Media Ethics (Philosophy) - Essay Example

And with this haunting one’s mind, there is basically nowhere to better start looking for the answer but in the very institution that is created for these dynamic exchanges – media. Recognizing the vast influence and the major role that mass media plays in he lives of people, Noam Chomsky’s definition of mass media strikes at the very heart of what it is all about. He claims that “the mass media serve as the system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.

”1 If the very nature of mass media is what Chomsky describes it to be, it is but fitting for us to reevaluate the value of mass media, as we now know it. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media claim that mass media is never really objective and fair in its account of what is happening around us, around the world. Rather, mass media since the start of the late modern period and made more significant after the end of World War II has been an institution that caters to the demands and whims of the capitalists owners and major stock holders in the field.

Thus, tainting the noble start of media – to inform people. Chomsky is in fact claiming that media is in effect a tool that is being used for propaganda by the superstructure that dominates the society. And this is made possible because the “raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaign.

”2 And one of these filters is “anticommunism” as