A mirror or a mirage?

In today’s world, the media’s ethical posture has influenced society’s attitude towards its reportage. The metaphor ‘mirror’ has been used to describe the relationship between the media and its audience. Prior, it suggests that the media is a reflection of reality. The assumption is that this reflection serves society’s need to have an unbiased, objective and critical view of her.

Although this apparent pragmatic tag satisfies the media’s role as the mediator of reality it is however in stark contrast to the situation on the ground .Neutrality in the media fraternity has been thrown to the dogs mainly due to the concentration of media houses in the hands of a privileged few as well as the commercial pressures that hang around their necks.

The current situation is akin to the media effects tradition undertaken by the three critical thinkers, also known as the Frankfurt school. Paul Lazarfield, Bernard Berleson,and Hael Gaundet had challenged the hypodermic needle theory(a theory propounded by Harold Lasswell in 1935 to suggest the direct influence of the media on her audience) of media effects tradition. The trust of the public for the media’s fairness is gradually fading away. The absence of credibility finds its strings rooted in her alignment to political parties and the unnecessary hyping of vulgar stories to sell one’s newspapers. In effect people have been compelled to judge on their own by looking and listening to different channels for the same news.

The destructive ethical posture worn by the Ghanaian media is gradually crumpling the country’s political stature. The current brand of Journalism transcending the media landscape adds meat to the work conducted by the Frankfurt school with the title: “The peoples’ voice” (1944, 95): a rebuttal of the notion that the media had a direct effect on the audience’s action.

Viewed from another angle the coinage “mirror” suggests the media as offering the platform for society to evaluate and adjust itself accordingly. This is similar to the tenets of the agenda setting theory of media effects. The media succeeds in shaping society to think in a particular way. No matter what trickles from the media-be it falsehood or truth, society feeds on it.

From which ever way we view it is important to realize the media is a potential tool to either mar or make us. In spite of being biased the media’s uncommon place in accelerating development and ensuring cooperative governance cannot be ignored.

The onus lies on the leaders of the industry to pull down her dilapidated structures and build new ones.