Media And Power Groups

Ali Can YALÇIN The Relationship of Media and Power Groups Media has been one of the most influential sources of information throughout history. It can be used to inform masses quickly and effectively. But what happens when governments and other power houses take advantage of its power and misuse it to manipulate people into believing things that are not a hundred percent true or correct? This could be exemplified in three historical cases that are witch hunts, the Nazi Germany and the cold war era. Modern age of history usually believed to have started with the beginning of the Renaissance which was far after the Dark Age. Although the Dark Age is generally attributed to ignorance and lack of science, early modern age was not the exact opposite of this. This phenomenon can be seen in the famous witch hunts. In times of crop failures and shortage of food, local governments, which at the time were feudal lords, looked for scapegoats and conveniently found so-called witches. Oster (2004, p.216) found out a correlation between decreases in temperature and the witch trials through statistical analysis. She discovered that the number of witch trials went up whenever there were economic problems (As cited in Heinsohn & Steiger, 2004, p.6). However, this is not the only reason for accusations that feudal governments made in Europe. After the great plague wiped out vast portions of population, another great witch hunt began. This time its target was to repress the artificial birth control via the midwives who were branded as witches (Heinsohn & Steiger, 2004, p.9). This aimed to counter the huge loss of labour force by eliminating midwives who were skilled at sophisticated birth control techniques.

One could think that, in the past, power groups manipulated the flow of information easier as their subjects could not reach correct information easily. As the centuries went on, accessing information became much easier; however, the advancing technology also gave governments new ways to accomplish their goals of filtering what information their people would get. One relatively recent instance of this is the Nazi Germany between the first and the Second World War. As soon as Hitler won the election in Germany, he banned the opposing parties and then started to work on the institutions to control the information and its main agent media. Lee explains that this was accomplished in two ways. First Nazi regime empowered and centralised Ministry of Education to erase the opposition to conformity. And secondly, the Ministry for People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda was founded to monitor the information flow (p.30). This helped the Nazi Party to achieve its goals quietly and without opposition from people, because people were only getting the news that government allow them to get. United States of America was one of the countries that were aligned against Axis countries which included aforementioned Nazi Germany in the world war two. After the end of the war, U.S. was one of the two central powers in the world. To keep its position, it entered a competition with the opposite faction which was in that time the Soviet Union. It could be said that United States used some tactics not much different from Nazis. The government wanted people to believe that communism was the evil that should be got rid of, started to do propaganda that was almost never based on truth. Also there was and infamous black list of leftist writers, actors and other people. That list made it impossible to appear on any branch of media to voice their opinions.

In conclusion, media is a great tool to reach information that is normally hard to get. But it is also a great way for power groups to manipulate the information traffic to control the masses that otherwise very hard to control. The well-known examples of this throughout history should be considered by people before forming even a single idea based on what they see and hear from the biggest and the occasionally biased source of information that we call media.

References: Heinsohn, G. & Steiger, O.(2004). Witchcraft, Population Catastrophe and Economic Crisis in Renaissance Europe: An Alternative Macroeconomic Explanation Lee, S. J.(2000). Indoctrination, Propaganda and Terror. In S. J. Lee & S. Lang (Eds.) Hitler and Nazi Germany. Available from http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.