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Politics of Communication Essay

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Its Friday!

Here, read my work. (time 2 x 8 hour)

During this half century in U.S. history many media companies have been gobbled up by rich conglomerate big businesses. Though the methods or perhaps the choices in which the public attains information have evolved, the core purpose of public opinion manipulation has unchanged. With the public opinion on focus point, Edward Bernays’ Manipulating Public Opinion disambiguates a theoretical bridge of communication between several dynamically established entities and the general public. Mr. Bernays’ assessment of President Coolidge’s late blooming personality identified the heart of the Whitehouse’s solution. The opinion of the masses transformed immediately when the president could relate with “the world’s greatest entertainer” (1) Al Jolson. Simply put, the opinion was that the president “was not frigid and unsympathetic.” (2)
Subsequently in the early 20th century the FCC was extolled in federal law by Commissioners who regulate all communication mediums. (3) This “New Deal” permitted the FCC in many ways the opportunity to side with large communication companies. Every opportunity to control and regulate communication airwaves in the 1930’s continues to persist in today’s new age digital broadcasting. It is within president FDR’s “New Deal” masks the social opinion agenda. For the objective of the Whitehouse was to use the FCC to deliberately promote social change. (4)
Speeding past the epically televised presidential debates and braking at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue the home of President Richard Nixon, the media consortium behind those Whitehouse pillars were assiduously restricting free speech in the name of the “fairness doctrine” The Nixon administration was recycling the identical claim the JFK itinerary included in their fight to restrict the media through the FCC. Bill Ruder, a JFK official made the following statement “We had a massive strategy to use the fairness doctrine to challenge and harass the right-wing broadcasters, and hope the challenge would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” (5)
Confusion aside, the FCC’s agenda may not be as powerful as history may suggest. Bernay’s view of other said entities are absolute bedrock in the understanding of public opinion manipulation. Bernay was aware of the flow of information from one faction to the other. Bernay was reverse engineering the architecture of how public opinion, polling and knowledge is dynamically adapting. Like Bernay said, “This is an age of mass production” (2)
The 1980’s media outlets surged with a wide scale massive deployment of coaxial copper cabling wire enrolled millions of subscribers to a polarized entertainment and political portal. Markus Prior authors a revealing composition that exams all “new media” outlets. The upgrade of television networks has created a drop in viewership of all political awareness due to the unreasonably bloated entertainment sphere. The title headline reads “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout” bold and true in the American Journal of Political Science.
Eventually during this time presidentially appointed FCC Chairman Mark Fowler declared the termination of the “fairness act”. The public was now to able to rely on their media anchors judgment in journalism. (6)
After the “media deregulation” phase, newspaper companies began to crash due to the unmanageable amount of lawsuits attacks. This “liability law” continued to wreck the entire economics of newspaper companies and soon forced a mass-media “newspaper consolidation” Then came in the 1990’s more regulation issues during the first few years of the first internet companies. (8) The Telecommunications Act challenged free speech and the Internet officially sparked a blackout revolt against anyone not supporting the free-speech blue ribbon campaign. (9) Eventually online Internet service provider applications such as America Online and Prodigy Internet service begin to die out as the speeds in which media could be delivered multiplied with Tier Cable providers. Again, the courts deal with Internet Neutrality lawsuits. Fascist Internet monster Comcast actually fills courtroom benches with random people whom were paid and shuffled in at the last second. (10) The data mitigation and network manipulation was achieved through identical big brother watching, great firewall of china software. (11)
A remarkable cliché the Whitehouse used after a crushing article in Wired magazine on the Governments and Tiered communications giants data hoarding promiscuity. Citizens private information was reasoned with defensive clichés such as “…to protect the citizens from terrorism” President Barack H. Obama has pardoned these corporations in a venial fashion. (12)
It is critical that all is the ideological concepts of political persuasion and mass opinion manipulation through both Whitehouse or Journalist’s tone and choice of wording is proven to exist.

