Media coverage and its influence on society

Media play an essential role in nowadays politics and the image of certain circumstances within society. As we are mostly not personally affected by the incidences which occur, we are only informed by the media, which means we did not observe it ourselves. Therefore, for anything we are told, we must be aware of the fact that this is told from a third person’s perspective, whose understanding of a situation might differ from ours being in the same situation.

For instance, when a mother is arguing with her child, some people might think she is mean and some that she does it for the child’s good. This is the result of different perception due to different experiences we have gained in life. An appropriate answer can mostly only be given when we know the whole context and why this situation happened to be the way we observed it.

Coming back to the media, one always has to be aware that the information, one receives, might be presented without the full context, directing the receiver towards a certain conclusion. By doing so, people’s opinion can be influenced either positively or negatively. As a result, politicians are forced to follow this opinion to be reelected. Accordingly, media have a considerable influence on all our lives, if we don’t question what we are told and that it is consistent with our observations.

To underpin this, I want to give a short example, I observed, comparing media coverage in the US and Germany. I was living in Northern America for a few months and I found the media coverage to be very different from what I was used to in Germany. The American media was built up very emotional. One thing I will always remember was the information that a house burnt out completely. In German media, it sounds somehow like “A house in city XY burnt down. No one was injured. The damage is estimated to be around 300,000€.”. In American media, there were three people interviewed of how they felt to survey this house burning down. They were only neighbors, not directly affected by the fire. All of them were crying and almost screaming of how devastating it was and how threatening.

For me this was really weird as I felt it to be more fear-evoking than to be informative. It makes you feel more vulnerable and that something bad can happen to you any second. As a result, when watching decision making on a political level, I think one can see a difference between decisions made by the US and Germany, e.g. how fast one calls for war or a strike back. For me, this has a lot to do with the people’s fear and I see a very high correlation between media coverage styles and this fear. As a result, one should be aware of how one might be influenced by outside actions and form one’s own opinion matching one’s experiences. This is especially interesting in the current refugee “crisis”.