How does Authority use Media to control
Knowledge and Belief in people, and why?
Today, I would like to talk about a relationship between two things, which surround us almost every day and almost everywhere. The two things are authority and media. You will notice how media surround us just by looking around this room. Television, computer, DVDs and books. They are all different kinds of mass media. What about when you come to school in the morning? When I take subway every morning in order to come to school, I find this small TV in the subway, which shows short breaking news. This is also a form of the mass media. Like this, we are exposed to the mass media very often and therefore we indeed have a tremendous effect from them. But where do you see authority?
Authority doesn’t have to be someone like the ‘big brother’ in 1984. Authority is someone who has power over you, in a way that they can judge your action or that they plant and change your knowledge. In a family, parents are the authority since children learn moral behaviors, follow parents’ habits and parents can give a punishment if children misbehave. Furthermore scientists and historians from your textbooks, your teachers, celebrities, big companies like Google and Apple can be considered as authorities. However, when we talk about authority we often think of the government.
Then what is the relationship between media and authority, to be specific government? Due to the reason that media has huge effects on us, government uses media, which has dominated our lives, to control people’s ideas and beliefs. I would like to define this process by introducing a new term, ‘mass media play’. Why mass media ‘play’? This is because government is simply playing around with the mass media in order to change or control people’s idea and belief. This term really tells you how authority is manipulating the media, and how authority is gaining ‘fun’, in other words benefits from the ‘play’.
Let’s look at...