Fair and balanced, All the News That’s Fit to Print, and The daily diary of the American dream are all trustworthy slogans of popular U.S. media companies. The opposition to these catchphrase slogans is “don’t believe what you read”. People read newspapers. They read TV and radio in the same sense. We evaluate information as it is encoded in to our short-term memory. While we process the arguments a chemical flow of keywords are paired with our own array of memories that bank emotions, values and other impulses. These and other psychological mind games have been researched for the intent to add a slanting opinion of a factual report. The slant of a news column, wiki contribution, radio talk show and TV news broadcast has all been filtered with a subjective media tone. Hayakawa (13) established meaning of “slanting,” when quoted “the process of selecting details that are favorable or unfavorable to the subject being described.”
The American understanding of this monopolized media conglomerate slant reporting is grossly rated at fluctuating 70 percent. (7) Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro author a prominent dissertation on the motivation behind media slant. They examine “Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers” (14) in this elite publication. The research resolves and identifies crisp examples of the psychology behind the slant, just as this topology has initialized.
Two key pieces of evidence suggest that our methodology produces a meaningful measure of slant. First, many of the phrases that our automated procedure identifies are known from other sources to be chosen strategically by politicians for their persuasive impact. Examples include death tax, tax relief, personal account, and war on terror (which we identify as strongly Republican), and estate tax, tax break, private account, and war in Iraq, (which we identify as strongly Democratic). (14)
Dwight D. Eisenhower is seen on the cover of Time magazine over 22 times. (15) Being endorsed by Henry Luce’s weekly magazine rallied Mr. Eisenhower into the oval office. By assigning inexperienced journalists and writers to difficult assignments, Time Inc. could use its editors to change and slant the stories before they were passed on to the publishing department. Because these types of endorsements were typical in mainstream media and opposite in local small readership news companies, the proven slanting effects it has on a reader are thoroughly examined. For instance, Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of M.I.T. in Boston collaborated together to produce an exceptionally critical dissertation on (19) The Political Orientation of Newspaper Endorsements in U.S. Elections. One quick example of how open and non-responsible newspapers were in the 1940’s is read from the Philadelphia Inquirer “To uphold President Eisenhower and assure the advancement of his progressive policies, be sure to vote for all the candidates for Congress running as Republicans.”
The epic farewell speech of President Eisenhower gravely warns the U.S. public of the unwarranted “Military-industrial complex” that influences political, corporate, and economic variables of future development.
We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
(16)
Press coverage accumulated vast amounts of deception from the Whitehouse prior to the Invasion of Iraq. Yellow cake WMD’s, “centralized” gallop polls and other “signals” is depicted in Lance Bennett’s analysis and “framing” of these press coverage reports are a critical lesson. The fragment below introduces Bennett’s passion to inform the public that a new world government is manipulating them.
Even foreign policy, once the private domain of pinstripe bureaucrats and business elites, that ray world of threats, promises, wars, espionage, and diplomacy, may have become transformed by a combination of new communications technologies and global media systems. Policy-makers have recognized the presence of television cameras at trade negotiations, peace conferences, and in war zones, with the result that foreign policy has taken on a public-relations, or media-diplomacy, dimension of substantial proportions (17)
Shapiro’s understands of the press coverage before the war in Iraq. It’s said that the Whitehouse did not corrupt it entirely; instead the media journalists themselves conflated it. Since %61 of the public still believed that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and al-Qaeda in 2005, after the fact the 9/11 commission report was released we can understand how powerful of an impact the mass media has on the masses due to their trust in them. In conjunction with that ABC poll Shapiro mentions that ABC poll results %47 of the people asked believed the 9/11 commission report was false for not finding the link between 9/11 attacks and Iraqi al-Qaeda partnership. Shapiro adds “Further, looking at the reporting by the three main national networks-ABC, CBS, and NBC-immediately after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, we find early reports, using non-Bush administration sources, which raised Saddam’s name in relation to 9/11.” After giving multiple examples of random middle east experts on tape insisting Saddam was to blame and should be killed and war hawk analysis’s opinions of the middle east’s aggression towards the USA the general public is still accepting personal opinions, stories, and incite despite what the Whitehouse or U.S. government declares as truth. (18)
In conclusion to the three main author’s exposition of political slant, the cubed evaluation never goes unsaid without criticism. Bennett’s book is publicized as “the most comprehensive study of the media and foreign policy, twenty distinguished scholars and analysts explain the role played by the mass media and public opinion in the development of United States foreign policy in the Gulf War.” (17) While the Gentzkow and Shapiro exist appear together as associated students growing with the rest of the elite in environment of political clarification. Shapiro is more aggressive and extroverted on the Internet as in his revelations. However, when it comes to Gentzkow’s view, it is more of an anti-television yet conscious and progressive vibe when he declares TV has the most significance on a voter. (Voter Turnout) Also, the dark reporting’s of a falling newspaper industry is highlighted with information such as the un-acclimated claim of blogging “I estimate that the online paper reduced print readership by 27,000 per day, at a cost of $5.5 million per year in lost print profits.” (20) This statement is nonsense since those profits can be made back with technologies such as Amazons Kindle 2 hand held, wireless, convenient blog reader. Nevertheless, the most important noteworthy examples of his dissertation in Voter Turnout are the factual information and ideological undertones in the ways media travels down the media pipe.

