The Media: Our Savior Or A Trap? | Teen Ink

The Media: Our Savior Or A Trap?

October 14, 2008
By Anonymous

What do you see when you walk in one of the aisles of a local grocery store, or gas station? Usually I see magazines such as People, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Vogue with some superstar at the peak of their fame on the cover. Then I see the weekly magazines next to the gum and chocolate with stars that aren’t famous enough to get on the ‘real’ magazines anymore. Many times those people are political officials.

One of the biggest elections in our nation’s history is going on and I see Lindsay Lohan, the Jonas Brothers, Brittney Spears, Vanessa Huchens, or Kate Hudson more than I do the candidates for president and vice president. Our country is in the middle of a recession, we are going to be finishing a war or continuing one, dealing with global warming and green house gases, and other foreign affairs.

With all of the things we need to deal with in our country people have the nerve and gall to drive hummers and watch MTV instead of buying electric cars and watching the vice presidential debates. The media has so much power, and can cause so much change. Yet they choose to report about things that don’t really matter. I’m not saying that all we can be worried about is politics, world economy, world endangerment, etc. Yet we can’t do the exact opposite, I’ve seen more about “Jennifer Lopez’s million dollar butt” than I have about Senator McCain’s, Senator Obama’s, and Ralph Nader’s plans for our country. Even when we are presented with issues about this election usually all it’s all mudslinging nothing important. The media not only presents us with useless gossip but also twisted versions of the important truths. That is bad, too bad to convey with words, and one can only wonder if it is truly the media’s fault, or our own?

Is it our fault for not pulling the media under control, or holding them to higher standards? Or is it the media that is to blame because they don’t report important things unless it’s in a newspaper, and it will probably be a twisted version. If according to Newsweek 81% of people think our country is headed in the wrong direction why are only a seemingly 5% doing something about it? These questions and more we need to ask ourselves; because a stable country cannot go on like this much longer.


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