Media Manipulatives

The last thing any of us need is another person to tell us what to do. Everywhere we go in life, there seem to be bushels of unsolicited advice coming from everywhere and everyone--from your mother to your car, to your hairstylist or mechanic and everyone in between. We can get annoyed with these people, and we can shut them out. But there is another major source of opinions that we do not always recognize. It comes in the form of newspapers and magazines and film. Sometimes it comes out of the box you've set as the centerpiece for your living room motif, and sometimes it shouts at you from the grocery line. What I'm wondering is if people realize how much they are manipulated by the overload of media in our society?

Some days I wish it would all go away. Like out of sight out of mind. News travels fast through phones and letters these days; we would eventually hear what we needed to hear, form our own opinions, and discuss it with each other as respectable adults. But alas, the days of ignorance are over. Now, any politician so much as sneezes the wrong way and we hear about it for three weeks! It's ridiculous the way we feel like it's our right to know every nuaunce of information that passes through the hands of our society.

I'm not trying say that we should eliminate all news and advertizing from our lives. but being aware of how we are affected by them would be the first step in fixing what I consider to be a problem in our society. Why should three guys sitting in an office at a computer be able to dictate what we think about a natural disaster? Why does one guy whose scripts are written for him, get the credit of being a great commentator?

Now I realize that you'd argue that you aren't affected by tehse people, and that you form your own opinions on things. But how are you to even know what opinion to form when the very presentation of the news is tainted with media bias? Please don't fool yourself. We are all maneuvered by words. We live in a wordy society where stories and words change lives and attitudes. If your wife saying, "I love you," affects you before you leave for work, then Ted Coppel and Connie Chung can sure as heck affect your thinking too.

I don't know. I just get annoyed with people who think their opinion should be valued more than anyone else's, when it's something that they are equally as ignorant about. An expect or someone with good credentials may be worth listening to more.

Tonight I'm just feeling like there's no way to really know exactly what has happened in our country, let alone the rest of the world, because people seem to have an agenda with everything they do. Maybe it's unavoidable. But maybe people should do what they can to get all of the information they can before forming such vehement conclusions. And maybe I'm being too idealistic.