Is media the most powerful entity on earth?

Nope, I think it is religion.

I think it depends on the region and how technnically developed it is. I think in developed areas yes. In the other areas religion may play more of a part.
(Welcome back stranger)

I’d agree that it is religion. However, having recently toured ESPNs campus in Conneticut, I’d say media is a close second. Wowza.

@Adirondackwannabe you remembered!

You always came up with interesting angles. This one’s really making me think. Look at the Palastine Israel conflict. How much influence would the media have there.? But then look at the US. It’s definately media trumping religion..

I suppose that could be true if the media spoke with one voice. However, they don’t. Which is just as well.

Yes and no. Most of us are increasingly driven by a combination of information and entertainment values. I’d say Media power is generally symbolic, it’s persuasive.
I still think that print continues to dominate in credibility. But I do remember reading somewhere that if a lie were repeated publicly a hundred times it would become a truth. I agree with @Adirondackwannabe. It depends on the area under discussion.
Yes, Joseph Goebbels said that. (Just looked it up).

Only if you pay heed to it.

I will give my full opinion a little later, but for now…..
It’s called television and radio programming for a reason. We are the ones being programmed. We are species of input/output. The information we put in, will help determine what we put out.

I think maybe money/economies might be the most powerful entity, if it can be one…this alone seems to dictate so many things which construct most societies, and I don’t think that the media would even exist as it does were it not for gain.

I also vote religion at the moment. Hopefully the momentum is swinging. Please, allow me to iron out some wrinkles in your assumptions.

You wrote: “They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent,”

I disagree. As a former journalist it is the duty of the reporter/writer to get the facts straight and to compose a factually correct fair and balanced story. This is the media I believe in. It’s their duty to distribute stories to the public, in a correct fashion.

Now the bad side of this is what I call the Yellow Media which is a play on of Yellow Journalism. It’s slime ball stuff and this media consist of TMZ, STAR MAGAZINE, US WEEKLY and other shit gossip magazines.

I think it’s the citizens fault to not examine truth not the media’s as you are claiming. However with that being said, it’s true throughout history that the wealthy have been able to distribute their power by using their money to use the educated to spread the ideas of the wealthy, because in history they were mostly in power, to this day even. It’s only been within the last 50 years that the media has been used to help the lower class I believe. Even art from the past was displayed and most likely commissioned by those in power to influence the lower class.

I could go on and on but baby is crying with mommy at the moment and I’ll get back to this later.

The media certainly have a lot of power, but there are limits. All the money that wealthy Republican supporters were able to throw at election advertising courtesy of Citizens United was not able to prevent the Democrats from picking up seats in both houses of Congress and winning the presidential election. At some point, media supersaturation starts turning people off and becomes counter-productive

I wrote this before and Fluther went down…

While the mass media may not be the most powerful entity on earth, those behind the mass media certainly wield incredible power and have great influence. Much mass media content is generated through interactions with public relations practitioners and content is influenced by media owners who control huge media conglomerates. Furthermore, there are organisations and individuals, who because of their financial power, can influence what is reported through suppression orders and threats of legal action.

In addition, because of the concentration of mass media, the news and information we consume is highly manufactured and controlled. I recently came across a new news site called ‘Newsmap’. All the major headlines for your country are mapped out and the size of the image for each story relates to its popularity. Have a look at this site and look at the various English speaking country’s pages. Look at the similarity in headlines for the Word news. The news we consume is generated by less and less companies.

While I do not believe for a moment Rupert Murdoch stands behind the journalists who work for him and tells them what to write, he still influences the content they produce. If you research and produce stories that do not fit the News Ltd preference, your story will not be published. Eventually you will conform or you will not work there anymore. So Murdoch, who pays the wages of the journalists AND the editors does have power over content.

Recently Murdoch posted this to Twitter. ‘‘Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy,’’ Mr Murdoch said.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/turnbull-targets-murdoch-over-guns-20121217-2bii3.html#ixzz2FdTUGOBu

A leading Australian politician responded with ”‘‘@rupertmurdoch I suspect they will find the courage when Fox News enthusiastically campaigns for it.’’

The story about this interchange was published in the Fairfax newspaper The Age and not in any News Ltd publications from what I can see. Murdoch does not own Fairfax. (The Age)

So in my opinion if mass media are not the most powerful entity, they are close to it.

After Money?

Sure.

I vote for ignorance as the most powerrful. It seems to me to rule the day in most discussions, activities, legislation, etc.

Actually, supervolcanoes such as what may erupt from the Yellowstone megacaldera, asteroid or comet strikes like the Chicxulub event that ended the age of the dinosaurs, nearby gamma ray bursts that happen to be aligned with the Earth, impacts with rogue black holes, or the eventual transition of our Sun to a red giant, which will swell its photosphere to beyond Earth’s orbit, melting us into its mass in about 5 billion years all are events with far more power than the press.

That said, media bent toward self aggrandizement or propaganda, such as the Nazi propaganda machine, those of Communist countries, and those owned by current media mogul Rupert Murdoch all do have considerable destructive force.

Media and religion goes hand in hand. Before modern print religion ruled the world, after wards media and social media together with religion rules the world.