Questioning on Pers Role Toward Publik Interests and The Need of Media Literacy

Abstract

The relationship that occurs between the media and the public does not always lead to a symbiotic mutualism. The media and the public in some relations give rise to tug of war interests, sometimes they are balanced, sometimes they overlap. Ideally, the media position themselves as providers of content that are proportionate to the public. Proportional here in the sense of according to what is needed by the public. However, in practice, the political economy of the media is an unavoidable problem because the relationship between the media and the public also involves industry as the environment in which the media is located. When industrialization is attached to the media, the relationship between the media and the public is very likely to run unequally. The public is no longer positioned as accessing information that must be served and considered. In fact, the public is placed as a commodity whose interests in the media seem to have been neglected. As a result, there is a lot of media content that overrides the public interest because it is merely pursuing capital. From this point, the demand for the public to be active and critical becomes important. In the end, the media literacy movement is no longer a made-up demand, but a necessity so that the public, as the owner of resources, has their interests protected.