The Role of Media in Shaping Political and Socio-Economic Narratives

Academic Paper from the year 2018 in the subject Communications - Media and Politics, Politic Communications, grade: 3.00, Bilgi University Istanbul (Communication), course: Inquiry into Knowledge, language: English, abstract: The media plays an integral role in influencing trends in the modern world. The information era, a phrase used to capture the way the world has developed to rely on information for most of the actions that people take, remains significantly different from all the other periods in the history of humanity. Information and narratives now have significant powers to change and influence the way people think and act, and more importantly, the reasoning they portray on various topics in their societies. The media plays a significant role in pushing for specific narratives and messages in the modern world. The current media has emerged as the most advanced system of communication that the humanity has ever experienced. Unlike in the past when information and narratives could take long periods to reach people, today the situation is significantly different owing to the developments that the modern media has seen in recent years. The role of the contemporary media in driving narratives has been studied quite extensively. The existing base of literature has focused mainly on the way the media delivers messages from the source to the consumer.

The current paper recognises that most researchers and commentators have not studied as extensively as required the role that media and communication play in driving narratives on political and social-economic trends. As such, the focus of this paper will be on the ways through which media and communication outlets influence the reasoning that people hold as truths in a world that has diverse sources of unfiltered information from multiple sources.