media Essay -- essays research papers

The ‘media’ as a whole plays a major part in one’s life. Media messages can be presented in many ways from reading newspapers to watching news on television from the comfort of your own home. However, the most important factors are how the news is retrieved and portrayed by an individual or a group of individuals as each individual has the right to accept what they believe not what they are manipulated to believe or to accept. There are various issues that can be looked at to conclude whether or not there is such thing as free, unbiased media, to define this topic it is too broad to study itself so it will be broken down and researched in small parts. Bias in different context will be analysed and shown how it is interpreted. Theorists will be researched such as: Rupert Murdoch and Noam Chomsky taking his views into consideration as well as elaborating on them. The approach taken to tackle this area of study will show clear evidence of where the information has b een taken from as this will enable the reader to make their own judgment as to whether there is such thing as free, unbiased media. Can it be argued that there is such thing as a free, unbiased media? Bias is based around media organisations made up of journalists and news producers presenting particular stories and the selection of which stories to cover with an uneven viewpoint, these particular stories may refer to accusations of either censorship or propagandism. Individuals perceiving various media messages can receive these in different contexts such as socially, ethically, economically and politically. There are different categories of bias that can be looked upon when presenting media messages to individuals such as: ethnic bias which includes nationalism and regionalism, corporate bias involving advertising and political campaigns, social bias that contains overall bias of reporting to favour the status class, political bias regarding the split in political slant and sensationalism about manufacturing or distort news as a purely commercial product. Temporal bias is known when media are biased toward the immediate, when media organisations decide to take up a story that is happening immediately. News has to be new and fresh, this news has to be ever changing even when there is a small amount of news to cover. There are other forms of bias such as status quo bias, narrative bias, fairnes... ...close look at the records shows Murdoch has imparted his far right agenda throughout his media empire† (Center for American Progress). An example of being bias would be that Murdoch is blamed for presenting partisan media coverage for political groups that publicise policies and conclusions to draw attention to his commercial benefit showing that media bias is involved from the beginning, middle or end and is often encouraged by politicians to persuade him favourably to cover their campaigns. An additional example of the contradiction of the theory of unbiased media would be that of Venezuela and Chavez. In this instance a democratically elected president was over thrown from his position by the media industry (the Venezuela army and influences from the U.S). The effect Rupert Murdoch has had on the media industry is substantial, setting up an empire that is forever growing. This clearly shows who the media is owned by and how much power they posses, this can determine on what is presented to the public from a single point rather than all angles of a specific story and through not one source of media but several forms of media even though some maybe bias and contain propaganda.