The Media's Ability to Control Our View of the World

With the coming of television and the internet, are we or are we not a more informed community? (Orwell, 1984) Essentially, this statement requires a profound study in order to determine the impact of news media ability to control the agenda and ultimately impact our view of the world.

First, let us differentiate these two sources of communication because there is a major difference between television and internet as a mass media communicating tool. Television focuses more on broad commercial needs of people and is highly dependent on paid advertisement compared to the internet, which is closer to very specific needs. In other words, television advertisement and programming are tailor-made to get a larger audience in order to influence the listener to buy a specific product regardless of his culture and background. (Porter, 2005)

Comparatively, a commercially internet source based of advertisement focuses more on specific clienteles who require specialized knowledge of issues predetermined in advance. For example, the internet users seek specific information on a given subject. This subject when identified in the internet search objective, will become the target of internet advertisers only at this specific moment and only advertisers involved in the specialized product will be demonstrating their products. In television, it would not matter who is listening, and on what particular level of interest the listener has. The people who watch television will get the whole thing regardless of what their needs are. In the internet, the advertisers will respond by supplying information which is only specific to the specialized topic. Consequently, the advertiser will relate to the specific subjects the us...

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...ng-term credibility gap imbedded in each one of us. Over the years, the credibility gap has become much harder to break by advertisers not only because we see more advertisement on a daily basis, but because, most of the time, the benefits resulting from the products advertised are sometimes not there. I believe that this is the major reason why media has not been that successful to influence our world views as much as it could have been. (Meyer, 2004; Porter, 2005)

It becomes apparent that more research is needed in each source of news media such as newspaper, television and, internet in order to see which one has more credibility. I am not sure that newspaper has more credibility than television to the extent mentioned in this paper. However, the historical data found demonstrated that newspaper is still a leader in this field.

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