Final Exam!!!

According to Wikipedia , here is the definition of Media: “
Media (the plural of "medium") is a truncation of the term media of communication, referring to those organized means of dissemination of fact, opinion, entertainment, and other information, such as newspapers, magazines,banners and billboards,cinema films, radio, television, the World Wide Web, billboards, books, CDs, DVDs, videocassettes, computer games and other forms of publishing. Although writers currently differ in their preference for using media in the singular ("the media is...") or the plural ("the media are..."), the former will still incur criticism in some situations. (Please see data for a similar example.) Academic programs for the study of mass media are usually referred to as mass communication programs.”
There are six models of the mass media that I'm going to define very briefly. But remember, as Prof. Pimpare said in class, “the Media can’t tell you what to think, but what to think about.”
The first model is the Objective Fact Model, where the media serves as a tool, between the government and the citizens, informing them about facts and no judgments or comments about what happened. The main critic about that model is that it is realistically impossible to inform the public about everything, there is just too much information. The second model is the Neutral Adversary Model, where media don't take sides but understand its function to check on the government. The third model is the Public Advocate Model. Journalists have the mission to inform and responsibly the public. The Profit-Seeker Model doesn't need more that its name to be understood. In our capitalist society, the media are big corporations, always looking for more profits, and thus, are selling us the news we want to buy. The Propagandist Model is according to Leighley “the chief purpose of the media is to support and advance the interests of those in positions of power.” Our last model is the Tocquevill/Pimpare Model which claims that the media should be free and available to anybody. All the news should be in them, and it is everyone’s task to make his/her own judgement about what’s going on in the world.
My opinion is that the ideal model is realistically impossible to reach .However I don't believe that each one of the models that I just described is actually 100% accurate. We live in a such complicated world, where, as Leighley explains, everyone one of us has another frame of mind, everyone of us understands differently the same information, that it is just impossible for me to conceive a model like the Objective Fact Model. At the same time, I am sure that the Profit-Seeker Model exists in everyone of those models. My ideal model would be then a model where the media would be free from any outside lobby. As much that I understand that it is impossible to find totally objective people, it shouldn't stop us to at least try to get as close as possible to the goal of finding them, instead of hiring pro-whatever political affiliation journalists. This media should be free (there are solutions for funding with a minimum of lobbying at the same time) and should be available to whoever would want to get it. It should report objective facts but in a very random order to avoid the danger of psychological association.
The performance of the Main Media/Big Media using my model that I would call Amram’s Model, is real a disaster. As Leighley says “It would seem unfair to argue that the business of privately owned media corporations is to offer in-depth, analytically political coverage to an audience that has no interest in it.” But, the problem is not that people do not know about politics; the real question is why people do no care enough about politics. After all, the power that government detains comes from the people themselves. One of our assignments for our class was to go on a political blog and to review the Comments on any one substantive entry. In Alana’s Views , Alana brought the example of a “posting entitled "Bush won't help fight the terror of crime in US cities," Joe from D.C. argued that the crime rate is increasing since more money is going towards the war on terror than to local violence. He brought in substantial quotes to prove his point, resulting in a brief but interesting post. This post elicited 135 comments. Some responders did make thought provoking comments with a point. Most did not. A lot of the bloggers gave one-line answers that failed to add anything to the discussion. For example, dad said, "criminals vote republican failure pays." Another wrote, "this govt doesnt give a rats ass about los angeles. they shoot all their propaganda in canada, to fuck the union writers, actors and directors." Regardless of whether or not these statements are true, they fail to add anything to the political discourse”
Many surveys were made to evaluate the level of knowledge that individuals have in terms of political knowledge. Well, all show a serious lack of basic political knowledge. The problem with those surveys is that the assumption is that “the knowledge is freely and easily available.” And it is not. While some people complain that The New-York Times’s level of writing is very low, others aren’t able to read it because it is too high, and of course because it costs money. We’re really not aware of the fact that people, nowadays, still share phones. Not somewhere in the South, in a lost village, but here in New-York City, in the Bronx.
Leighley asks the following question: Why politicians seem to be so critical of the news produced by the mass media? The answer is of course that media always seek for the sensational news, and psychologically, individuals are attracted to them. Meanwhile, “politicians cannot be satisfied with this, especially since they are devoting more resources than ever to managing media relations.” But media do depend on them for the news coverage, since they make the laws and take decisions. So, it is a constant debate what should be said to the media, and how it should be exposed to the public, and that’s why I think that Amram’s Model wouldn’t have that kind of issues since it would be a neutral media, which would just quote whatever the official said, entirely, and it couldn’t be accused of bias.
