Media is meant to exist to communicate the truth. The public has come to trust the media to do so but something most people don’t take the time to think about before believing the “sources” is how easy it is to pass off a piece of information as the truth that is not in fact the actual truth. This action becomes manipulation and is against Journalistic Ethics (whether those media stations care or not).
Manipulation, unfortunately, is a very common thing now-a-days. The risk of inaccurate information has predictably grown with the use of the internet and especially social networks such as Facebook showing trending news and providing an easier way to share this misinformation. The internet provides the opportunity for many amateur, illegitimate news “sources” to spread information as well. News sources are supposed to be trusted which makes it so ironic that, in fact, it is hard to trust any of them at all with so much information floating around.
But who predominantly controls the manipulation and why do they want to manipulate our population? At the end of the day, greed and money of course fuels the motivation to get the mass to think and act as they would like us all to. Through media, it is as if these big companies that own and thus rule and restrict these news sources also own the rest of us as well. Think back centuries ago when slave-owners tried everything they could to hold back knowledge and information about the world around them from their slaves. Knowledge is power and the slave-owners knew that. The big, bad media conglomerates of our day know that as well. What’s more powerful than knowledge? Being in control of what knowledge and information other people get. There are plenty of crazy conspiracies out there and although most of those are obviously untrue, it is easily proven that media can be biased in a certain way for a significant effect.
It does not have to be just news stations either. One of the biggest influences that goes unnoticed is through entertainment such as Saturday Night Live. However, sometimes the points-of-views that are wiggled into the skits can be good points. The bigger question: can this influence be used as positive manipulation? How and in what circumstances? I strive to find out those answers as that is exactly what I want to do through my filmmaking.
