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Media Studies Induction Task

Why Study The Media?

The media is seen around the world through different genres; News, TV, video games and also through the internet. Some can be informative whilst others can secretly be instructive, making people blindly follow without them knowing. Studying the media can allow a person to understand the issues and solution to the world’s major changes and/or improvements that are or aren’t made aware.

There are many ways that media can be distributed and expressed. One example of which is through the news. There are three main subcategories that fall under news; the internet, television, and newspapers. Although the three are very effective at informing people of past, current or future events, they are mostly one-sided. This is due to the publisher or writers of many broadsheet articles and small chain newspapers belong to different government parties. An example of this is the Sun in which the publisher, Rupert Murdoch, followed under the jurisdiction of the conservative party so at the time of the general elections, the newspaper instructed the reader to vote for conservative without them being aware that they were being passively forced to. Another example of this is when the entire UK voted to either stay in the EU or leave. A lot of paper chains encouraged the readers to leave with subliminal messages or fancy artwork making them blindly follow under the influence of the governmental parties. Understanding this will allow a person to learn the basic element of how the media works.

Another example of this is through television; more specifically documentaries based on real-life events. These allow a viewer to see the problems and solutions that the world has or had by showing the information on both sides; the positive and the negative. This allows documentaries to be fair and unbiased which make it more believable and doesn’t influence a viewer to believe a biased event that the news creates. A more in-depth example is the documentary World War Two: In colour. Not only does the documentary show a more detailed view on the events that took place during the war, but it also shows a more detailed view on both sides of the event. It informs the viewer on the actions that the Nazis took and the actions that the allies took so it doesn’t give the bias view that the news creates which means it doesn’t just shows the ‘valiant actions that the allies took’ in which some people would believe but in the real world the allies had their negatives and in which a lot of the time they were pummelled by the Nazis and committed genocide against German children and wives of the Nazi soldiers. Understanding both sides of the story allows a person to get an even more in-depth view on the media; the good and the bad. 

One other example of media is video games. These, however, have mixed views upon them. Some people believe that all video games rot the brain and make children violent and behave in a poor fashion. This is only because they allow their children to play the more crude and violent games and not the ones intended for their age range. A lot of the influence of parents against video games have made the news. An example of this is in The Guardian named ‘Is video gaming bad for you?’ which although gives both sides of the story, it is mainly one-sided towards the negative impacts of video gaming which makes it unfair. A lot of video game creators now-a-days tend to develop games based on real life events. An example of this is the game ‘L.A. Noire’ which is based off the ‘Black Dahlia’ murder in which a woman nicknamed the ‘Black Dahlia’ was found dead in which the corpse was severely mutilated and severed at the waist. This snippet of information allows the player to understand the real life issues of the world along with the fact of war. This also creates an awareness of how the world issues can be manipulated to make events seem differently to what it should be, which is what some aspects of the media inhabit.

Overall, studying the media can be essential to understanding the problems that the world constantly throws at us and how we deal with it through fake news and lies spread through manipulation and conceptualisation.