Why Anxiety Is Good For You

Each week Time magazine releases a new issue to its four main markets: The United States, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. The cover image and graphics often vary for each issue depending on the country it is released in and this tactic was no exception in December of 2011. While the foreign markets received a cover highlighting the Egyptian Revolution, which was perhaps the most important global story at the time, the US cover boasted an image of an innocently drawn character with a headline that read, “Why Anxiety is Good for You”. The obvious implication that comes about as a result of these contrasting covers is that foreign cultures are more outwardly exposed to worldwide occurrences, while Americans are continuously more sheltered. Except, why is this the case? Media Regulation is an ongoing topic of debate in the US in regards to the entertainment industry. Regardless of how minimally media is claimed to be censored according to the FCC, it is clear from the 2011 Time cover, and many other issue covers for that matter, that media censorship is much more prevalent than commonly advertised. Mass media is a highly influential form of communication, yet 90% of it is controlled by only six corporations in America (Lutz). Due to this lack of production source variety, it is no wonder that …show more content…
The story was purposefully censored in the US, however, in order to ease the audience’s exposure to the event and lessen the readers’ perception of the event’s magnitude and importance. This same exact censorship via selection bias, depiction bias and corporation control happens repeatedly for a myriad of topics and highly affects the process and politics of social change in America. Regardless of how modestly mass media controlled is published, it is clearly a much larger