To get back to the idea that power is given by the people to the government, it is also true that the elected officials generally “respond to citizen’s policy preferences.” One could also imagine different models of politicians, the Profit-Seeker would be the one who would do anything to get elected, the Public Advocate Model would be the one who would do what seems to be the best for his constituency etc… But, in the end of the day, we are the ones who are making the decisions, since we are the one who vote for them. If we decide to not go along with the politician’s Profit-Seeker, by the next elections either he will not be there anymore or he will have changed his strategy, if he is smart enough.
Regarding Government Secrecy and a Free Press, we had the visit of Steven Aftergood, who is the Director of the Government Secret Project of the Federation of American Scientists. Yoni Noble, in his famous PublicAgenda.org, we read an article about the 20 questions that should be asked on any poll that would come up in front of us. Questions like who did the poll, who paid for it, what questions were asked and in what order….do show the liability of a poll. Psychology is used a lot, and manipulation is definitely part of the game. For example, if the person asking the question the questions wears an orange t-shirt seeking to know what a rabbit eats, 97% of the answers will be carrots. Why not 100%? Well there is always a 3% of margin of error.
Political Science being a soft science never has one definition for one specific term. Propaganda is defined according to Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy by “Schumpeter (1966) as “any statement emanating from a source that we do not like”, while Jones affected to see no difference between propaganda and the institution-bound transmission of information.” Nevertheless, it is true that the term propaganda has a very bad connotation; people see through it a picture of a dictatorial state. As O’Shaughnessy brings for examples, rumors is a very dangerous phenomena and get to extremes like claiming that the Holocaust never happened or that Nine-Eleven was a CIA or an Israeli plot.
But we are manipulated, on some levels, by some symbols. For example, we watched in class a clip from a candidate who was talking from a Church with the Cross in his back, then we could hear his voice but see him at the same time with his wife smiling (both of them of course) and their dog (there is always a dog!). All those symbols, and myths are deliberately put there, and even if unconsciously people don’t pay attention to them, it still sticks in the back of their mind until the day of the election when they will pick A and not B, because B had a red car, and who would vote for somebody who owns a red car? For the same reason, big companies continue to pay for the same adds to be shown on television, like the Corona one. It’s not to promote their product; most people know about it already. It is only to make an impression in order for the potential client to choose their product and not another one the day she will be at the supermarket.
The New Media’s situation is a little more complicated, since it is new and we haven’t so far so much of it in order to evaluate its impact. INTERNET!! That’s the word. This invention which connects people from all over the world, and apparently facilitates communication, seems to perfectly fit Amram’s Model. The information is right here, on anybody’s computer, at any time. Hold on. Did I just say computer? Some people are still up to sharing a phone and I am talking about getting a wireless connection, using my laptop, download music to my iPod, paying the DSL connection… Did I forget to mention that the same corporations that own the Main Stream Media (MSM) own the biggest news websites? Indeed, we counted between 6 to 7 big corporations who share 90% of the MSM, and those corporations do not only own Media, they also own oil companies, gas companies… so talking about neutrality after know those information becomes a little hard. To almost finish with the internet, who said they were free of charge? Some websites make you pay to access to their articles or opinions. Amram’s Model claims that everything should be as available as possible, and what we see with that kind of new media is the transition from the inconveniency of the MSN to the New Media phenomena.
And Moshe Said “Let There Be Gilmor…” And There Was Gilmor. Dan Gilmor has a very positive and futurist view on the New Media. He believes that there is a big revolution and it is because of the beautiful invention of the blogs. We saw in class a short movie about some students who saw blogging as being a citizen-journalist. As Gilmor explains, blogs are a collection of everybody’s knowledge. Each one of us has something to offer, knows something that others don’t and that’s where blogs come up. They’re here to offer an opportunity to everybody to share that knowledge and also to express their views on other people’s blogs. If Wikipedia
became one of the top 10 websites visited (from the 28th last year) it is because Wikipedia is a super-blog. So many surveys were made, and most of them conclude that because Wikipedia is so popular, it is also accurate as well. People check the articles that they wrote and discussions are taken as to know if some substance of the article has to be change or not.
In order for Amram’s Model to be working, we then would need a free access to internet to the entire world, which is realistically impossible. My suggestion could be summarized in one word: EDUCATION. People have to be aware of the New Media. If people do not vote, if people do not read newspapers, it is just because they do not see the importance of it, for whatever reason. So, by educating them of what they could gain from the New Media, they would find a way to access it. There are libraries all over New York City with free access to the internet. People, instead of going on the MSM’s websites, should be going on blogs and read the comments to get a better understanding of whatever news they’re interested of. It should be up to the people to make up their own mind.