Media as an educative tool:
- Educates people on government affairs
- Ordinary people understand complex issues
- Interprets important policies
- People learn every day
- Personal and mass education
Media plays an important role by educating citizens on the various ways through which the government operates. It also analyzes important topics; for instance, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the media keeps on educating people on the various ways of dealing with the disease according to government directives.
Media and political decisions:
- Participative role
- Takes a stand on issues
- Makes government take interest
- Criticizes the government
- Arms citizens with relevant information
The media plays a participative role in influencing political decisions. The media follows closely all the political decision-making processes and keeps the citizens informed to know the inner workings of the government. The government could easily bow to pressure from the media and address certain issues affecting the citizenry.
Media as a watchdog:
- Creates a forum for discussion
- Investigates improprieties
- Keeps the government under check
- Defends the truth, freedom, and democracy
- The fourth estate
The media creates a forum through which governance issues could be discussed coupled with keeping the government under check by investigating improprieties to keep the government under check. As the fourth estate, it defends the truth, freedom, and democracy (Rodny-Gumede et al., 2017).
Media and curbing corruption:
- Investigates corruption cases
- Reports to the citizens
- Compels the government to act
- Demands accountability from the government
- An institution of checks and balances
Corruption is a global problem and it is entrenched in governments and public service. The media investigates, exposes such cases, and demands those involved to take responsibility. For example, the exposure of the Panama papers led to the resignation of Iceland’s Prime Minister (Starke et al., 2016).
Media as an ideological apparatus:
- Used to keep status quo
- Used to champion certain ideas
- Rhetorical manipulation avenue
- Campaigns tool
- A tool of control
The government could use the media to maintain the status quo in society by being converted into ideological apparatus to advance certain ideas. Politicians could use rhetoric to promote their ideologies, whether for public gain or personal advancement.
An agenda-setting tool:
- Influences salience of topics
- Takes away citizens ability to think independently
- Creation of new agenda
- Shaping and filtering reality
- Focuses on topics of interest
The media could be used as an agenda-setting tool whereby it controls the salience of certain topics and shapes the way the public thinks. For instance, during election campaigns, different candidates use the media to sell their manifesto to the public. The just-concluded US elections underscore this argument.
Media and public opinion:
- Shapes public opinion
- Public opinion is not universal
- Could manipulate data
- Creates “new” forms of “truth”
- Highly influential
The media shapes public opinion significantly by choosing to present the preferred side of a story, which eventually becomes the truth for a certain section of the public. For instance, in the recent US elections, a significant number of President Trump supporters believe the elections were rigged, based on what some media organizations chose to present.
Media and class dominant theory:
- Represents views of a minority elite
- Controlled by certain individuals
- Advocates views that concern these individuals
- Manipulates what people can see
- Biased media
The media is mainly owned by a small group of elites with close links to politicians and governments, which underscore the class dominant theory (Chen, 2018). As such, the information presented by some of these media organizations serves the interested parties by fooling the public to believe a certain side of the story.
References
Chen, W. (2018). Abandoned not: media sociology as a networked transfield. Information, Communication & Society, 21(5), 647-660.
Rodny-Gumede, Y., Milton, V. C., & Mano, W. (2017). Rethinking the link between media and democracy in the post-colony: One size does not fit all. South African Journal for Communication Theory and Research, 43(2), 1-9.
Starke, C., Naab, T. K., & Scherer, H. (2016). Free to expose corruption: The impact of media freedom, internet access and governmental online service delivery on corruption. International Journal of Communication, 10(21), 4702-4722.