the helpfulness of media during a protest
One of the biggest impacts of media is how it can shine a light for everyone to see. Obviously, not everyone supported equal rights but the more people saw how many marched in support and the unfair ways protesters were attacked, and the horrible portrayal of African Americans in society. This would cause those who had even the bare minimum of morals to stand up and do what they could to help. It didn’t just help the civil rights movement, during wartime the media is able to help show the horrific details of war and if there is a crisis.
Media presence has really helped promote all kinds of protests today. Nowadays the media covers all kinds of protests. They show worker conditions strikes, BLM protests, and gender protests. This really helps spread the message and get more of the population involved. Even if you don’t support a cause you must admit the media helps create more support when a protest begins.
Another impactful form of media is social media, but how well does it help? From what I’ve seen I don’t think it helps too much. Many people who try to use social media to gain support on an issue end up not doing much and a lot of the time hurt their chances of gaining support. A lot of what people post on social media is either exaggerated or just false and it happens for almost every cause. Whether it’s right-wing or left-wing, protest, or just trying to bring awareness a lot of posts, especially on Instagram are false. That is why I do NOT post stuff like that on my social media because I know most likely it’s not real information. I do think eventually social media will be helpful but it will be after we are better at analyzing and figuring out what is real and what is fake.
I agree with you that the media no doubt had a very positive effect on civil rights. This is because it raised awareness of what was going on. In fact, it could even be said that the media is what caused civil rights legislation to even be brought up and passed. This is true because civil rights started picking up serious steam across America only after the news started covering what was going on and what exactly segregation was.
I would imagine that many people do not think of this but up until the past few decades people typically did not know about what was going on around the country. People typically focused on what was going on around them and that was basically it. Therefore, many people in areas that did not have segregation didn’t even know what segregation was. Luckily, however, the topic of segregation getting covered by the news would help raise awareness of the violations of human rights and violations of the equal protection under the law amendment of the constitution.
I also agree with you that today media of all kinds raise awareness of things such as protests, riots, and strikes. The effect of media on politics and everyday life is very obvious with it being extremely difficult now to scroll through different kinds of social media without hearing about politics and what protests or riots are currently happening. I would also assume that it’s true that all of the political things being pushed on different kinds of media have politicized more and more of the population. This is best shown in polling results from recent elections that younger people are voting more and more. Also, I don’t post political things on my social media accounts either because I find people who talk a lot of politics to be very annoying.
I agree that social media can have significant impacts and help raise awareness for issues. I think that it can help by making issues more known among people. People can see a story in the newspaper and decide not to read it but when watching TV you can not skip what is being played. Media helps get the word out about issues and it requires you to hear what is happening. It also helps show the extent of what is happening in areas and it can sway people to help. It is true that the media shows all kinds of protests. I think that often the media will only show the sides of media that help their story sell or that can cause reactions from people. Media can also be harmful because they do not always tell the whole story about protests. It can also decide to force its own narratives about protests and who is protesting.
I agree that social media can be harmful because a person can spread a false story and so many people will believe it immediately and without question. I have heard very often that a story is spread over a social media app that did not accurately tell a story but because so many people saw it and they assumed it was true. That being said I think one of the biggest reasons for false information being spread is that no one wants to fact-check or put in the work to find the real story. Another big issue about media is so many news sources lean right or left and there are only some news sources that are actually reliable sources of information. So many instances of false information happen when people decide not to fact-check stories they see on their social media feeds.