The debate over the extent to which the international media serves elite interests or alternatively plays a powerful role in shaping minds is dogged with curious interest. Some attribute enormous power to the news media (the so-called CNN effect) while others claim the media `manufactures consent’ for elite policy preferences. This power is not restricted to the influence of the media on their audiences, but also involves the role of the media within the broader framework of the social, cultural, political, or economic power structures of society. Media especially have agenda-setting functions. They do not tell people what to think, but what to think about. At present, there is a tendency of the audience to pay attention to significant indirect, overall and ideological influences of the international media. The influence however, cannot be limited to the news media, and in particular to the press, thus ignoring the undoubtedly pivotal role of television and other media genres in mass communication.
International media power is generally symbolic and persuasive, in the sense that the media primarily has the potential to control to some extent, the minds of readers or viewers, but not directly their actions. This suggests that mind control by the media should be particularly effective when the audience does not realize the nature or the implications of such control and when they change their minds of their own free will, as when they accept news reports as true or journalistic opinions as legitimate or correct. Such an analysis of international media influence and its symbolic dimensions requires going beyond a narrow social or political approach to its dark power over minds.
If we want to examine what exactly goes on in the minds, it is assumed that the international media manipulate their readers or viewers through structural properties of news reports. For instance, manipulation as a form of media power enactment is usually evaluated in negative terms, because mediated information is biased or concealed in such a way that the knowledge and beliefs of the readers or viewers gets changed in a direction that is not necessarily in its best interest. Once such fundamental patterns of knowledge, attitudes, and ideologies are firmly in place due to repeated news reporting and other forms of public discourse, they will further act on their own when people have to evaluate news events. After some time, there is little need for conspicuous manipulation of specific knowledge and opinions of the readers for each case. Once given the carefully selected facts, although presented in a seemingly objective fashion, the readers and viewers will themselves produce an active consensus. Ideological control in the case of enthusiastic audience is virtually total, or hegemonic, precisely because persuasive text and talk are no longer seen as ideological but as self-evidently true.
There is evidence that in many situations the international news media has persuaded and manipulated minds to follow political or military views on international affairs. Analyses of topics show that despite slight changes and variations of coverage during recent decades, news on world affairs remains focused on a small selection of preferred topics, including immigration, crime, violence, cultural differences, terrorism and race relations. The prominence of these topics is further biased by the overall tendency to cover such issues in terms of problems, if not of threats. Immigration in such a case will never be represented as a boon to a country lacking a workforce for dirty jobs or enough youths to prevent demographic decline. Rather, immigration, although tacitly condoned as long as it is economically propitious, will be represented as an invasion or a threatening wave. Refugees, who used to be pitied within the older framework of humanitarian paternalism as long as there were few, are now barred from entering the country and being called economic refugees (i.e., as coming only because they are poor), a well-known code word for being considered fakes, despite the political or economic oppression in their countries.
Disinformation campaigns combined with consensual political outlooks among journalists and politicians in the construction of preferred interpretations of the current political situation in the world has largely influenced thinking of readers. The problem is that for most Western countries, especially the United States, these and related notions are selectively defined and applied to those situations in which their interests were being threatened, for instance, in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Freedom mainly implies market liberalism and freedom of Western investments, not local autonomy or freedom from oppression or exploitation. Democracy is advocated only for those nations in which the current leaders, whether dictators or elected governments, are seen as a threat to Western interests. Human rights are a strategic argument focusing primarily on unfriendly nations or leaders, while being ignored for Western client states.
The public has freedom in participating in the use of international media. Rejection, disbelief, criticism, or other forms of resistance or challenge signal modes of counter power. The mind involves mental representations, including so-called social cognitions such as shared attitudes and ideologies. If readers are able to relate more or less explicitly, such mental representations, as well as their changes to properties of news reports, would change notions such as media influence or manipulation meaningless. In other words, influence defined as a form of mind control is hardly unproblematic, as is the power of the international media that try to access the public through the media when people would not desire to change by the seemingly more powerful.