corporate media sources seem more de...

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Mass Media. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:46, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683216.html