Reflection, the Finale

Taking a look back at the times where I'd stay up late watching TV, I remember that I watched a lot of infomercials and even today, due to basic cable, see a lot of infomercials too. When I'm at my grandparents, eating dinner, my relatives typically turn on the news channel in the dining room and I listen in to the stories, and when I'm done eating, I sit in the family room where the news is also being broadcasted. When I use the internet, there are tons and tons of stories about what's going on in the world. So basically, I'm exposed to the media every single day, even from people who talk about what's going on in the world. When I hear these stories, it immediately goes to the part of my brain of the value systems, and then it affects my view on reality, as the media is able to make reality assumptions. The media actually is shaping my brain to believe that different things are going on in the world and they're my only way to figure this out.

Being aware of the way the media is producing things is actually very important. Because they're allowed to manipulate words, events, stories, etc. like in the news or for a product, they can basically control what we think with a few simple words. I believe limiting the media only to advertisers is silly; isn't the news just advertising the things going on in real life? You can apply lots of the things used to analyze and break down advertisements to the news broadcasts.

When I watch the news, I realize they typically pick stories of bad things that have happened and those typically have the most coverage due to the amount of viewers they gain for those stories being interesting. After critical thinking, I've used some of the habits to debunk these stories and understand why they come first. Even in the drama I was watching, Pinocchio, they focused a lot on how the media coverage is used to derail our minds from what's really being presented. Like when a certain news station covers an event such as a police shooting or anything in the media that covers the police shootings, I find myself having problems joining the outrageous bandwagon every other person seems to be along; the "fact" that all police are bad or corrupt. Through tentativeness and keeping an open mind, I've been questioning why people have been judging the police force to be like this, an recently I saw the effect of this as police officers now have to wear cameras on their bodies to monitor behavior. The media can make any hero a villain, and can also make any villain a hero. I remember during this one discussion about media in some class where we looked at a video of the police officer beating up a person on the highway quite violently. When I chose to speak, I talked about how it was too quick to assume that the police officer was "evil" and that we should analyze all the facts before we jump to conclusions.

The media, in my opinion, is an evil institution. It takes what's going on in the world and twists it in some way that denies the facts and leads to speculation. While not all of the media is like this, many of the companies for advertising and broadcasting are manipulative and don't realize the weight of their words, or do and use this to brainwash us. The uneducated masses suffer the worst because they're typically found following the crowd.

"I don't think of broadcasting as a joke. With one word, you can kill a person. That is what broadcasting is. How would I dare to think that it is a joke?" -Choi Dal Po, Pinocchio