Research into the News and Media

Research

Artists around the world have created various pieces of work portraying the different ways the media is trying to control our lives.
The yesmen are an activist group which uses tactical media. This tactical media is used to raise awareness about social issues and want to expose the lies of big corporations through the use of multimedia, such as using fake websites to spoof the corporations they dislike. They strongly express their belief that corporations and government organisations act badly towards the general public, dehumanizing us.
Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Our targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else.

Another example activism against consumerism and giant corporations is from the examples of Naomi Klein. In her book ‘No Logo’ a part of her book was a chapter based on “No Choice”. Naomi Klein discusses how company brands use their size and power to limit the number of choices (in terms of competition) to give the general public choice on different products to buy. Many examples of this tie closely with Wal-Marts giant scope in the USA with their overall marketing dominance over the country. Giants such as Disney and Sony decide to open their own chain of stores in order to push away competition and furthermore restrict the boundaries on what we can buy and choose. This ties closely to the news corporations and the choice they give us to look for; they only give us the news they want us to see, not what we really want to know.

We believe that the media today has a giant effect on people’s lives. In some forms the media can be very useful in bringing us the latest weather updates, and commercial products, however the news in various forms has became over biased and is now capable of changing people’s opinions and views but this is only because we have heard ‘one side of the story’. This is why we are using the Simon board game to portray a new scope on what people should really find in the news, not what the corporations want us to see with bias opinion.

An example on why we believe the news is due to the recent presidential elections which took place in 2009. In this time, networks such as FOX provided very bias political views against Obama’s Democratic Party. Obama was shown on all other major networks apart from FOX. FOX deliberately seemed to mention more about McCain and Palin than any other party leader. Making them look like a political right-wing (Republican). Obama’s administration has been in many conflicts with FOX network since, with FOX spokes people calling them ‘crybabies’ and making bias comments on Obama’s health plans for the USA.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_Channel_controversies#Obama_administration_conflict_with_Fox_News

Another example of the news creating faults and confusion to the general public has recently lined with Japan’s natural disaster and nuclear power plant troubles. Several news corporations have come forward with stories which are meant to be the same but have altered pieces of ‘data’ such as the amount of people missing or have died from the earthquake, tsunami etc. We don’t understand the point in changing information to bring our attention, when we already know the situation is terrible out there. The most accurate news that comes forward is from the ones who call into the news shows and are aired live to give us the most un-biased information.
We couldn’t find much artists work against news corporations because it is difficult to approach without offending giant news groups.