Where role has this cluster left me in?

I use to be "anti-politics" because I am uniformed. I had generalized this to other ideas in society. I had an open mind and accepted differneces, but I did not seek them out if they were not in front of me. Now, I want to seek out differences, I don't want to poin them out, but I want to take on the responsibility of the knowledge of them. I don't want to have the responsibility to act because I am part of the majority and I have the power. I want to earn this power through the acquizition of knowledge. Perviously, I was not a large consumer of media, like politics because I felt everything was biased and controlled by those in power. I still think that, but I have gained the skills to filter through the media and use it to come to my own conclusions, instead of being given the conclusion. If I so desired, I could use this power, not because of how I am grouped in society's eyes, but because I seek it out as being part of a democracy, ato tell my own conclusions and ideas to consumers of the media.

A Few Objective Men

Lippmann believes that the power of media should be held in the hands a few educated men. He felt that our society had grown too big to include everyone’s voice within the democracy in where he did “not to burden every citizen with expert opinions on all questions, but to push that burden away from him toward the responsible administrator.” Therefore, society should teach a few to represent the whole and teach objectivism to avoid the creating of stereotypes and discrimination. Lippmann says, “When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the facts and to make their wisdom. When they ignore it, they go inside themselves and find only what is there. They elaborate their prejudice, instead of increasing their knowledge.” If you look at the philosophies of Mills, you would also see that is psychological theories include that the mind contributes to what ideas are held based on what information is presented to it. However, I think, as the father of agenda-setting, Lippmann forgets about the consumers of media. The gatekeepers can be trained to represent the majority; however, the few in power don’t have the ability to control the conclusions of all who consume media. According to selective perception, people seek out to interpret what they see in ways that would agree with what they already believe. I think even if media accurately represented our public, I don’t think its message and conclusions would accurately be drawn due to the simple fact of individual differences. I would, in this case, side with Dewey in that I think discussion and participation of media would be ideal, rather than being simply a consumer of what the few individuals representing the voice of “democracy” have to say.
We must acknowledge Lippmann's ability to realize man's ability to notice differences and be susceptible to propaganda and what we call stereotypes. Through selective exposure, one can shape how another thinks. He set the foundations of how he proposed we, as a whole, should handle media. However, I think we simply just need to start somewhere, and build on that with critical thinking and continued discussion of the foundations to match the changing world we live in.