V&PO: Role of the Media in Attitude Formation

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Attitude can easily be defined as systems of positive and negative evaluations, emotional feelings, and pro or con action tendencies with respect to social objects – people, places, things, and ideas. With this in mind, attitudes of individual people collectively form the major contributor to a consensus. These individual attitudes also collectively form and influence public opinion, which is the sum of accumulated opinions concerning an issue of public debate and which affects a particular group of people. These attitudes and public opinions are greatly influenced by many factors with two factors standing out; media influence and group identity. Therefore, it is important to understand how this two factors influence individual opinion, attitude formation and public opinion.
Role of the Media in Attitude Formation
Although the influence of the media on attitude formation may not be as great as that of social environment, ignoring the role played by the media would be illogical. By the fact that attitude is personal and based on emotions and evaluations, attitude can easily be influenced by what content a person is exposed to from the media. This comes with the ever increasing activity and exposure to the media, specifically electronic media compared to the conventional media. The rise of influential media personalities who have risen to be opinion leaders have gone a long way in influencing the attitude of the masses.[Public Opinion, accessed on November 15, 2014, ]
How the media puts across a certain issue affecting a group of people will go a long way in affecting and influencing people’s attitude towards the issue at hand. This is especially true for those that greatly rely and believe the information provided by the media. Therefore, the media plays a big role in influencing either a positive or negative attitude on an issue affecting a particular group of people.
No matter how strong a person’s attitudes may be, they are still subject to change with learning of new facts and perspectives that challenge their attitudes. This is where the media plays a major role in influencing attitude by providing information and views concerning issues affecting particular people in society. This is especially true for cases where people learn of a contrary opinion held by a person who is greatly considered as an opinion leader by members of a particular group or society. Due to the respect accorded to these opinion leaders, the people’s attitude towards a particular issues is likely to change due to the influence of the opinion leader.[Ibid.]
Media Influence on Public Opinion
The media is a very powerful entity when it comes to influencing and shaping the perception of the public concerning a particular issue. This is because the news the media broadcasts makes the viewers to shift their attention to the certain people and situations. Also, the media has the ability to report most, if not all, reports concerning an event. This information consequently becomes the main source of information for millions of people around the world or a country. For an example, a news report may show all the possibilities of a suspected murderer to be guilty but fail to show the other possible side of the suspected murderer being innocent. This will influence public opinion to be inclined to believing the suspected murderer is guil...