Mass media and ideas Hi, I wrote an essay for a subject that has defined statement. --------------------------------------- The mass media, including TV, radio and newspapers, have great influence in shaping people's ideas. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement? Give reasons for your answer. ---------------------------------------- Essay: Undeniable is the role played by the mass media on shaping the people’s ideas. The newspaper have influence sufficient to start a war or stop it, just selecting the words and images that they show to the public, in other words they can choose a side or just omit the other. Many governments avoid resistance of ideas controlling mass Medias by imposing a censorship in order to control the information about issues like education, poverty or starvation. Your ideas and opinion come from the facts that you know or the information that you read, the mass media as a information or history supplier might influence people just telling the part of history. Recently in Brazil an example of that happened, while the country is having problems with corruption and violence a TV Show that runs on Sunday night and has a great audience instead of talking about corruption scandals they preferred to show another that aren't even related to the politics. The freedom of people country can be measure by the news. Dictatorial or extremist kinds of government tend to control the media, because it's easy to rule people with a unique opinion about public issues or manipulate if they have only one source of information. In some democracies specially when the time for elections come. In Brazil it's common the government more money then as usual with certain TV Channel, radios or magazines in order to receive good news about the situation and in consequence obtain more votes in the election. To sum up, in my point of view in our modern society the media specially the social media based on the Internet have a great influence in people's ideas. We need to pay attention to what we are reading and who write, what is his interests on writing that. We should read information that comes of a variety of sources in order to have a more assertive opinion about situations or ideas.