The power within the media is a hotly debated topic and is judged by people based on how topics such as political & religious beliefs are handled and broadcast within the sphere of the general public.
One of the main factors of the power within the media is the virtue of surveillance. More and more surveillance is becoming a part of our lives with an increased presence for corporations gathering search and viewing data from consumers. Stemming originally from Jeremy Bentham, it can be argued that the first form of this surveillance culture was born out of the Panopticon, first employed in the Illinois Statesville Penitentiary. This was a setup for the prison which allowed for all prisoners to be monitored at all times by arranging the cells in a circular formation around a centre watch tower. The tower was blacked out, ensuring the prisoners did not know when they were being watched, leading them to assume they were watched all the time. This is a similar philosophy that has arisen from the newer forms of media. ‘The new reality is that people are public by default and private by effort’; this is a quote from Dana Boyd which describes the fact that anyone who participates in online social media applications is public with their information. Because of this, companies have the right to collect your data and distribute it however they feel necessary.
Reinforcing the argument above is the fact that 62% of adults within the UK have used a search engine to search up their own name to see what data returns from the result. Michel Foucault displayed a sense of dissatisfaction with this system in his book ‘Discipline & Punish’ in 1977. In the book he said ‘The panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form’. This infers that by using this system of surveillance the media has a large imbalance of power which could lead to nefarious & negative behaviour later on. As well as this, it has also led to advertisers having powers over studios producing content that is safer for revenue streams rather than publishing to push cinematic boundaries. This feeds into the notion that the media has a power imbalance compared to its consumers, having the ability to feed their personal agendas into their consumers. An example of this was within the 2016 US presidential election where the result was blamed heavily on interference and intrusion from social media companies advertising certain politically charged content toward potential voters.
During the session we investigated this notion even further, by researching a prominent political figure. We had decided to research current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn due to his controversial and ‘anti - establishment’ stance within his sphere of operations. Among a number of many news outlets, I was tasked to judge Corbyn through articles published by the Guardian. Reading through approximately 5 different articles, I had come to the conclusion that overall the Guardian was slightly in favour of him while maintaining the odd article against him. Other outlets such as the Daily Mail and New York Times researched by other people in my class returned more clashing results, displaying Corbyn in a more negative light, due to more a right wing bias compared to the Guardians left bias. This displayed that if people were to stick to a single or similar news outlets they could easily be fed an opinionated bias by these companies. This could lead consumers to form opinions based from the news outlets' power imbalance, as discussed above.