Do we manipulate the media or does the media manipulate us?

In the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedy, this question didn't really hit me until viewers called CNN last Tuesday asking questions. One caller voiced his concerns: He'd seen the coverage of the Palestinians immediately following the attack--when they were dancing in the streets and handing out sweets. What the caller didn't understand was why CNN--and so many others--ran the segment without pointing out that this small group of people was not representative of the nation. It was a group of uneducated people whose views were in no way congruent with the rest of the country.

The call made sense. I'd wondered the same thing myself, and was anxious to hear an answer from the CNN team.

Sadly, there wasn't one. "OK, we've got to go to commercial. Thanks for your call," the anchor responded, curtly. The topic was never mentioned again. And I began wondering if I was being fed biased bites of a pro-war agenda.

"Paranoid," you say. But think about it: The message we're seeing day after day on television is the same: Thousands of people died a horrible, tragic death; Middle Easterners did it because they want to destroy the spirit of our country; and we won't let them.

Turn to National Public Radio or the Internet and you get a different angle. Here, there are analysts, pacifists and discussions going on. But I wanted to know why I couldn't get these diverse perspectives on my television set.

I turned to expert Glenn Sparks for some answers. A professor of communication at Purdue University, Sparks has been published in national and international journals on the effects of mass media. While he thinks the media have handled the crisis well, disseminating vital information, he agrees that when it comes to an analytical or nonmainstream perspective, it's certainly lacking.

"I think it's going to take a little longer time for those voices to get into media," he said. "Media are focused on crisis, and the impulse of reaction was not for peace. I think there's a tendency for the media to present a pretty narrow and uniform response to crisis events as a way to sort of preserve unity. There's a perception that there's a high need for pulling together and if we have disagreements, it waters down collective spirit."

But there's more to it than that, he says. You also have to look at the media from a business perspective. He points out the trend towards consolidation of ownership in today's media environment. Since more and more media outlets are owned by the same people, we are provided with even fewer diversified perspectives on our news. And the perspectives we do hear, no doubt, are concerned with profit.

"If the perception is that a large proportion of the population feels the same way, it's difficult to run something counter to what the majority feels," Sparks explains. "There's a difficult dynamic because the media are in business. They have a product to sell and have to be concerned with how people are reacting. I think they're watching public opinion very closely."

I suggest that it may be beyond that. Maybe we're not controlling the media as much as the media's controlling us? With everyone in the media talking about the inevitability of war, people feel that's the overwhelming sentiment sweeping the nation. Pro-war polls speak volumes for our spooked country, which is searching for something, anything, to grasp. Even so, there are people out there who aren't interested in upping the body count. There are people out there that don't want war. We simply aren't hearing their voices.

Sparks said this is called a "spiral of silence."

"If you hold a minority opinion and you don't hear that minority opinion being espoused, you come to believe that even fewer people share that opinion than actually do, and you become less likely to articulate it."

Especially when an anchor would rather cut to a commercial than acknowledge and address the validity of your point.