Mass Media-- Crossing the line?

In the tenth grade I read a book called 1984 by George Orwell. It was interesting to me to see that “Big Brother” would watch over people in the country and later brainwash them. Also they would have media praising Big Brother and not much else. I could not imagine a world like this but little by little this is occurring without us acknowledging it through our media infringing on our natural born human rights.
Main stream media is a medium designed to reach a large group of people by using television, internet, radio and much more. Their mission is to inform the citizens of this country and be objective without infringing on the rights of humans. The rights of human beings are listed in the Declaration of Independence as article one, two and three. Without these rights we would have prejudice, racism and a lot more consequences.
Article one of the Declaration of Independence says all people should treat one another the way we would like to be treated and not be enslaved. That is, we shouldn’t be forced to do labor against our will without reimbursement. Second article says that everyone has the right to be in this country and accepted despite their age, race, sex, language, political views, and religion. And this is something very prevalent in our everyday life now; we see it in fine print on job applications and tests. And finally the third article says people have the right to live; freedom
to have protection and comfort. So for example we have the right to buy what we need to survive and what we want.
Even though we are given these rights from birth, they aren’t always upheld. There have been so many taboos that now we don’t categorize as taboo that have been being expressed. Some examples of this is when Lou Dobbs talks about deporting every Mexican in the country (even though his wife is Mexican), or when Carlos Mencia makes stereotypes of each ethnicity in this country and calls them derogatory names such as wetbacks, and coons. But aside from this extreme expression of “freedom of speech,” we have the news media.
News media is supposed to be impartial but actually isn’t, according to Global Issues. Media is supposed to help inform people, but underdeveloped and undeveloped countries have various problems. International news is decreasing which is not giving it the attention it deserves. This can be a problem because they aren’t being given the exposure they need and so they aren’t receiving the resources and help they need from other countries.
Another issue of mass media is that journalists’ are threatened to censor their writings and reporting so the news isn’t always accurate. The problem of freer countries such as US is the lack of objective reporting which is because those papers are controlled by elites, or more wealthy people, which they in turn use to how it will ultimately advance them (Shah, 1).
When the news isn’t conveyed properly to the public we don’t get to see the truth. For example, if we didn’t see the effects the war we are in now on television, since it is not directly affecting us we don’t see what is going on. Therefore we won’t be directly affected by it. On the other side of it, when hurricane Katrina hit and we saw how high the water was and how dead bodies were floating on top of the water we were directly bothered by it. Also when Haiti was hit by the earthquake and we saw the devastation that was caused by that we were directly bothered by it.
Ultimately mass media has a lot of influence on how we view certain things. Even when the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 happened the media indirectly showed us pictures of Muslims in their garb and after being shown that a couple hundred times we began to internalize what a terrorist looked like. Mass media is to blame for this. They show only scary images from the Middle East like the Osama Bin Laden’s videos.
Its almost like we are allowing Big Brother to brainwash us. Mass media is like Big Brother and we are in the country where, even though we sometimes point out flaws in our government, we still censor our comments as well. Too bad we don’t do that where it matters.