Constructing Public Opinion (Sep. 28th)

Whilst Mr.Paterson was absent, our group watched the remainder of 'Constructing Public Opinion'. We touched on topics like Clinton concealing his standing point from the public, media manipulation, America's military spending, 'democratic' polls, and how we could utilize these techniques in creating our own country. Firstly, my teammates and I talked about whether Clinton was liberal or conservative. According to the documentary, for a substantial amount of issues, the public assumed Clinton was liberal. In reality, Clinton's stance was conservative and supported conservative trade policies. Regardless of these issues being covered by the media to a certain extent, the public still perceived Clinton to be liberal due to the media's consistent yet manipulative portrayal of him being on the left. Public eyes continued to believe Clinton as a member of the left-leaning group for copious years, and this image was deeply ingrained into people's minds. In my eyes, this is a very appalling media manipulation, because misinterpreting the country's president's stance is a significant issue. This shows how easily viewers are manipulated and controlled by the media, and how uncritical the majority of people are. Most people in Japan accumulate predominant information from the mainstream media. In accordance with the film, this means Japanese citizens are only chasing the change in the media, rather than the change in reality. To elucidate, much of what we comprehend from TV is guided by the general framework of media coverage. In other words, our knowledge is heavily influenced by biased producers who choose what to conceal and assure that it does not reach the public eye. An example I related to most was climate change and public concerns towards it. As someone who is very anxious about our rapidly deteriorating environment, not broadcasting about this significant issue that permeates the world, is concerning. 

Another important point elaborated in the documentary was military spending. There was abundant data showcased to explain the severity of the problem. My group members and I discussed this issue because it was astounding news. This truly depicted the power of media defining and modifying our knowledge of the world, and how "subtle but profound" its influence is. However, one issue we did not quite understand from the given context was if this budget conversed about in the film includes the U.S-Japan security alliance. From what I understand, America supplies various countries across the world, militarily. So I wonder how that influences these numbers, and whether this would explain the staggering number. Nonetheless, I would definitely argue that the level of military spending is disproportionate to the level of risk in America, like lack of health care insurance, school security, domestic violence, climate change, etc. Countries including the U.S and Japan should unconditionally be protecting their citizens and finding out that there is a whole industry endeavoring to conceal this is devastating. Therefore, our team was unanimous about cleverly distributing the budget and leaving the capacity to deal with tangible threats to "our country". 

Acknowledging the new ideas we acquired from the documentary, our team talked about designing laws regarding media manipulation. After exposing all this fraud (starting from last semester), implementing laws to diminish fraud in the media, is essential. Notwithstanding our idea and hope, we still have not figured out a practical plan on how to execute this. Subsequently, our country has officially settled on a governing system after much discussion, proportional representation. This way we can at least minimize the power and bias accumulating in one place and hopefully have some control over the media as well.