.Many news consultants claim that no matter what they say, the audience prefers to watch good-looking, likable people it can relate to (perhaps of the same age group, race, etc.) Unfortunately, in some markets the top anchors are sometimes hat racks who read beautifully but who can barely type a sentence or two without the aid of the producer and writer (Postman 30, 1992).
TV news also depicts a family-oriented presentation. They have a female anchor and a male sitting side by side looking happy in order to ensure everything is fine. Another factor that affects news on television is the music that is played when the news program begins and ends, and is always penetrated in between. This is evidence for the dissolution of lines of demarcation between serious public discourse and entertainment. If there were no music at any given point, especially in the beginning the audience might expect something life-altering. The media presents itself as if it is familiar to its audience.
The same familiarity is established through personalized language, which plays a considerable role in advanced communication. It is your congressman, your highway, your favorite drugstore, your newspaper; it is brought to you, it invites you, etc Its success indicates that it promotes the self-identification of the individuals with the functions which they and the others perform (Marcuse 92).
The medium in the media has the capacity to shape and form the values, beliefs, and opinions of the mass populace. How do they do this? They do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits (Chomsky 55, 1994). The media determines, selects, controls and restricts information from the original pleat in order to serve the interests of politicians and elite groups in America. For instance, when America wants to induce the public to go to war, the government presents a theory of its political leadership as being committed to war through the media; after all they are seen through the media lens as God s Country . However this is a very heavy burden of proof to meet because a war is a very catastrophic affair. When a political debate is formed with citizen participation, the only topic that is covered is the ramifications of the war; how should they plan the attack, what will determine the climax in order to intervene, or even how much tax payers will contribute to the military. Never or rarely do they talk about a peaceful settlement. The United States have been criticized of intervening into foreign affairs only when they somehow profit from it. With the comfort of media producing a one dimensional and pluralist democracy, dissent will be repressed and America can intervene much easier.
The media perseveres and expands upper echelon power amidst the corporate and political sectors in America. The media s monolithic ideologies, which are either formed or imposed on them by agencies like AIM, have favored the conglomerate corporations and politicians by articulating their values, beliefs and their accomplishments. Nonetheless, advertisement plays a significant role to substantiate the dominant class in America. Corporations use the media to sell their product in advertisements in newspapers and television. In effect, advertisements indoctrinate the public; it produces a false consciousness. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe (Marcuse 12). Marx has redefined ideology-in the capitalistic sense- as a false consciousness in which consequences are treated as causes and real social relations are mystified in order to perpetuate the status quo or the interest of the dominant class. This is what American ideology has come to with the helping arm of the media.
Herbert Marcuse postulates that humans have needs, they are inevitable. There are two categories of needs; true needs and false needs . True needs are things that are necessary to acquire in order to ensure survival (i.e. food, shelter, and clothes). False needs are those which are superimposed on upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice (Marcuse 5). These false needs are imposed on the individual by external powers, channeled through the media.
Freedoms have become a delusional weapon that retains the elite population. The new modes of liberties need a carefully assessed evaluation.
Thus economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy-from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would mean liberation from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, abolition of public opinion together with its makers (Marcuse 4).
Marcuse concluded that the only manner a individual will achieve individuality or self-determination is by liberating him or herself from the media.
Politicians manipulate the mass populace indirectly through advertisements, whereas corporations attack their audience directly. Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individual through the way in which it is organized (Marcuse 1). The tactics politician s channel through the media is much more complex than how the corporations manipulate the public. Advertising has invented these corporate monsters, the circulation of the newspaper promoted business products and television invites their available merchandise to households.
In the newspaper, advertisement cost comes into accordance with the size of the ad and its location. Business firms find that ideal spots are in short distance from exciting news. Marshall McLuhan has argued that bad news sells good news. Bad news is real news for the reader. One must consider that the newspaper is what McLuhan calls a hot medium, where the individual must partake in high participation to read. A cool medium would be a TV, where there is low participation. Bad news brings upon not only reader participation but intensity as well. Good news is advertisements. Ads , have to shrill their happy message loud and clear in order to match the penetrating power of bad news (McLuhan 188). An individual may be reading about a devastating earthquake that cost 100,000 lives, and than on the same page find an ad that elicits its message loud and clear; INVENTORY BLOWOUT! . Now the readers focus is on the rest of the ad s detail.
Corporations approach and bid their advertisements in a different way on television. Accountants, business people, and managers are statistically watching the television audience. Rating companies do not simply count the viewers of a particular show , they slice, dice, chop, and crunch the viewer information, then report to advertisers who pay them for these statistics (Postman 7, 1992). Demographics are also taken into account when statistics are documented; particularly they provide a statistical picture of the age, sex, and income of who habitually watch programs. Advertisers of toys will advertise on cartoons; advertisers of cosmetics advertise on soap operas; and advertisers of running shoes will advertise on sporting events. Since the commercial involves the eye more than the ear, the best commercials are the most appealing. With the fascinating complexities American media corporations own, commercializing can take form in multi-dimensions. Advertisements have the ability to manipulate a population s social and psychic lives. They tell people to buy their product if they want to become attractive, or they tell everyone to buy a computer and hook themselves up to the Internet so they can see more of their junk advertisements; they do this indirectly by proposing their Internet address on screen.
Not only do news and advertisements create a pluralist society, but regular television programs carry the same potential as well. These are programs Chomsky calls necessary illusions – unreal things that are important. These necessary illusions allow the individual to escape reality and find themselves in some form of fantasy; these necessary illusions are often the topic of social conversation; these necessary illusions allows the media to become synergetic- newspapers and magazines can be used to promote the lives of celebrities in movies, television-series, or sporting events or vice-versa. Therein is our problem, for television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations (Postman 16). Sport teams, for example, are an important cultural trait in America. The media forms American culture, and it is slowly permeating overseas.
Politicians need to stand on good terms with the media to prevent any disruption to their master position. Corporations need newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting not solely to sell their goods, but also to maintain their economic and political influence.
The main trends are familiar: concentration of the national economy on the needs of the big corporations, with the government as a stimulating, supporting, and sometimes even controlling force: hitching of this economy to a world-wide system of military alliances, monetary arrangements, technical assistance and development schemes; gradual assimilation of blue-collar and white-collar population, of leadership types in business and labor, of leisure activities and aspirations in different social classes; fostering of a pre-established harmony between scholarship and the national purpose; invasion of the private household by the togetherness of public opinion; opening of the bedroom to the media of mass communications (Marcuse 19).
The media are no longer neutral agents of the merchants and politicians but essential gears in the machinery of corporate gigantism and political pluralism.
In America, political and corporate power asserts itself through its power over the media apparatus. The elite can maintain, sustain, and substantiate themselves only when it succeeds in mobilizing, organizing, and exploiting the technical, scientific, and mechanical productivity available to them. In this case, it is clearly evident that the media has provided the higher echelon the opportunity to succumb to their ideological measures. It is also unmistakable that technological administration shapes and forms American values and beliefs in the social and political spheres. The control of media is the most effective political and corporate instrument, where they have the power to form the mass public to their status quo.
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