and lets distinguish the difference between an opinion being that its your thoughts/feelings
while knowledge is based on something that can be proven.
in our society public opinion serves as a primary means of communication from the citizens to their government, ( as seen in elections ).
like everything else with media, there is never a distinguish answer of whom were discussing. the question of "who" is a member of the public is always changing depending upon historical context ( historical movements gave audiences the ability to gain legitimacy) and the agendas of those measuring public opinion.
As we talked in class a major theory which explains this is Agenda Setting, Agenda setting theory describes the powerful influence of the media - the ability to tell us what issues are important.
in lecture we were able to watch clips of older news clips which have the ability to shift an audiences view. This lead to the discussion of news priorities, which asked whats most important in the news story. Today the most important news would be the Blue jays score update and the Canadian elections.
when discussing public opinion politics comes up often, when elections are getting close, its common for political parties to release videos displaying other party leaders in a negative light, in hopes that their video will alter your opinion on this party/ party leader and therefore not vote for them in the upcoming election.
This video clip example of a political party talking negatively about other parties and highly of themselves leads into the article: If theres a news agenda. This article discusses the differences between news that is presented to you in the style of hard news ( regular news broadcast) and the alternative "funny news" such as comedians like John Oliver on late night shows discussing the same issues as were discussed in the news that day. the theory is that because the news is presented to the audience in a comedic way and not so heavy not only will more people watch it, for its considered entertaining rather than educational, but the comedians perspective however right or wrong is simply a slip of the issue, or not the whole story. If it was the whole story it would translate into hard news, therefore funny news is a way for the public to gain an opinion on political issues as an example, but its not always the most accurate or informative.
in seminar we focused on how the media's agenda setting easily alters celebrity appearances because they are talked about so often by such an array of perspectives, while not being able to actually ever meet the people that are being discussed the publics opinion is suggested to change often.
we also discussed the idea of audiences becoming more active, there being mediated communication and the fourth wall, as well as asked if audiences should be interactive. in my opinion yes i believe audiences should be able to participate in the discussion whether it be electing a new political representative, voting for your favorite television star, or simply voting on what the schools cafeteria menu should posses. everyone should be able to voice what they think.
finally as always the question comes up about HOW we measure such things. however when it comes to public opinion it isnt so vague and questionable, measuring public opinion is done in a variety of ways such as surveys, face to face, straw polls, random sampling, census etc. although some such as straw polls arent a very accurate representation of an entire population, it is a way to capture the publics views in the best ways we know so far.
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