Media: Behind The Scenes

Phil 243- Intro
12 December 2012
Media: Behind the Scenes
Picture two big golden arches in the sky. Now picture there’s music in the background, and all it keeps repeating is “ba ba ba ba ba, I’m loving it”. Add in the smell of greasy French fries along with the face of a slightly too happy clown smiling encouragingly at you. While it may seem like a strange dream, in reality you are actuallypicturing advertising cues from McDonalds, the largest fast food chain in the world. If shown even just one of these memory cues, even a small child has the capacity to instantly recognize it. Media companies pay millions of dollars a year to program them into people’s minds as the ideal representations. This has allowed the media to plant ideas and “knowledge” subconsciously into American’sheads and control things from behind the scenes.
The media is the means by which capitalism spreads its ideals. With technology constantly expanding, so have the ways the media has been able to accomplish this. For example, in the 1950’s the main source of information came from the newspapers, radio or even simply by word of mouth. Today, with the widespread access to the internet, media companiesare able to use all of these older methods plus things like social media, cell phones, and television to get their products and ideas on the general public’s mind. This creates an unconscious battle of representations in a consumers mind. When a consumer thinks of laundry detergent do they picture Tide or All, maybe even Gain? Media companies work hard at creating memorable ads that will sway aconsumer towards their side and are always researching better ways to make people remember products. One simple and yet extremely effective trick companies use is repetition. As a general rule the average person is much more likely to remember something after it has been repeated four times. Other popular techniques include appealing to emotions and bandwagoning, or making it seem as though everyoneelse is using the product.
The effects of the media may seem harmless when it comes to trivial things like which laundry detergent a person buys, but its influence can extend far beyond that. A more serious issue the media has influence over is politics, and more specifically elections. Representations not only extend to products and services, but also to people themselves. Political figures areof course no exception. Historically, looking at the presidents on The United States, nearly all of them have been white older men with a religious background. This has caused generations of people to form a representation of the ideal president which they then, sometimes without even realizing it, match every possible candidate up to. It is then the media’s job to make each candidate fit thatmodel as best they can as they try to sell the candidate to the public. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate is a classic example of how media and representations can influence an election. Nixon was the favored candidate and yet “pale and underweight from a recent hospitalization, appeared sickly and sweaty, while Kennedy appeared calm and confident. As the story goes, those who listened to the debate onthe radio thought Nixon had won. But those listeners were in the minority. By 1960, 88% of American households had televisions — up from just 11% the decade before” (Webly). Voters who saw the debate on TV did not think of their ideal president as weak and shady as Nixon appeared, but rather more like Kennedy with his calm and confidence. For the rest of the campaign, advisors helped Kennedycontinue to be portrayed with a calm and confident character, and he was eventually “sold” on America for president.
Sometimes the Media can be used as a distraction to keep people ignorant against other more important issues. Constant ad bombardments have helped push America into a society obsessed with consumerism. Many people become so preoccupied with things such as the latest electronics, or...