15.2: Mass Media

We experience almost none of “the news” firsthand. Occasionally we are in the right place at the right time to witness it with our own eyes and ears. The soldier knows the outcome of the battle from having personally fought it. The congressional intern hears the roll-call vote leading up to the passage of a major bill. The victim of a tornado emerges from a basement to find a neighborhood reduced to rubble. These stories might appear in the same nightly news broadcast, but it would be unlikely (and unlucky) for anyone to personally witness more than one of them that day. Most people will have had direct experience with none.

We encounter most news through 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. It exists in the space between us and the world we cannot experience directly.

Almost anything can be a medium. When your friends tell you about a party you didn’t attend, they place themselves between you and the party. Most of the time, though, media refers to mass media, which can reach large audiences relatively quickly. Your friends can only tell so many people about the party by themselves. However, if they post about it on a mass medium like Instagram, millions 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. We react not to the world as it is but rather to the world as media present it. American journalist Walter Lippmann referred to this presentation as a pseudo-environment. It is a picture in our heads, partly based on the real world but supplemented and distorted by assumptions, misinterpretations, and stereotypes. (Lippmann was the first to use the word stereotype to refer to prejudices about people or places.)

Pseudo-environments help explain why people frequently react to the same news in drastically different ways. We are often baffled when others’ reactions to news seem wholly unnatural and unreasonable, whereas ours seem eminently sensible to us. We forget that what we are reacting to is not the world itself but rather a pseudo-environment shaped both by the media we consume and by our own preconceptions and prejudices. The seemingly inexplicable behavior of other people may be entirely sensible responses to their pseudo-environments.