Don’t Believe Everything You Read

The hypodermic theory is based on the idea that audiences are very susceptible to influence by the mass media. From personal experience, I do find that it can be difficult to resist the influence of the media. In my own time, I try to not believe the initial headlines I see, and instead, I do research about topics that are important to me. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes me a minute to step back and not just be influenced, but it is difficult. I feel like we should be able to trust journalism, but sadly I know that sentiment is far from reality. They make it easy to fall victim to fake news by creating misleading and false headlines. People want to consume information quickly and don’t want to put effort into reading a full article, so with headlines that spread misinformation it’s no wonder we can be influenced by fake news.

We have all seen this go disastrously with political campaigns, regardless of who was written about. Headlines this past election were ridiculous… I personally don’t understand why the media is okay with creating a social climate that could explode so easily.

Covid-19 is a perfect example of this theory being proven correct. There are a variety of terrifying stories out there that stretch the truth and put fear into the world. The Covid virus needs to be taken seriously and people need to be protected, but because it is a sensitive topic anyone will believe what they read or hear about if a couple of articles support each other.

A few years ago we were influenced that Apple wired headphones became uncool and Airpods were what we needed to buy… only for wired headphones to become trendy again as of a month ago.

I do think our society is easily influenced by the media because now more than ever news becomes viral and conversations happen fast.