While trying to do research and form an argument, Adam was getting actively distracted by the newspaper (The Daily Star), proving that he is indeed being influenced by the news in front of my eyes. The news gets very political, and one particular image that attracted his attention was one of a political cartoon showing the various parties as circus performers, with Conservative and Labour at the front of the pack, already showing immediately that they’re trying to disregard the other parties in relation to the main two that typically end up in power as of recent years. The front page itself is about “Tezza vs Jezza” (in reference to Theresa May vs Jeremy Corbyn), as opposed to the other parties. In regards to this, when you look at the other parties, Labour and Conservative ended up with over 250 seats each in the most recent election, while the Green party had a single seat at the end of the election. There’s no way that people weren’t swayed by the news telling them that the election was about Tory v Labour making them want to vote for these parties over the others. This is referred to as “Hypodermic Needle Theory”, the idea behind this is that people will see something in the media, in this case they see that either Corbyn or May should be Prime Minister, and they vote one of these ways without looking too far into it. This might not be necessarily true that you wouldn’t look into it, as many Labour and Tory voters are well informed and heavily believe in those parties, but a lot of people aren’t willing to give parties like Green or Lib-Dem a chance because they aren’t referenced as often in the news, and this supports the idea of hypodermic needle to an extent as it shows that people are ingesting what news sources say they should vote and don’t look into the alternatives. Would you be able to tell me that you know any of the policies the Green Party stands for? It seems obvious that there’s extreme influences to this from the news, as the publicity some of these other parties get is extremely underwhelming.
On the other hand, if a smaller party gets enough publicity then it’s possible they can have a real chance. Back in the 2015 election there was a massive scare (or a massive opportunity, depending on how you look at it) that UKIP would get into power, with many places having UKIP as their second most voted party overtaking Labour/Conservative. UKIP ended up nowhere near getting into power, holding a single seat in the end, but there’s a lot to be said about the publicity this party got from both sides, those who supported them and those who didn’t, that many people thought it was entirely possible that they could get a huge chunk of seats and really make some massive changes in parliament. In the end, they didn’t, but there was so much fear mongering about scary UKIP that everyone was worried the election would go poorly, it was clear that both sides were giving publicity, without anyone talking about the real changes in Scotland that were putting SNP into a position of power. Conservative supporters would likely have been against this and would have tried to change it, but the news was only speaking about big, bad UKIP, instead. This shows that people do listen to fearmongering. Nobody fearmongers SNP, SNP gets seats. Fearmonger UKIP and they don’t get seats. Even after the 2015 election, people were still talking about UKIP, because they were the ones who were in the news. You can’t say people aren’t persuaded by the news when the 2015 election seems to heavily suggest that, if something doesn’t get publicity, nobody cares.
Have you ever watched the news and just thought about it, or do you just look at, for example, the 2016 American election, and think “Yeah, this Donald Trump campaign is a disaster, hopefully he doesn’t win.” It’s highly unlikely that you were looking into everything both people stood for, because if the news says he’s bad, he’s bad. Donald Trump is, in my opinion, excellent at advertising a product. I saw an old advert for his own brand of steak that he created under his company name (Trump Steak, what a name). In this advert, he doesn’t tell you about the nutritional value of steak, about how much steak is in the steak or about how it’ll save the world. He sits down, giving you a comforting smile, and says that, in plain and simple terms, “This steak is the best steak, take it from me.” If a multi-millionaire who hosts an extremely popular TV show sits down and says something is good, you would think “If it’s good enough for a multi-millionaire, it’s good enough for me.” At a cheap enough price, everyone wants what a millionaire is having. If a millionaire wants to ‘save the country’ and ‘make it great’, people want that. Did they look into it? I’m sure some of them did, they may have been more active readers, looking into facts, manifestos and deciding that his travel bans, internet policies and overall political views were right for them, but would he have won without the publicity making passive viewers think that he was just simply going to make America great? I heavily doubt it. If you advertise it, people want it, and Trump had far more publicity.
You could argue that, similarly, Corbyn had more publicity than May, but unlike Trump, Corbyn isn’t a corporate advertising genius, a multi-millionaire or a guy from the Apprentice. He’s advertised as a local bloke looking out for local blokes. Who else was advertised as this? Nigel Farage, the fear mongered scary UKIP leader who was going to invade the country in 2015, apparently. By using the same advertising behind Corbyn, Conservative news was able to convince people that they were more or less the same, rather than trying to make them seem like completely unique individuals with independent views from each other. News can advertise somebody, and advertising is everything to get people scared. People were scared of instability under Farage, people were scared of instability under Corbyn. I, myself, trusted Corbyn, and did my best to look past the persuasion they were trying to force, as did many people and many newspapers, but just because 90% of people, for example, aren’t convinced by what someone says, still means that 10% are. If an aeroplane company landed 9/10 planes they wouldn’t be bragging about it, that would be a terrifying figure, and if 10% of people are prone to passive viewing of television, that entirely suggests that there are six and a half million people in the UK who will vote what the news tell them to. Conservative had less than a million more votes than Labour in the most recent election. If those 6 million people who passively viewed, for example, the Sun, looked at it and thought “Yeah, I don’t want the UK in the Cor-bin, so I’ll vote Tory” actually looked into what Corbyn stood for, it’s very possible that Labour could have won by a landslide, but, under the assumption that 10% of people don’t look into facts, it can be seen that the news does definitely influence people’s decision making. And that’s if the percentage isn’t actually higher, as there are no figures I can find on it (I assume more passive viewers aren’t aware they’re passive)
When somebody makes a news report, or a statement in general, they have a preferred reading. To bring back the Cor-bin point, they want people to be like “Oh no, can’t have any of that Corbyn ruining the country”, and will vote against him. This is their preferred reading, this is what the person writing it was hoping would happen, wanting them to think what they think. The difference here is the oppositional reading - somebody looks at it and thinks “Oh no, can’t have any of the Sun ruining our news sources”. Alternatively, there’s a negotiated reading, which is what people really should be going for, where people will analytically look through all the different debates, topics and points raised, think about it in comparison to their own thoughts and delegate to themselves how accurate they think it is in representing the facts. By arguing that the news doesn’t influence people, you think it’s going to always be negotiated readings. Why do preferred and oppositional readings would even exist if this were the case? There is obviously professional evidence that suggests there is influential persuasion within the news if there is any reason that these would exist, as there is the intended interpretation to change a person’s beliefs to that of the writer, and the opposite which is drawn from somebody resisting the influences the writer is using. If the news isn’t influential, why are people trying to resist its influence?
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