Fourth Blog

In chapter ten of James Potter’s Media literacy, he discusses how the news is not a reflection of events but is instead a construction that the news broadcasters create. He says that the news is constructed through a variety of constraints and bias’ including time and resource limitation, ownership, use of sources, branding, and even a set story formula.

     One of the news-framing constraints that Potter specifically advises to be cautious of is the use of public opinion. He says that we have the technology to record accurate public opinion, but only if it is there to record. On page 158 he says that “the problem is that often people don’t have an opinion about something, or they are not sure what their opinion is-they are ambivalent.” He then illustrates this point by asking the reader to conduct an informal poll. He assures that most of those polled will have an opinion, but few if any of those will have sound reasoning for having that opinion.

     The views of Potter on public opinion resonate in the youtube video by ChallengingMedia featuring Justin Lewis. Lewis says that public opinion is often guided by the media. One of the ways he says that the opinion of the public can be swayed in is the actual coverage time that is spent on an issue. He illustrates this in two ways.

First, he shows that when environmental threats were highly covered by the media, public opinion on those issues went up. But even when the problems were getting worse, public opinion went down as coverage went down. Next, he spoke about presidential candidates during an election. He showed that even though the candidates were basically the same on all major issues, they were portrayed as being completely different due to their stances on civil liberty issues.

Both of these examples show that not only is Potter right on the issue of poll takers often being undecided and quickly forming opinions during a public opinion poll, but that the news media actually counts on it and does not hesitate to feed on it. This is why public opinion must be very cautiously viewed, because those whose opinions were taken may not have really had an opinion at all, or maybe they just saw something about the issue just a few minutes early in the media and hastily formed an opinion on what they saw covered. The point is that unless the opinions being recorded are well founded with clear reasoning, experiences, or information, the views of those polled may only be of those that are running the news.