Responsibility of the media

The media is, arguably, one of the most influential forces in today's society. Media and advertising (which have traditionally gone hand in hand) both dictates and follows pop culture. I have always been aware of the responsibility of journalists to report the truth, however after reading the non-fiction work Blink I am even more so. Malcolm Gladwell is a New York city journalism and writer who has written extensively on the subject of 'new media'. He authored The Tipping Point, which was the first work to address the modern concept of sharing information instantly online - basically how and why a video can get 100 million views in a week. His latest book Blink addresses first impression. Snap judgments, or what Gladwell refers to as 'thin slicing'.

It is a very interesting book and well worth the read, however one specific chapter really struck home and seemed particularly relevant to my course. Gladwell writes about the theory of priming. In one experiment, students were asked to solve a linguistics problem. Within one of the problematic piece of text, subtle descriptive words were scattered such as 'Florida', 'grey', 'wrinkled' and 'lonely'. Students who completed this test, as opposed to other control tests, walked out of the room slower than when they entered. Psychologists have realised that the unconscious dictates behaviour in accordance with associated words, concepts and feelings. In other words - these students didn't realise they were behaving 'old', their unconscious dictated them to.  

This is certainly interesting, but the concept of subliminal messages is somewhat outdated. However, this has unimaginable consequences when applied to the media. In another experiment with American students - half African-American students, half Caucasian-American students - psychologists presented all students with the same test, but told half of each the African-American and Caucasian-American students to imagine they were black, disadvantaged youths beforehand, and the rest that they were upper-class white professors. Through simply thinking of these stereotypes, the differences in both test groups were striking. The 'professors' got 55.6% of the questions right, in stark comparison to the 42.6% of the 'underprivileged black youths'. Of course, the students, as a whole, were equal in their intelligence and ability - the only difference was the associations their unconscious formed with the stereotypes.

Sure, positive think can make a student perform better at a test, that believable and hasn't got too much to do with the media, right? Stereotypes, however, are largely at play here - and the way in which stereotypes are maintained and spread is almost solely through widespread media. Finally, in a last experiment, the unconscious association of the mind were further tested in relation to race and sex. Words such as kitchen, corporation, home, capitalist, were listed and subjects were asked to assign them to one of two columns, one labelled 'Male or Career', the other 'Female or Family'. The second time round, subjects were asked to assign the exact same list of words to two columns, however this time the columns were either 'Male or Family' or 'Female and Career'. The second time, participants took far longer to assign the words to their respective column. This is due to the mental associations we all have with male and career, and female and family. This same test, called an IAT, was reproduced to reflect the unconscious associations we have with race and certain attributes. The author, Gladwell, who is and African-American, writes that he did not believe that he harboured any negative feelings towards his own race. However, after taking a race IAT, the results showed that he took longer when associating positive attributes with the 'black' column than with the 'white' column.

These finding are beyond scary. The though that you and I are 'conditioned' to associate certain attributed to particular members of society unconsciously is devastating to those fighting not only for equality, but against damaging stereotypes. This also highlights the impact of the media in 'conditioning' the public - not purposefully (it is not a conspiracy!) but through the choice of which stories to print, and how they portray minorities in the press. Certainly gives us all something to think about!




**This is an interesting interview with the author: http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html