Works Cited
1. (Dix, Andrew and Taylor, Jonathan. Figures of Heresy, Sussex Academic Press (2006), pg. 176; quoted from Dylan’s book, Biography (1985))
2. Edward L. Betrays, “Manipulating Public Opinion — The Why and the How,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33, No. 6 (1928), pp. 958-71; JSTOR
3. “About the Federal Communications Commission.” Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Home Page. 27 Mar. 2009 .
4. REEVES, ALEC. “Privateline.com Telephone History: Page 7: 1921 to 1948.” Daily Notes. Imperial College, London. 27 Mar. 2009 .
5. Snow, Tony, and Adam Thierer. “Why The Fairness Doctrine Is Anything But Fair.” The Heritage Foundation – Conservative Policy Research and Analysis. 29 Oct. 1993. 27 Mar. 2009 .
6. Limburg, Val E. “Fairness Doctrine – U.S. Broadcasting Policy.” The Museum of Broadcast Communications. 2004. CRC Press. 27 Mar. 2009 .
7. Rainie, Lee, John Horrigan, and Michael Cornfield. “The Internet and Campaign 2004.” Pew Internet & American Life Project. 6 Mar. 2005. Pew Internet and American Life Project. 27 Mar. 2009 .
8. Smolla, Rodney A. Suing the press. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
9. “EFF: Blue Ribbon Campaign.” Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending Freedom in the Digital World. 27 Mar. 2009 .
10. Jansen, Dean. “Comcast Secretly Pays People to Fill Seats at FCC Hearing « Miro – Internet TV Blog.” 26 Feb. 2008. 27 Mar. 2009 http://www.getmiro.com/blog/2008/02/comcast-secretly-pays-people-to-fill-seats-at-fcc-hearing/.
11. Mislove, Lan, Andreas Haeberlen, and Krishna Gummadi. “Detecting BitTorrent Blocking.” 22 Oct. 2008. Rice University. 27 Mar. 2009 .
12. Kravets, David. “Obama Sides With Bush in Spy Case | Threat Level from Wired.com.” Blogs Home – Wired Blogs. 29 Jan. 2009. Wired INC. 27 Mar. 2009 .
13. Hayakawa, Samuel. Language in Thought and Action. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & Company (1990, 5th ed.), 1940.
14. Gentzkow, Matthew, and Jesse Shapiro. “What Drives Media Slant?” Thesis. University of Chicago and NBER, 2007.
15. “TIME Magazine Archives – TIME Archives – TIME Magazine Back Issues.” Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews – TIME.com. 27 Mar. 2009 .
16. “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation.” INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE. NEWS, COMMENTARY & INSIGHT. 17 Jan. 1971. 27 Mar. 2009 .
17. Bennent, Lance, and David L. L. Paletz. Taken by Storm The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (American Politics and Political Economy Series). New York: University Of Chicago P, 1994.
18. Shapiro, Robert Y., and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon. “Deep Suspicion: Iraq, Misperception, and Partisanship” by Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and Robert Y. Shapiro. LFP Editorial Enterprises, LLC. 27 Mar. 2009 .
19. Ansolabehere, Stephen, Rebecca Lessem, and James M. Snyder, Jr. “THE POLITICAL ORIENTATION OF NEWSPAPER ENDORSEMENTS IN U.S. ELECTIONS, 1940-20021.” Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.
20. GENTZKOW, MATTHEW. TELEVISION AND VOTER TURNOUT*. Thesis. F Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2006.

Great Readings
• The Political Impact of Media Bias (Stefano Delavigne (UC Berkeley and NBER) and Ethan Kaplan (IIES, Stockholm University) June 26, 2007.
• Partisan Bias in Economic News: Evidence on the Agenda-Setting Behavior of U.S. Newspapers (by Valentino Larcinese & Riccardo Puglisi & James M. Snyder, Jr.)
• The Fox News E?ect: Media Bias and Voter Behavior (Stefano DellaVigna & Ethan Kaplan)
• Markus Prior News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout

Author: William Fleurant

A black-hat Bostonian with a Brahmin accent…

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