The Relationship Between Mass Media And Politics

Mass Media is the main if not the only source of information nowadays. In fact, it has become a part of our lives that we cannot get rid of. Each moment, audience counted as millions and called “Masses” participate in sharing news or receiving media products that can change their life positively, or it can play on their backgrounds, change their opinions, especially the ones related to politics, it has a good side on the one hand: informing masses about the latest policies or events, listening to their opinions and suggestions. But on the other hand, a bad side that might cover it all, it wouldn’t be surprising to know that most of media platforms aren’t free, They are made to defend the interests of parties, institutions and countries as well, and since everybody visits or at least receive news from it, it has become targeted from politicians to take advantage of it in order to achieve certain goals. therefore, it has become one of the most powerful weapons in the world due to what it can do to the masses. The relationship between mass media and politics can be studied in three levels: social media, national media and international media.

First of all, social media has the largest masse among all other types of mass media, people consider it as the easiest and fastest source to get political news, Facebook for example can identify a client background through studying pages and posts that he like and visit. After that, it sells his information to pages that support the same ideology and pay Facebook to get followers, so when the client opens his Facebook, he finds with no effort, news and platforms that fit with his thinking and ideology. Recently, people somehow learned how to benefit from media to effect on the field; masses’ reaction to a certain event can directly effect on it. We can give an example with the military coup that took place in Turkey. According to many specialists, social media played the main role in failing the coup. Khalid Taha, a specialist in social media, told Aljazeera: “we have reach a new era of social media when people can change the happenings, when Erdogan sent a call in Facetime he changed the cuff to his favor” because right after his call, millions of Turkish understood that a coup is taking place on the country, especially after the strike that targeted the national TV building in order to blind people of what happening till the coup succeed. Unfortunately, people rely on social media more than TV, and Erdogan took advantage of it. Not to mention the example of the social media and Arab Spring, Al-An channel reported about the early beginnings of the Egyptian revolution, that few people on the public eye were posting sometimes on Facebook sort of invitations to a movement that would change the situation, it had a good reaction and started to spread between hundreds of masses even when it wasn’t that serious, and then they’ve shared that invitation to gather everybody in Rabia-Al-Adawiya’s yard, when even the organizers have been surprised of the huge number of people participated in only the first day which was 25 January. And we all know the Political evolutions that took place after that day, and it all started with one post on Facebook.

Second, National media refers to all broadcast and print products of a country that get nation-wide distribution, so it is the first responsible of all problems related to the lack of political knowledge in a country. Especially when it chooses what to show and what to hide, when it takes sides between parties or ethnic groups, when it glorifies a certain regular institution and hide the others. In fact, national media often defend system or attack it depending on the interested of each media platform. However, they focus on their purposes even if the price was to product news and distort facts. It is worth to mention how the Moroccan TV shows the king as a saver of the country by showing him in the news doing all missions that are supposed to be done by other institutions as well. When we rarely hear something about the government that we voted for. It has educated Moroccans to trust only the king while considering the others as criminals that did nothing to the country. While in actuality, the government is an active stage of political conflicts, and ruling news. And although it is the institution that passes laws and launches projects according to the Moroccan constitution, it stills invisible in the national media for some reasons. The same case appears in countries all over the word.

third, the majority’s knowledge about International politics is based on what they see on one Specific TV channel or newspaper…etc. They don’t do any effort to check out the other opinion in order to compare it and conclude something, or to question and doubt the reliability of what they see, that’s the common case that we shouldn’t ignore. For example, let imagine two Arabs that follow different channels, the first one believes just Aljazeera as the most reliable channel, while the other is following only Russia Today. If we gathered the two in a debate about Syrian war for example they would not agree on anything, because they will build their arguments and analyses on different logical bases. But in actuality, one of the two -if not the two- has a fake or shall we called ”produced” data base. And here a question comes to our brains as: ”why do Mass Media product the truth? ”. in fact it has more than one reason to do so, such as putting people in the wrong political picture in order to defend somebody’s interests, not to get people aware of the truth that if they reach it, it may cause many serious problems to the producer of ”the single story” as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie call it. And more seriously than that, one of the most international media platforms’ objectives is to reasonable Military policies. For example, many propagandas were showing the American Intervention In Iraq as it was in favor of Iraqi people, and after a while everybody understood that the real reason behind the intervention was to control oil in Iraq and not to fight terrorists.

To sum up, the famous political quote says: ”it is important to have masses’ support before starting anything”. We should remember this rule when we receive any product from media. We should know how to use media, otherwise, media will use us. In Addition, Masses can easily take advantage of media if they didn’t believe every single word that appears on their favorite platform. Also, to try to compare other opinions and try to realize the truth, if they shared what they’ve found in order to get people aware of what’s happening around them.