America's Media Ownership

America's Media Ownership  The study by Park et al. (2002) suggested that people rarely employ nonverbal or verbal cues when trying to detect deception in the real world. It further posited that people generally identify lies through physical evidence, third-party information, confessions, and inconsistencies with previously gathered knowledge (Novotny et al., 2017). Although this finding would later be disproved by other studies, it holds some level of truth, especially in regard to typical media consumers. For instance, the study by Wolfers & Utz (2022) indicated that social media functions in different ways and could cause stress as well as serve as a coping strategy for stress. This study suggested that social media, like most other mediums, can have deleterious impacts as well as positive effects. The 2012 documentary film, Shadows of Liberty by Jean-Philippe Tremblay, illustrates the seedy underbelly of corporate media, especially how the concentration of media power in the hands of a few threatens free journalism and liberty. Tremblay presents the cautionary tales of three reporters whose careers were destroyed and their work discredited because their corporate masters deemed their stories as too bothersome.
The fact that America's media ownership is controlled by a few monopolies has created a media echo chamber where actual news reporting has been replaced by commercialism and infotainment. The documentary highlights the appalling state of mainstream media by showing how American corporate media has gradually swapped objective and free journalism for advertorials and sensationalism. For instance, the story of Roberta Baskin illustrates the way big business interests have resulted in severe censorship as well as professional sacrifice. Baskin was the first journalist to break the story of Nike's sweatshops in Vietnam. The story caused a stir in the corporate world, ...