The Role and Influence of Mass Media

Topic 5: The role and influence of mass media Since the development of technology, mass media becomes an important part of modern society. It influences all areas; therefore, it is raising a question among people about what are the role and influence of mass media. The term mass media refers to the channels of communication (media) that exist to reach a large public audience (the mass of the population). Mass media includes newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and more recently, the Internet (Kristin& Susan, 2002).Mass media is an efficient supporter in education, policy, entertainment, finance, and all other fields. One function of mass media is education. Mass media supplies an enormous source of documentaries on a wide range of topics such as animals, behavior, geography, history, or art (Kristin& Susan, 2002). The information is extremely helpful with students at any levels. Additionally, mass media contains many visual documentaries, which make learners easier to see and us e theories rather than only reading text.Secondly, there are many educational children’s programs like teaching children to count or recognize words, or introducing them to different societies and cultures (Kristin& Susan, 2002). There are also many programs which help parent to solve their kids’ problems. Fox example, the book â€Å"Good parent bad parenting†, which is published by Lulu. com publisher on February 2 in 2004, is one effective product of mass media which help parents to educate their children. The mass media is also a useful aid of policy. Almost all of politicians use the mass media to promote their positive images or political opinions.There is an example of using the mass media to advertise during his campaign of the United State President Barack Obama: The GOP group announced that they were going on air with a $25 million of advertising to buy in most of the major battleground states to counter a pro-Obama advertising campaign of the same amou nts (â€Å"Obama campaign,† 2012). Moreover, some ministries use the mass media to introduce new policy and to take feedback from the populace. For instance, the Vietnamese Ministry of Transport presented a new policy about taking fare of transport on Monday, January 1st 2012 (â€Å"The Ministry of transportation,† 2012).After a few days, they received many opinions among the public, which included positive and negative feedback so that they could correct this policy. Another important function of the mass media is entertainment. Since the development of the mass media, the entertainment industry has been more and more successful to approach the public. There are many entertainment programs available on TV, radio, or the Internet every day. The variety of entertainment programs make them suitable for all types of viewers. On TV nowadays, there are some special channels for people interested in travelling, discovering, cooking, shopping, etc.For example, cable TV has ne arly one hundred of channels of all fields, which are very useful. One type of the mass media, advertising, brings benefits to both entertainment industry and economy. All producers use advertisements to introduce their products to public with an aim to sell goods. However, with the dense appearance of advertisements, advertising can be seen as one type of entertainment. Besides the positive influence, there is so much negative influence of the mass media. Firstly, the mass media contains so much unsuitable content that affect badly everyone, especially the children.Some violent programs on TV or on the Internet make children aggressive and make them use violence to solve their problems exactly like what they have seen on the mass media. A recent review of sixty-seven studies that investigated the influence of TV violence on aggression in children found that three-quarters of the studies claimed to find some association(Kristin& Susan, 2002). One noticeable example about this issue is about the juvenile criminal named Le Van Luyen. He intended to kill four people in a family to rob their gold (â€Å"Le Van Luyen kill mercilessly,† 2011).His bloody crime was quite a disaster. However, it also has been available in mass media for a long time. Therefore, his images and crime were available on all types of mass media. This led to another terrible crime of a younger criminal named Dao Van Tai. He killed two people to rob property. When being asked by police, he admitted committing this crime by copying the crime of Le Van Luyen (â€Å"The second frightened murder,† n. d). Secondly, mass media sometimes invades people’s privacy. Celebrities and politicians are usually the victims because they receive more concern from society than others.The mass media industry sometimes uses private details to make profits rather than showing the full view of somebody’s live to the public; hence, mass media public their scandals or bad behaviour. These i nvasions are bad for their profession or even destroy their reputation. Mass media even is an origin of spreading out secret information of the government. Once the secret information is leaked out, it will be available all over the world rapidly through mass media. For example, the latest intelligence of the United States, which is flooded in all types of the mass media, is the secret information of the war in Afghanistan.The information really makes the United States nervous. Washington fears it may have lost even more highly sensitive material including an archive of tens of thousands of cable messages sent by US embassies around the world, reflecting arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings and uncensored opinion of other governments (â€Å"Afghanistan war log,† n. d). The mass media may contain misleading information, which has negative impact on the public. Since some information in the mass media is misreporting, misquoting, rumor, or exaggeration, people do not know w hich one is reliable; therefore, they waste time reading wrong information.That is so confusing! Mass media plays an important role in modern society. It can have positive influence on one side and negative impact on the other side. The public can not refuse its advantages by only seeing the disadvantages of the mass media. However, people must have an overlook to the mass media so that they can take advantages of mass media as much as they can! END WORDS COUNT: 994 REFERENCE LIST: 1. Book: Kristine, B. & Susan, H. (2002), Academic encounters- Life in the society, New York, Cambridge. 2. Web document:Afghanistan war logs story behind biggest leak in intelligence history (n. d). Retrieved July 5, 2010, from http://www. guardian. co. uk The second frightened murder in Vinh Phuc (n. d). Retrieved April 19, 2012, from http://www. kenh14. vn Obama campaign: Crossroads ad campaign is â€Å"dishonest† (2012), from http://www. pilitico. com The Ministry of transportation explain the reasons for fare of transport (2012). Retrieved November 1, 2012, from http://www. vneconomy Le Van Luyen killed mercilessly people (n. d). Retrieved November, 2011, from http://www. vnexpress. net