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Media 's Influence On Society

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Media plays an important and influential role in society. The media effects so many different institutions throughout a society that researchers have began to wonder how the media is really effecting these processes. Over the years many models have been developed to explain this process. The models that I will look at, include the hypodermic model, the mass society theory, the minimal effects model, and the agenda setting and priming model. Before looking at these models, we must first look at some of the challenges researchers ran into while trying to understand the media effect. Many researchers believed that media had influence on the public, but did not change or have an effect on what the public believed in. However this was false statement, “This idea contrasted sharply with the public’s general perception that media play a very influential role in society. There are three major reasons for this gap in perceptions” (Graber 2009a). The first reason for this misperception was because of how narrow researchers looked at the effects on media issues. An example of this is when researchers looked at voters and whether certain media exposure would alter their vote. They concluded that there was no media influence, but the catch was that these studies were conducted during a time when party loyalty was very strong. This would be an important factor in the reasons why media did not influence the publics vote. To gain a better understanding researchers should have,

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