Page 140 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

124 Media Studies

action in the world – regarding everything from which political party they
will vote for to whether or not they will support a war – depend on what
picture of the world is in their minds, then ownership of the media and
limitations on it are important issues indeed. For example, when Rupert
Murdoch, a conservative known for inserting his beliefs into his news
companies such as Fox News so that news reporting often seems biased
toward right - wing perspectives and values, wanted to purchase the Wall
Street Journal , a business newspaper, many feared that he would also turn
that into a vehicle for his views. He was obliged to promise to refrain from
doing so in order to convince the owners to sell to him.
Simply inserting a right - wing idea into a news broadcast is not likely to
convince the audience to adopt it, but if the news media routinely, consist-
ently, and repeatedly rely on one perspective or one way of depicting the
world they portray and rely on, then it becomes more likely that those

routinely watching and listening will be influenced in their beliefs and
perceptions by it. They will “ see ” the world in a particular, quite limited
way. In order to understand how that might be the case, you need to think
about news reporting as something more than an alignment of words with
facts, and you need to think of how you perceive the world as being itself
a kind of picture that is painted for you by your culture and that is very
different from the facts of the world.
There is a strong tendency in any culture to think of everyday reality as
normal, as being as it should be. I ’ m always struck, living in Philadelphia,
an American city with a sharp geographic division between a poor area
populated by African Americans and Hispanics and a well - to - do area pop-
ulated by Whites, with how strange it seems to live with such a sharp
economic divide “ as if ” it were normal. To live in such a world sanely, the
picture of it in your mind must be one that endorses it. Such pictures are
linked to keywords we use to categorize the reality before us in our minds.
So we use words like poverty , for example, for a reality such as the one
around my university in Philadelphia. If we used a different set of words
– such as economic concentration camp or capitalist apartheid – we might
be tempted to think quite differently about that reality.
The news media foster and maintain supposedly “ normal ” pictures of
reality in our minds by using certain words and images to represent that
reality to us. Those words and images are often your only access to that
reality. In a way, when you try to picture that world in your mind, what
you see is the images the media have put there. For example, I have very
little real contact with North Philadelphia, the poor section of town. I hear