Argumentative arguing how negativly the meadia influences the masses during times of war - Research Paper Example

Yet, both politics and journalism make claims to a standard of objectivity that often hides the political bias in the construction of “social fact”. It is through shared communication methods such as literature, newspapers, the internet, tv news, etc. that people in modern societies form their views on complex political issues that may affect the lives of millions. Nowhere is this more exemplified than in issues of international relations or foreign policies, and the conduct of war – which has led nations across the world into millions of deaths and untold destruction primarily through the dissemination of political views and ideologies throughout large populations that permitted organized military violence by the State.

In general, the television news and newspapers frame the discourse by publishing a type of collective debate between opposing viewpoints as they relate to current events and pertinent issues of social governance in a democracy. As Noam Chomsky writes in “The Culture of Terrorism,” "The leveling of discourse within the ideological system is an extremely important matter. Part of the genius of American democracy has been to ensure that isolated individuals face concentrated state and private power alone, without the support of an organizational structure that can assist them in thinking for themselves or entering into meaningful political action, and with few avenues for public expression of fact or analysis that might challenge approved doctrine.

adherence to doctrinal truth confers substantial reward: not only acceptance within the system of power and a ready path to privilege, but also the inestimable advantage of freedom from the onerous demands of thought, inquiry and argument. Conformity frees one from the burden of evidence, and rational argument is superfluous while one is marching in an approved parade.” (Chomsky, 1988) The media act as a “fourth branch” of government, essential to the healthy functioning of a democracy systematically.

Minority political groups may be forced to resort to other means to organize their viewpoints and distribute them popularly if they cannot gain mass-media access, but there is little practical guarantee that minority communication channels can compete with mass-media communication networks that dominate the public construction of issues debated in modern societies politically. This is one way that political hegemony may operate in repressing views unfavorable to the status quo of hierarchical power distributions.

The media never covers a war neutrally with just the facts. They report stories or fabricate ones that they believe will gain ratings or sell papers. This is the definition of “Yellow Journalism,” and it can be seen historically as the way that the public was rallied to war, from the early days of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Rough Rider” raids on Cuba to the modern conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the establishment of the news empire by William Randolph Hearst, mass-media news sources increasingly pursued a centralized, corporate model of operations that mirror in many ways the development of the superpowers themselves.

The Hearst papers had the budget required to “