The Media's Influence On Modern Day Photography

Modern day technology such as cameras, cellular phones, and television, has made the media more accessible to the public. Before technologies were attainable to most, the news was spread around by newspapers or by spoken communication. An example of the media using conventional technology in the early 1990’s, a standard camera, is in “The War Photo No One Would Publish,” in which Torie Rose DeGhett addresses how the media censored graphic photographs, such as Kenneth Jarecke’s photo of a soldier’s burnt corpse. Since the 1990s, the voice of the press has changed because of new advancements in technology allows popular opinion to be the media’s source for content which spreads to the majority of people promptly. Technologies that have developed
Today’s technology has enhanced the media’s voice from being independent of the public to expressing the public's popular opinion, which influences those who have access to media. The media today can now spread their biased political views, their misleading modern trends, and their unattainable beauty standards, in a more quick and personal manner. The media is capable of influencing the public’s views on politics because of widespread technology. The media can influence the people to become interested in biases they show the public to change people's political values. Since there are multiple sources of media, there can often be times where one source of media that people trust and favor instead of doing their own research on political events and facts. As a result, people would form their political values based on a media source whose goal is to make the public agree with the public’s
The media promotes themselves by advertising compelling content through photos and videos, which convinces people to spend money on certain products and to trust the media on their opinion for good-looking products. For example, a popular trend that is photographed on social media is Starbucks’ colorful “rainbow drinks.” A Seattle Times article by Janet I. Tu features a photo of five hands holding up cold pink, blue, yellow, purple and green drinks with the Starbucks-labeled cup. Tu’s article states how these drinks are not on Starbuck’s official menu, which confuses customers and baristas with the difficulty of ordering these popular beverages (Tu). The social media shares modern trends with the public to gain more popularity for themselves, even if that means causing frustration and misunderstanding among the public. Even before advancements in technology, the media was still misleading with information in the 1990s. DeGhett was able to interview Stella Kramer, a freelance photo editor for Life magazine, who said that their magazines were “are all basically just propaganda,” regarding to not publishing Jarecke’s explicit photograph (81). Even before the media used todays technolgy, the media was using their sources as propaganda for their benefit of being more