RESPONSE TO THE 3 PERSPECTIVES BELOW. A MINIMUM OF 200 WORDS PER PERSPECTIVE. LIST REFERENCES USED WITH EACH PERSPECTIVE. RESPONSE 1 (Bonita): The media has the potential to influence the public’s attitudes and behavior by emphasizing strong points in personal characteristics, material products, belief systems or appeal to criteria that they want to project unto the general public. On the other hand, they simultaneously downplay negative aspects of products, hide characteristic flaws, and potential harm of viewpoints. I think this can be taken to the extreme in dealing with sales of merchandise where competition and profits are at stake, and ethical guidelines are blurred as to consequences or loss. I think a “quick sell” is the mindset of individuals and corporations advertising in the media where profit and sales is the desired outcome of their motivation and integrity and conscientiousness is ruled out. By portraying products, or even candidates as glamorous, and in attractive settings with appealing backgrounds, hip music, lots of lights and action, anything would be made appealing and deemed useful for personal use. The idea that a product can make a person feel young, energetic, happy, content, refreshed, revitalized, sexually attractive and appealing would capture anyone’s eye and seemingly want to buy whatever it is they are selling. Unfortunately, most of us realize that that is not the case, and we would be wasting our money to indulge in such products, or salesmen. I think, while news programs are supposed to report the facts, I believe there is bias to reporting in that intonation and background play a major part in how the viewer perceives a broadcast or news information. I also think it depends on the person. As stated in “The Social Animal” self-esteem is one variable that marks whether or not a person is influenced by data. Self esteem can result from many factors, education being one of them. Family background and social influences are another, either building or negatively impacting self esteem. I think television can produce social events as in the well publicized aggression studies. I think violence on TV causes us to be immune to crime and/or normalizing it whereas it becomes just another event in day to day life. In reality, statistics show that actual crime rates show 3.97 per 1000 in the United States (U. S. Violent Crimes, n.d.). It seems like every channel has a murder or sexual assault going on. Crime is sensationalized in that it is all about glamorous men and women in high profile situations, distorted facts, glamorous crime fighters and sensationalized court systems. The impression is that it’s O. K. to commit a crime, as long as you don’t get caught. The sad part is, there’s a lot of good out there that is public interest, and media could be reporting on those issues and events, as well as human disaster. To make an hour news show more interesting, it has to play on our emotions, otherwise they wouldn’t get ...