15.1: Mass Media

We experience almost none of what counts as “the news” firsthand. Occasionally we are in the right place at the right time — or, perhaps more accurately, the wrong place at the wrong time — to witness news happening with our own eyes and ears. The soldier in a war zone knows the outcome of the battle from having personally fought it; the congressional intern hears the roll call of votes leading up to the passage of a major bill; the victim of a tornado emerges from a basement to find what was once a house reduced to rubble. Each of these stories might appear in the same nightly news broadcast, but it would be extremely rare (and unlucky) for anyone to have personally lived through more than one of them that day, and most of us will have had direct experience with none.

Instead, we encounter most news through the prism of the media. The word medium can refer to anything that exists between two other things, such as a size of clothing between small and large. In the realm of communication, a medium is something — a newspaper, a radio show, a television program, a website — that passes on information about the world to us. In other words, a news medium exists in the space between us and the world about which we might like to know but which we cannot experience directly.

Almost anything can function as a medium. When your friends tell you about a party you didn’t attend, they are acting as media, placing themselves between you and the events on which they are reporting. Most of the time, however, we use the term media to refer to mass media, modes of communication that can reach large audiences relatively quickly. Your friends can only tell so many people about the party by themselves, but if they post about it on a mass medium like Twitter, millions of people might find out about it (for better or worse).

Recognizing the role of media in telling us about the world is essential to understanding its power. Because we experience nearly all news through media, we react not to the world as it is but rather to the world as our media present it. American journalist Walter Lippmann referred to this presentation as a pseudo-environment, the “picture in our heads” that is partly based on the real world but distorted by assumptions, misinterpretations, and stereotypes — both our own and those of our media. (Lippmann was the first to use the word stereotype to refer to prejudices about people or places.)

The concept of pseudo-environments can help explain why people frequently react to the same news in drastically different ways. Our own reactions to news seem perfectly natural and reasonable to us, and we are often baffled when others’ reactions seem wholly unnatural and unreasonable. We forget that what we are reacting to is not the world itself but rather a pseudo-environment shaped partly by the media we consume and partly by our own prejudices and preconceptions, most of which are not shared by all. Even if our own pseudo-environment happens to be the most accurate one — and we seem to always to be confident that it is, whether or not we should be — it’s entirely possible and even likely that the seemingly inexplicable behavior of other people is in fact an entirely sensible response to their pseudoenvironments.