Media shapes public knowledge by defining events and scenarios people cannot access directly

Evidence

The behaviour itself was not particularly new or startling. … The Mods and Rockers didn’t become news because they were new; they were presented as new to justify their creation as news. — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics, 221 (#expands, via linked claim)

The skewed structure of public access to the media. Access and visibility in the media exhibit a clearly defined social structure. The media favors power groups, accredited elite witnesses, institutional spokesmen, experts, as against “out-groups”—the socially dispossessed or disorganized, the deviant, ethnic minorities, working-class groups, etc. When the latter groups appear they systematically tend to have their problems defined for them . They are always carefully “balanced out.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 851 (#expands, via linked claim)

Lippmann’s view is that reality is “picturable,” and truth can be achieved by matching an independent, objective, picturable reality against a language that corresponds to it. News, however, cannot picture reality or provide cor- respondence to the truth. News can only give, like the blip on a sonar scope, a signal that something is happening. More often it provides degenerate photo- graphs or a pseudo-reality of stereotypes. News can approximate truth only when reality is reducible to a statistical table: sport scores, stock exchange reports, births, deaths, marriages, accidents, court decisions, elections, eco- nomic transactions such as foreign trade and balance of payments. — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 358 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Media access is skewed toward powerful groups who define issues.; Media do ideological labor by assigning events to classifying schemes.; Mass media act as primary definers shaping public crime attitudes (+12 more)

Related

• Events lacking significance can be magnified by the media. (similarity 0.86)
• Media access is skewed toward powerful groups who define issues. (similarity 0.84)
• Mass media act as primary definers shaping public crime attitudes (similarity 0.83)
• Public perception of deviance is driven by media narratives. (similarity 0.83)
• Media exaggeration shapes public perception of events significantly. (similarity 0.82)
• Media do ideological labor by assigning events to classifying schemes. (similarity 0.81)
• Media orient citizens by sifting out intersubjectively shared interpretations of the world (similarity 0.79)
• Media ideology works through unspoken absences, not just what is said (similarity 0.78)
• Media audiences require mafia symbols in crime imagery to find it authentic (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Events lacking significance can be magnified by the media. #expands (0.75) — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics, 221
• Media access structurally favors elites against out-groups whose problems get defined for them #expands (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 851
• News cannot picture reality but only signal that something is happening #qualifies (0.60) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 358
• Media exaggeration shapes public perception of events significantly. #corroborates (0.55) — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics, 185
• Public perception of deviance is driven by media narratives. #corroborates (0.55) — Cohen, Stanley, Folk devils and moral panics, 219
• Formal balance and impartiality in media mask real dominance of prevailing interpretations #complicates (0.50)