Pop culture is made in a factory.

• *DEFENSIVENESS; representing a suspicion of the media and popular culture*(popular media is created in a lab). This view sees the media as powerful and negative, and the children that consume it are very vulnurable. Teaching media can empower them.

Growing up I has such an innocent trusting view. In college I became a Political Science student and watched all the 24 hour media channels to gobble up all the knowledge I could. I trusted what they produced, as being honest, and truly fair and balanced, like some networks profess, because I was a patriotic innocent American. It seemed outside my world view that this news outlet would produce propoganda to indoctrinate me into a narrow world view that would benefit a minority group who sought to gain and hold onto more and more power. 

So one day my best friend calls me up, asks me what I think about Israel and they way they are treating the Palestinians. I tell him the fox news talking points, that Israel is a free, honest, humanitarian nation who is subject to terrorist attacks, and so they have no choice, for their own safety, to increase security around the Palestitnian people. My friend told me to check out a website common dreams, I did, and there my perspective on the world changed. There were other perspectives here, views that challenged the world fox news talked about. I was shocked. It was like my first semester in College, at Nassau Community, when I took my first Philosophy class, my perspective on the changed, my way of looking at things changed. 

Needless to say my view on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict changed. Why would a nations 1000 times as strong and powerful, Isreal, act like such a bully to a weak, crippled, people, the Palestinians? How would we as Americans act if Israeli's came to the USA and started populating it and pushing Americans out of the way, than when we get mad and protest they attack us? How could a people like the jews, me being one, leave Europe after all the brutalities of WW2 that they endured and become like torturers and torture the Palestinians? These questons made no sense to me. These questions challenged my moral philosophy. These questions were not even discussed on the news programs that shaped my world view. 

I began to see how corrupt the mass popular news media system was and is. 

Another part of pop culture I wish to challenge is music. In the music industry today it does not seem like popular music is music that filters through the people and becomes popular in a democratic format. Instead I think pop music, and pop culture is created in a factory. Musical talent are found based on voice alone while someone else writes their music, someone else dresses them, they have a publicist to project a certain image to the world. They have promoters who get them played on all the popular tv and radio stations. It is almost forced down our throats.