Allegory of the Cave Essay 7

Behind The Lens Many people question themselves when they think they aren’t right about something because everyone else around them believes the opposite. What you think might be truer than you think because the world tends to believe what they want to, and not the truth. In Plato’s philosophical example of life in the “Allegory of the Cave” he explains and questions his views on human existence and the reality of things. Everyone has a different reality and a way that they perceive things but other factors like the media influence and persuade us. The media has the power through the radio, television, or other technologies to tell us things that might not even be true but we have to believe them because we don’t know what is true. The media even hides the truth in the news, has the ability to persuade us to believe something, and influences human existence. We rely on the news to know what is going on in the world, and we can’t really deny what they tell us because it’s their job to tell us the truth. There have been many mishaps where it has even been caught on television one example was on the news, “Taking her act one step further, this morning she appeared on a suburban street . . . paddling a canoe. There was one small problem. Just as the segment came on the air, two men waded in front of Kosinki . . . and the water barely covered their shoe tops! That's right, Kosinski's canoe was in no more than four to six inches of water!” (Finkelstein 1). If the news decides not to tell the truth even if doesn’t prove their story, what reality is there if they can make up some random story with proof that they didn’t even tell the truth on television. The way that the media has the ability to tell us false stories, proves Plato’s theory, “…and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion…” (Plato 1). The ‘shadows’ that he saw represent

Cited: Esdale, Logan. “Living Under Media Influence” 15 June 2000. <http://epc.buffalo.edu/ezines/rust/1/lumi.html> Finkelstein, Mark. “Up a Creek: Accusing Bush of Video Stunt, 'Today ' Gets Caught in Stunt of Its Own” NewsBusters. 14 Oct. 2005. <http://newsbusters.org/node/2199> Swinton, John. “Media Blacks Out the Facts or 'We are intellectual prostitutes '” Heall. 1995. <http://www.heall.com/medicalfreedom/mediablackout.html>