Understanding Media: Fake News, Social Impact, and Theories
Fake News: Definition and Features
What are fake news and their main features?
Fake news involves the production, distribution, and consumption of false or misleading information through digital mediums. Main features include manipulation, disinformation, falseness, rumors, and conspiracy theories. These behaviors have existed as long as humans have communicated.
False or misleading information is produced, distributed, and consumed through digital communication technology. Fake news and disinformation are symbols of a larger societal problem: the manipulation of public opinion to affect the real world.
False information dressed as news has created serious concerns in many countries. Some researchers have called this information pollution, polluting the public sphere and damaging democracy.
Fake news consists of false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.
Social Media’s Impact
What is the impact of social media?
The social impact of media explains the uses and effects of media on individuals, groups, or society. A theory needs to conceptualize media use and the potential changes that this media use can bring about in individuals, groups, or societies.
This is mostly known as the deliberate and non-deliberate short and long-term individual or collective changes in cognitions, emotions, attitudes, and behaviors that result from media use.
Media Effects Theories
Individual
- Two-step flow theory (Lazarfeld, Berelson & Gaudet, 1948)
- Knowledge gap theory (Tichenor, Donohue & Olien, 1970)
- Priming theory (Berkowitz, 1984)
Social
- Framing theory (Entman, 1993)
- Social learning theory (Behaviorism Bandura, 1977)
- Elaboration likelihood model (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986)
Understanding Ideology
Define what is ideology?
Ideology is a complicated term with different implications depending on the context in which it is used. It can be seen as an insult to charge someone with being ideological since it is a way of contradicting one’s beliefs. It often means belief shorts that help justify the actions of those in power by distorting and misrepresenting reality. Therefore, in other words, ideology is basically a system of meaning that defines and explains the world and that makes value judgments about that world. It can be related to words such as belief or even worldview, basically how the world is defined. To conclude, ideology analysis is fundamental to understanding the images and the words in a show of media text and ways of thinking for defining into a social and cultural context.
Selective Exposure
Selective exposure definition?
Selective exposure refers to the preference that people present when consuming media outlets. Normally, people will incline to media outlets that portray their same ideologies or beliefs, to be satisfied with what they read or hear. Selective exposure was first used to describe that before an election, media users exhibit a preference for messages and outlets that convey a stance in line with their own political views. It can also be talked about as individuals’ selection of mediated content and it can be conceptualized at an aggregate or an individual level. For example, users almost always exhibit systematic bias in selecting media messages. Individual selective exposure decisions result in systematic biases in audience compositions at the aggregate levels.
For instance, sports for men and fashion for women.
Uses and Gratifications (U&G)
Uses and gratifications (U&G approach)?
This theory seeks to explain why people use different media sources and what gratifications they get from each one of them.
Cultivation Theory
Cultivation theory?
Cultivation theory explains that long-term exposure to media influences how consumers perceive the world and conduct themselves. Different genres affect the way that cultivation theory is applied. High-frequency viewers of telecom are more likely to believe media messages and the belief that they are real and valid. Heavy viewers are exposed to more violence and therefore are affected by the mean world syndrome, the belief that the world is a far worse and dangerous place than it actually is. It can have long-term effects that gradually affect the audience. Their primary focus falls on the effect of viewing on the attitudes of the viewers as opposed to created behavior.
It is also said that the world created on television is an accurate deception of the real world. Television can induce certain paradigms about violence in the world.
The Importance of Genre
The importance of genre
Different genres affect the way that cultivation theory is applied. While cultivation’s original focus was on the cultural environment produced by the totality of television content, cultivation researchers early on distinguished among daytime programming, news, and commercials as potentially different from prime-time content. It is important since it differences in topics and story structures across genres.
Framing Theory
Framing theory?
How different media outlets present certain events to give it a specific meaning. The concept of framing is related to the agenda-setting tradition but expands the research by focusing on the essence of the issues at hand rather than on a particular topic. The basis of framing theory is that the media focuses attention on certain events and then places them within a field of meaning. Framing is an important topic since it can have a big influence and therefore the concept of framing expanded to organizations as well. In essence, framing theory suggests that how something is presented to the audience (called “the frame”) influences the choices people make about how to process that information. Frames are abstractions that work to organize or structure message meaning. The most common use of frames is in terms of the frame the news or media place on the information they convey. They are thought to influence the perception of the news by the audience; in this way, it could be construed as a form of second-level agenda-setting – they not only tell the audience what to think about (agenda-setting theory), but also how to think about that issue (second-level agenda setting, framing theory).
Fake News and Propaganda
Fake news and propaganda (Goebbels’ principles of propaganda, Hitler’s ideas of propaganda) definition of fake news and news propaganda.
Propaganda is when news stories are created by political entities to influence or mislead public opinion and beliefs.
When news stories are created by a political entity to influence or mislead public perception, it is often described as propaganda. The overt purpose is to benefit a public figure, organization, or government. There can be an overlap between propaganda and advertising. Similar to advertising, propaganda is often based on facts but includes bias to promote a particular site or perspective. The goal is to persuade rather than to inform, and differing from advertising, the emphasis is not on financial gain, but on political influence, such as the Russian channel one which is found to have published factually untrue news stories to influence public perception of Russo actions.