When I first set off on the daunting task of the research paper, I started off thinking about recent events that had influenced my life. I tend to be cynical and not let events affect my thinking too much. At the end of the day, bad things are always going to happen in the world and there’s no sense in getting caught up in them. Politics is more of the same. There’s always going to be stories about why one side is bad and stories about why the other side is worse. With this in mind, I sat back and thought about what had really affected my life and I could write about. With abortion rights being a hot topic at the time, I thought about the debate that has been endlessly being fought in the media and how each side spreads its information different ways. It hit me then: a video I had seen browsing Reddit over a year ago about news anchors saying the same thing. I recalled the impact it had on me, genuinely frightening me at the state of what is supposed to be a truly free press. Whatever the intentions of the video, it worked on making me fearful of the reality and terrified of the future. With this in mind, I had the subject of my research paper in mind.
Analyzing the video would not be easy, as I had to sift through a lot of background to understand how this situation even ended up happening. 40 plus years of history later I had an understanding of the circumstances leading up to this, but I realized that no other person is going to do enough research. I found that this would be the subject of analysis: how people are being unknowingly influenced by the content that they watch, and is there any way to stop that? In the case of the video I had seen, it is the conservative powers at play controlling the spread of information and I was curious to find out why liberal groups just don’t do the same thing.
Long story short, there isn’t enough money behind them to do the same. But how can they compete with the spread of information coming out of their opponents? The video got my attention and that of others, so it must be a viable blueprint for future campaigns. Analyzing the video to show why it was successful and how it could be used in the future would become central to my project, and I followed that blueprint writing it.
I would like to see my research paper be taken further with focus on other artifacts, namely other forms of resistance that have gained the attention of the public and social media. I believe that bringing up other pieces of evidence that support the analysis of my research paper would be beneficial to public knowledge and could provide liberals with a strategy to use to gain support and fight the monetary influence that is against. Doing so is important because of the vast reach of conservative media and the millions of people it targets and influences every day. People should be able to make their own decisions, not have the richest player buy their way into their eyes and ears. For the sake of democracy, I hope it goes further and becomes wider knowledge.
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