Communicating Politics The Mass Media Primary institution for communicating politics reinforces politics ideas Our mass mediated culture Characteristics TV dominant media General media usage Exposed over hundreds thousands ads a year Over half a trillion in advertising 135 thousand a second for super bowl commercial o Study 69 of hour waking hours are spent using some sort of media 9 hours daily Almost 1 in 5 teenagers send more than 200 texts a day Our lives are mass mediated Our generation is more affected our age group 18 29 only one who admits to use too much technology We know we overuse but don t limit ourselves India had more telephone access to toilets We are advertised and given incentives Advertising and mass media o Information wants to be free Not in your life Ad revenues graphs o Media that is not commercial in nature become commercial in nature When radio was first developed they weren t commercials 80 or 90 years ago Now 20 minutes hour All about money o National news 8 3 minutes in commercial Local news 8 4 minutes in commercial If you take commercial time out no programs They have variety in sections but constant commercial time Programs are there to keep our eyes exposed to commercial Mass media exists not to deliver news entertainment programming but rather than to deliver an audience to corporate advertisers Economic underpinning TV s penetration of contemporary culture most popular mediated activity in the US 90 of Americans watch TV on any given day Average per week almost 5 hours daily only activity that requires that we spend more time than that is working Until the 2000 objectively more US households had TV then had toilets 750 million people a day watch TV 3 5 billion hours are spent watching TV daily TV news vs print news Key difference TV news length fixed newspaper size flexible Accommodate more eventful news Cognitive vs Emotional responses TV makes emotional responses blood vivid extreme Newspaper readers react more intelligently cognitively Nature of TV audience People who rely on TV tend to be Inadvertent viewers News is on but they re not focusing on everything Not paying attention Drawn disproportionately from the lower end of the socio economic strata layers Lower income lower education Not as politically sophisticated More likely to be taken in by poor coverage Opportunities for elite leaders for agenda setting TV is the main source for news As of 2010 our generation uses internet more than TV not reading In 15 years big drop in people who watch TV read or listen to the radio traditional news source Old people follow the news twice our rate 10 years our generation has fewer amounts of people watching news Internet produces less revenue because there s less money less news Walter Cronkite THE news anchor we re more inadequately informed by news TV Additional factor o Concentration in the media The news business characteristics consequences 30 years ago the media monopoly book Only 50 companies controlled the media 21 years later now 5 companies control the media CONTROL Fragmentation situation were length and detail in reporting news give way to pacing and change of scene Reliance on self contained story Beginning middle end No facts units news mcnugget no details fake summarized Filtered news Blunt emotional simple messages Simplicity is inherently conservative maintains the status quo Doesn t create resistance nor change because people are socialized in a simple way into the world We react emotionally we tend to fall back on those dramatic simple issues View things as black or white Progressive thinking is necessarily complex It doesn t describe propose solutions and make people think This serves the system it argues change Inability to think logically in integrated ways o Inability to see the big picture o Inability to exert control in marketplace of ideas We have to know how the system works to exert control Dramatization body bag journalism Crime reporting increased in 25 years when actual crime statistics say that crime has decreased in those years Drama trivializes content confusion of fantasy and reality We want drama and excitement They manipulate the information if they don t have enough proof Like the Tiger Woods recreation Dumb down the news Boundary warping creation for commercial reasons of culture of unreality one that both creates and satisfies its own demand Get people hooked free drugs you like it come and buy it Political corruption it is very serious and they mix it with cartoons and silly stuff Different unreality different effects o Artificial reality We can t tell the difference GTA Avatar Jurassic Park guy ex When technology is that good we can t tell the difference o Pseudo reality denial of complexity via entertainment It becomes so entertaining we don t care about the differences between fantasy and reality We can t disentangle reality and fantasy Most trusted anchor Jon Stewart entertainer Dramatized news decreased ability to recall details think about subject in complex terms Diminishes ability to see the big picture Imagery makes impression on us Ex Nixon vs Kennedy debate Iraq War 3 misconceptions Alchaeda oil weapons of mass destruction The people who paid more attention to TV more misconceptions the people who paid more attention to newspapers less misconceptions Personalization when individual s personal stories become the focus as opposed to the issues being the focus Obscures true workings of political economic system o Political social relations defined as personal psychological I don t feel right about this candidate o Tendency to look for hero of the moment Normalization a devotion to official actions and reactions from Washington Wall Street axis in presenting the news within acceptable bounds This is a fundamental component of power most critical characteristics the most disbelieved Background People have lost trust in the media People in general a majority think it s too liberal the media Media have a media bias But fundamentally the media is actually very conservative 1 newspaper in the country is conservative The Wall street Journal Fox news has a bigger audience it is conservative The news helps conserve the things the way it is Way for news business to legitimate itself through corporate sponsors they keep it safe for their products Self censorship is common result limited scope of news coverage Public radio commentaries are made more by conservatives than liberal Because they 14 mnts normalizing