♫♪♫♪♫♪ Radio ♫♪♫♪♫♪

           The industry transformation that took place in 1920’s that led to the RCA’s creation of NBC and the creation of CBS allowed the radio to become a regulated and commercially widespread industry.

I believe that industries were the leading force of commercializing the radio due to economic incentives and the potential for creating a new kind of technology that could be widespread and easily profitable. Industries allowed for the radio to expand in ways that the government and even audience demand could not actively achieve. The audience demand was what called for the expansion of the radio, but it was industries that put the radio into large scale operation.

Beginning with AT&T’s sell out to the RCA in 1926 the radio began to become its own economically independent industry. Before this point the radio had little formal organization and lacked regulation. Once the RCA began to broadcast its radio network NBC self regulation was no longer an option. The growth of big industry forces caused the Radio Act of 1927 which led to the creation of the FRC. While the creation of the FRC was initially what regulated radio, the government was not necessarily a guiding force of radio but rather just a catalyst to the already booming industries that were leading radio to the extremely powerful form of technology it grew to be. With big industry names deciding what was to be played on the radio and what sort of advertising was to be broadcast the radio quickly grew to become commercially successful.

I have experienced the ineffectiveness of information campaigns through programs such as D.A.R.E and prosocial television ads which often lack target audiences and have unspecific objectives.

The media often has a reputation for displaying images of violence, drugs, and sex that are said to go against society’s core values. Why then do the methods implemented by big media companies clearly have a larger impact than those implemented by education programs that seek to display prosocial behavior? Information campaigns are campaigns that seek to influence society to adopt prosocial behavior as opposed to being influenced by the negative effects of the media. However, these attempts often fail. Advertising spots are difficult to find, and are usually at night when the target audience (children and teens) are often asleep. The focus of the programs are usually vague, and lack a target audience. Teens often joke about the exaggerated affects displayed by the educational program, and occasionally the campaigns can be even worse than ineffective. Another problem with information campaigns is that unlike commercials that aim to sell products, they aim to immediately and directly change people’s values as opposed an overtime build up of values.

D.A.R.E. was a drug educational program that was implemented in my elementary school along with many others. Many problems that plague information campaigns were also prevalent in D.A.R.E. The progam lacked focus, aiming to prevent drug use, gang involvement, and violence all at once. It also attempts to scare children about drug use by making it seem much more prevalent than it actually is. As a child, programs like D.A.R.E. often made me believe that ALL teenagers smoke cigarettes and that I needed to use any means possible to avoid them. While I did take away the harmful effects of drugs, I also saw the portrayal of drugs as commonplace to make these effects seem less damaging. Information campaigns such as D.A.R.E are at times ineffective and even can even have negative effects on viewers.

 http://www.dare.com/home/default.asp

Agenda Setting and Framing in the News Media

Exactly how much influence does the news media have over what we think? Where do we get these ideas and exactly how "biased" are certain news channels today? The news media can use agenda setting to decide what the public sees and to frame stories to further promote political ideologies that are beneficial to that news source.



Agenda setting is used by the mass media in order to decide what the public sees as relevant topics in recent news. Through framing the stories that the news decides to display, the public sees a one-sided idea of the topic of interest. Agenda setting and framing are especially relevant in today’s society because news media such as CNN and FOX news are becoming increasingly one-sided and biased towards certain topics in the news and towards political candidates. The line between delivering the news through a “surveillance” standpoint and a “interpretation” standpoint has gotten increasingly thin, furthering the divide between political standpoints in the American population. This divide is furthered by gatekeepers who decide what is to be displayed in news stories and have political motivation to display stories in a light that will further dominant ideology in the media. This is an important concept because hegemony must be continually won and secured and is not a constant in society.

One example of the furthering of ideology in the news media through framing and gate keeping is recent headlines of FOX news. FOX news, which is owned by well known conservative Rupert Murdoch frames stories in such a way that the receiver of the message is influenced not only by the story chosen, but by the title of the story. One recent headline claimed “Boehner Would Vote for Middle-Class Tax Package if That's the Only Option.” This title slants recent support of only middle class tax cuts by republican John Boehner as being only a beginning to the amount of tax cuts that should be taking place. This conservative agenda in the supposedly "unbiased" media clearly displays Murdoch's motivation to further the positive idea that lowering goverenment spending is necessary and inevitable. Below is a link to the biased news story:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/09/12/obama-economic-adviser-afford-tax-cuts-high-end-earners/


PICTURE TAKEN FROM: http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/02/12/videogames-will-destroy-the-environment/