Bowling for Columbine essay
-media can be used for good and bad influences.
1. Around (50) minutes there’s an example of South Park, showing the creators view of the history of guns in America
2. The presentation of the boy pulling out a bunch of guns (41-42) showing how easy it’s to hide guns, influencing fear
3. (57, 106) where racism is present
4. (58.50) killer bees, (56:00) sharks (55:00) the media showing fear.
The film uses media to show that media itself is a very powerful tool that has good and bad uses. Media can be used to influence the public and it can be in good ways or bad. They confronted K-mart about selling hand gun ammo in their stores. They went there with a jiggery camera and two people that were shot with the ammunition from K-mart. At first they didn’t listen to them but they came back the next day with the media along and the people at K-mart finally listened and promised the media and everyone else they would stop selling hand gun ammunition within 3 months of the promise.
Media can also influence people badly by influencing the public against a topic or view. The news clips the documentary showed, always had some fear in what they were saying. They showed shootings, robberies, and many times when they were showing the profile of the criminal they’d a lot of the time say black male, 6 foot something ect… they wouldn’t say African American male. They were almost portraying that black wasn’t good but evil. They also showed an advertisement for a metal detector company and they showed how easy it is to take guns to school. They showed that anyone could bring a gun and to be “safe” they should invest in metal detectors to be safe.
The media seems to be the key to violence in the U.S., especially since they’re the country with the highest death rate from guns. Canada has guns and so does the Germany but they death rate from guns is low, but they don’t portray as much fear in the media as the U.S. does. The movie had a montage of news footage showing outbreaks and scares in the U.S. media. It seems all they show is some kind of fear or violence. They also show animals as a bad thing; like sharks are horribly violent creatures even though when they attack a person it’s because they thought is was a seal or something else.
The documentary itself has a lot of influence on the viewer watching it. It uses every documentary tool out there to influence the audience to follow his idea he’s putting out there. Michael Moore uses interviews and the back grounds behind the people getting interviewed give off a sense of how it’s suppose to be taken. An example is the farmer being interviewed in his house where there are papers piled messily and coffee cups everywhere, while a police officer is interviewed in from of the county flag and an office background. Other times the back ground can give an image of intelligence. Every little detail the media has is thought through and planned carefully so it’ll influence the public just right.
It seems that the media can have a major influence on the public and since the media isn’t controlled nor have any guide lines they can pretty much tell you anything and people will believe it, and the media is different in every country so it seems to have a major influence on the violence and fear in a country. It’ll always be very influential.
