e. How and in what tone information is supplied to us can influence our opinion in a positive or negative way.
             The media has shaped our view of society and the process by which we choose our leaders, make our rules, and construct our values. The media has the power, although indirectly, to encourage people to support or oppose the government. And, so with this power, the media chooses to promote what it believes is beneficial, and supportive for democracy and American (government) pride. Self-censorship plays a huge role in what stories are made public; the media only chooses to report news that shows the ruling party favorably.
             Another factor is that now, to an unprecedented extent, large numbers of American reporters and editors work for just a few huge corporate employers, a situation that hardly encourages unconstrained scrutiny of media conglomerates as they assume unparalleled importance in public life. Like the Viacom-CBS merger in September of 1999, the joining of AOL and Time Warner put a lot more journalists in an awkward position: on the payrolls of media outlets that are very newsworthy as major economic and social forces.
             In contrast to state censorship, which is usually easy to recognize, self-censorship by journalists tends to be obscured. It is particularly murky and insidious in the emerging media environment, with routine pressures to defer to employers that have massive industry clout and global reach. One of the ways the mass media accomplish the backing-up of their routine way of proving the "news" they provide, is by having certain, paid specialists confirm what their report states. They use these few specialists over and over to prove a huge array of different stories. These specialists rarely ever provide views expressed by the working class; they are usually part of the wealthy capitalist class.
             The other obvious way of keeping vital news out of easy reach for the working class is by simply omitting st...