How does mass media propaganda influence political

opinion in the United States?

Although propaganda has been prevalent for thousands of years, it has only recently (in the

past century) evolved to an elaborate scientific process capable of influencing a whole nation of

people. Propaganda is primarily the spreading of ideas, information, or rumors for the purpose of

helping or hurting an institution, cause, or person. Propaganda has been used in times of war in

the form of posters being used to sway towards or against a specific cause, but currently is used

as a political and social means in less formal ways to influence people’s attitudes. Evidence of

this in the recent 2017 presidential election is shown with all of the commercials where the

candidates used propaganda techniques to gain an unfair advantage over their competition as

well as the thousands of retweets/likes when a celebrity endorses a candidate on Twitter.

In modern society, many citizens receive their news sources through various unconventional

outlets like Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. These mostly biased sources of media have an

advantage of being able to create a funnel of information to persuade people to go to one source.

By doing this, it’s much easier to persuade or brainwash people, because they are only listening

to that source that they deem most credible. They simply repeat, repeat, repeat and people

internalize it as truth. It is, in a way, manipulating people into believing the same ideas that

media outlets/accounts believe without giving them all sides of a story/idea so that they

(consumers of media) can make up an opinion for themselves. Many followers of these accounts

believe they have control of the quality of information they are receiving, but in reality they are

repeatedly continuing to absorb false information from sources they deem to be credible. Being
that this information is all so easy to access and that ‘everyone you know’ is using it, you feel

‘out of the loop’ if you’re not accessing news through social media. That compounds into the

problem where people don’t say to themselves “hey, I should probably be really judgemental

about this information because I chose to subscribe/follow this person”.

Media also severely limits the information with which audiences understand certain issues

and that alternative solutions to political problems are effectively removed from public debate.

There are certain loopholes that outlets can go through when talking about a subject to limit its

viewers’ understandings about an actual topic which causes the audience to view issues in a way

the media wants you to see them. The analysis of media content - of what we are told and not

told - is therefore a prime concern. In a study of news outlets reporting climate change, they

traced the way the media has constructed uncertainty around the issue and how that has led to

disengagement in relation to possible changes in personal behaviors. While not telling you

anything that is false, the way they are wording and saying things [intentionally] may cause you

to see things in their light and not come up with an opinion for yourself. Politicians can also both

feed information into the range of media, and attempt to anticipate audience response to the

manner in which policy is shaped and presented so that their policies/laws look more appealing

to the public.

Many people today criticize television, radio, social media accounts, magazines, and the

Internet for unfairly using their power as a major (sometimes biased/unfair) link between citizens

and their government. In order to win political primaries, individual candidates usually seek

media attention to gain a following from voters. As a result, do voters have political power, or
are they being told to believe whatever the media seeks out to make them believe? The media

has the power to sway people who are uncommitted to a certain political party as opposed to

citizens actively engaged in politics that have a political party of preference because they have

no strong opinion in the first place. College students or America’s youth, for example, are very

impressionable with regards to politics as they have not had much real world

experience/knowledge and tend to be ignorant on important political issues. These young people

tend to get their news sources from social media or biased news outlets and since their political

opinions are not strong yet, they can be brainwashed by whatever the outlet it trying to tell them.

The fact that the media focuses on certain issues and disregards others can contribute to what

gets done in American government. Media sources have often been accused of emphasizing

scandalous, high-interest issues at the expense of duller but more important political problems

simply because they know by blasting one way out of proportion, it will make the other seem

less important/worse by comparison.

Clearly, the media has a great deal of influence over politics in American government. Some,

not all, abuse their power to brainwash the impressionable into only seeing things from one point

of view as opposed to giving them the facts, and allowing them to form their own opinion. Some

sources are driven by profit motives and strive to give the population what they like to see,

without giving them actual facts about important issues. As a result of so much manipulation

from the media I believe media should be checked by government regulations, by skilled

populations, and by people’s own good judgement.

 Bibliography

U. (n.d.). The Media. Retrieved March 01, 2018, from http://www.ushistory.org/gov/5d.asp

Happer, C., & Philo, G. (n.d.). The Role of the Media in the Construction of Public Belief and

Social Change. Retrieved March 01, 2018, from https://jspp.psychopen.eu/article/view/96/37

Davison, W. P. (2017, March 17). Public opinion. Retrieved March 01, 2018, from

https://www.britannica.com/topic/public-opinion/The-mass-media