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The Power Of Media

The late human rights advocate El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz aka Malcolm X, fully understood the power of media and how it was being used during WWII to influence public opinion. He once said “The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”He also believed media could be used to educate people to improve race relations and teach people how to empower themselves.

The late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr also understood that media could be an effective tool to advance the cause of civil rights and bring about change in the United States. Some of the American News Media at the time was an ally to the Civil Rights Movement and they frequently broadcast or published the brutal images of police dogs, fire hoses, bullwhips and cattle prods used against Blacks fighting oppression. These images stirred the consciousness and rallied popular public opinion against Jim Crow and segregation.

William Bernbach, considered a legendary figure in the history of American advertising, said that when you discuss media and its power to persuade, you must start with the advertising industry. It is the primary goal of the advertisement industry to persuade the viewer into buying whatever is being sold. Whether what is being sold is a product, a place, person or ideals, media is predominately the delivery system used. When you look at feature length film or listen to a song for entertainment, you are one way or another being sold something whether it is a product, a lifestyle or a point of view.

In fact, advertisement agencies pay filmmakers and songwriters to place their products in movies or the lyrics of a song. When you see a Hollywood actor taking a drink of a particular beverage or a rapper rapping about driving a particular automobile, you are being influenced to buy those products.

Unfortunately, we are being influenced to not only make purchases through the entertainment industry; we are also being influenced to buy into lifestyles that have a corrupting effect on our values and morals.

William Bernbach said it best when he said, “"All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level."

If we look at the history of mass media, particularly the invention of radio and television, would you say that society has been lifted to a higher level or has it devolved to a lower level?

The Black Talk Media Project seeks to facilitate a collective of individuals and groups acting in concert to lift society to higher level using media to inform and educate. In order to achieve this mission, we seek to build community media centers to teach youth about not only the effects of media and how propaganda is used to influence their thought, but to teach youth and others in the community how to produce and broadcast programming to their communities to influence it in a positive way.

©2009 Black Talk Media Project - New Media For A New Generation