Influences of Mass Media

Taylor Y. Wright

Mrs. Angela Conrad

College Preparatory English

26 April 2013

Influences of Mass Media

Although the media has many positive influences, there are far more negative influences. Starting at a very young age, people's lives can be completely shaped by the media. There are many different ways that the media can affect society. Among these are violence in the media, perfect images in the media, and advertisement of unhealthy foods. These are all huge problems in our lives that need to be changed. People do not realize just how addicted we are to the media and if we do not start owning up to it, we could be led down the wrong path.

"Media Literate people know how to act. They are not acted on. In that way, media literate people are better citizens (Kipping 127)". This is a very intelligent statement. The point Pat Kipping is trying to get across is that people need to become media literate. According to Kipping, media literate people understand that:

* "Television is constructed to convey ideas, information, and news from someone else's perspective.

* Specific techniques are used to create emotional effects. They can identify those techniques and their intended and actual effects.

* All media benefit some people and leave others out. They can pose and sometimes answer questions about who are the beneficiaries, who is left out, and why" (Kipping 127).

He also states that media literate people:

* "Seek alternative sources of information and entertainment

* Use television for their own advantage and enjoyment

* Are not used by television for someone else's advantage (Kipping 127)"

Everyone should be working on teaching their young children to be media literate. If our country is able to do something like instill this knowledge in our young people, maybe they would not end up being "acted on" by the media. If people know how to not be negatively affected by the media, they will be less prone to blindly follow something and would know they have control over their life.

Violence in the Media

One of the biggest influences on the young children of the United States is violence in the media. Every child has seen a movie or a video game where the main goal was to blow someone's head off. Most children also have little toy guns that they think are fun to point at people and pretend with. This is okay for some children who understand the true seriousness of a gun, but other children may not know the difference between a toy gun and a real gun. In some video games, the media plays it off to be rewarding and fun to kill someone. Some parents are very good at teaching children about gun safety and the difference between pretend play and reality, but other parents could care less about spending time teaching their children about gun safety. Therefore, all that poor child will know is what they see on TV or in video games. This is where criminals come from.

News coverage of crime contributes to the problem of media violence (Jackson 29). People who watch the news see how much attention a person gets from committing crimes and they think they could get attention that way. For example, I do not think the shooter of Sandy Hook Elementary should not have been talked about on the news because in some people's minds, this made him a celebrity. There are people out there who are dying for attention and would go to any extent to get it. That is one reason that there are so many school shootings. People are just trying to get as much attention as the last shooter did. Many shooters do not have that great of a life and have nothing to lose, so they think, "Why not go out with a bang?"

This is ridiculous. Someone who just took the innocent lives of multiple children should not be strewn across every news station in the country. It would be sufficient to state on the news that the offender has been caught and will be charged, without showing their picture or name. Some people will say that it is good that they expose who did the crime so they are publicly humiliated, which is true if the shooter is still alive, but at the same time, they are giving others motivation to become "famous" in a bad way.

Leonard Eron once stated that, "Kids learn by observation... If what they observe is violent, that's what they learn" (Easterbrook 55)

According to Easterbrook:

Eron is a psychologist at the University of Michigan. He has been tracking video violence and actual violence for almost four decades. His initial studies, in 1960, found that even the occasional violence depicted in 1950's television-to which every parent would gladly return today-caused increased aggression among eight-year-olds. By the adult years, Eron's studies find those who watched the most television and movies in childhood were much more likely to have been arrested for, or convicted of, violent felonies. Eron believes that ten percent of the United States' violent crime is caused by exposure to images of violence, meaning that ninety percent is not but that a ten percent is not but that a ten percent national reduction in violence might be achieved merely by moderating the content of television and movies. To cite a minor but telling example, the introduction of vulgar language into American public disclosure traces, Eron thinks, largely to the point at which stars like Clark Gable began to swear onscreen, and kids then imitated swearing as normative (Easterbrook 55)

Developing Unhealthy Lifestyles

Another major problem in the media these days would be how much unhealthy food is advertised. Unhealthy foods are widely advertised in the Media while healthy foods are not. When people see how easy it is to buy cheap food, they forget how rewarding it can be to eat healthy foods. People wonder why our country is obese but the reason is that unhealthy foods are advertised everywhere as being they are cheap and fast. Some of it could even be false advertisement. I have never bought a mcdouble from McDonalds that looks like the ones they show on television.

"In 2004, over one-third of children and adolescents were overweight or at risk of becoming overweight, more than triple the percentage in 1971" (Harris, Jennifer L., and John A. Bargh. "The Relationship between Television Viewing and Unhealthy Eating: