Misguided American Values Analysis

The mass media has many influences on how society perceives certain things. The media can be seen to shape people’s opinion of themselves, enforce gender stereotypes, and in some ways the media also decides what we should value. The average American household has more TVs in the house than people, there’s about 2.73 television sets and 2.55 people per household, and at least one TV is on eight hours a day (Goodall, p. 160). This explains why we are so influenced by what we see and hear in the media, when we surround ourselves with media we can’t help but to be influenced by it. The way that the media influences people isn’t always bad, sometimes the media’s influences are good, for example news broadcasts. If a young blonde haired girl is

Instead of newscasts focusing on events that are going on in communities and around the world they overlook those and focus on the lives of famous people. The way that society is set up we value things that don’t really matter rather than focusing on things like current events. Maggie Kelso, writer of the article “Social media reflects misguided American values” brought up a very important point in her article when she compared how society reacted to Nelson Mandela’s death and Paul Walker’s death. When Paul Walker, an actor, died about twice as many people tweeted about his death compared to Nelson Mandela’s, a widely known human rights activist and leader (Kelso). The point she made was that “Americans value themselves and their lives, and more important issues around the world are often overlooked. This is the fundamental problem with our society: we are too self-obsessed”

News programs allow people to be aware of some of the things that are going on around them and without news programs many people/ families would not be conscious of their environment. However, the news programs can be misleading at times. Sometimes news programs can be biased in order to make viewers feel a certain way about something. New reporters commonly only tell one side of a story; the reason that they do this is so that the general public will be biased. One example of this would be when a police shoots a citizen, some media may cover the story from the victim’s perspective in order to try to get viewers to see the police in the wrong or vice