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"Does the function of mainstream media allow for or suppress and homogenize individuals?"
Media in NA supposedly functions like this: choose a demographic --> cater news to interest that demographic --> get money from advertisers to market to that select demographic. Sounds good, right? I'm pursuing a communications degree and we're given these ideal notions of journalism as "the watchdog of the government, the informant of the masses, the bringer of social justice" -- basically that truth and sunlight cure all and keep society good. Of course we examine many different viewpoints, but that's not important because this is the pervading one. The message: Who is your audience? They are the most important. Help them.
Except I think it doesn't work like that and everybody's deluding themselves. Like when kids grow up having a passion to teach, become teachers, and go into it knowing its a flawed system but still want to do their best. Except for journalists & media in general, we won't admit the system is flawed or that we're complicit with a lot of the things we abhor.
When the core value of your media company is making money, or "corporate," (corporate meaning having control & all things subservient to profit) that equation gets twisted around. Cater news to that demographic gets an added "if it doesn't affect advertising"
choose a demographic --> cater news to interest that demographic if it doesn't affect advertising --> get money from advertisers to market to that select demograhpic.
So now the interests and values of the advertisers are the main deciding factor, and not the audience. This happens when you take a fresh grad who spends a lot of time on a story only to have a seasoned editor shoot it down because it would compromise advertising interests. We're not prepared for this, only warned about it second-hand, and suddenly that's the lay of the land. Those are the rules and it's adhere to them or lose what you've worked for & have somebody else take your place. This is rarely ethically examined in my classes (relegated only to the sparse ethics sections), only haphazardly dealt with by being told "find a company that shares your values."
When people talk about vast conspiracies of the rich and powerful, they're not conspiracies, its this: The pervading culture of our media is corporate.
Those thoughts came out about the behind-the-scenes. This culture is disseminated on massive scale 24/7 everywhere. So back to the question: "Does the function of mainstream media allow for or suppress and homogenize individuals?"
Now I'm sure there are a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me who've thought about this a lot more. And I could be wrong. But this is interesting to consider, and can be applied to video games too, but thats another blog post. What do you think? Esp. if you come from another culture.
 
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I think one problem with the media is that they want the biggest profit; and to do that they need to cater for the majority. And to do that, I find (especially news) accommodates the bottom denominator. So there is very little intelligent news broadcasting, lots of cliche and over-repeated nonsense which either jumps to conclusions or summarises a very complicated issue into a very shallow argument.
Media is also paid for largely by adverstising, as you said, which is the ultimate homogenizer and suppresser in many ways. Advertising tells you what you should be, and offers you that "thing" if you buy the product advertised. So, in my opinion, a media which encourages true individual thought can't have advertising (or needs to do it in a really smart way).
I am not an expert, this is just my opinion. In New Zealand you pretty much NEVER see an intelligent person discussing something important on television. I think radio does it better here, especially on national radio station. The entire media experience is a horrible bombardment of advertising and badly written articles which someoen has decided is important news.
Best example; news articles about Pippa Middleton or some other celebrity making the first 1-3 news stories on at 6:00 PM news. It's disgusting.
(Sorry, I've gone off topic... just bitching  )
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Are there any good examples of news companies not airing certain stories that would have made their advertisers look bad, that later turned out to be a big deal? For one thing I'm not sure how much conflict of interest there would be...I would think for most issues like foreign or domestic policy advertisers wouldn't really care that much, except maybe for specific policies that would damage their sales or reports about the safety of their products.
It would seem like that's a big risk for a company to make anyways; to risk lying to your viewers and be exposed about it in the future through a competing news company. I mean if different news companies theoretically have different advertisers (I doubt they're all supported by the same group?), then they would be able to point out each others' biases and keep them honest. The problem might then become that its difficult to find the truth when everyone is biased...but at least its easier to find the truth by hearing both sides than just having one side.
I think mainstream media doesn't necessarily have to homogenize individuals beyond standard competition. You can have a news company that strongly values getting both sides' opinion, recognizing the advantages of running a news service that people can trust and therefore building a greater number of viewers which in turn benefits the advertisers a lot more in the long run.
But I do think it will homogenize people at least a little. Its inevitable...that if you're a big news company, you're going to want to cater to the masses, and that means getting the stories that most people like; the competition is irrelevant here because they're going to have to follow the same stories. But I don't think its to any significant degree. We still have a great variety of opinions out there, which you can see when you browse the internet or watch the protests and hear people's views. People are a little too strong mentally to be truly homogenized by the media (to whatever extent we are being homogenized in the first place...which I think is fairly small).
I think the only downside here is that there's very little truly intelligent content in today's media (its almost all sound bites, which is more appealing and useful to the general public I suppose). But that's okay, I'm pretty sure people know of ways to find out more information about topics of their interest beyond TV news. Its not like its difficult to pick up a book or google an issue and read about it from various sources, or watch debates.
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EPT
