"A World at Risk" essay discussion

In "A World At Risk: Unreliable Media and the Culture of Fear", Monica Martin argues that in this time of planetary crises of almost every kind, the mass media often function as distortion, pacification, and misinformation devices. She interweaves her arguments and presentation of information mainly around the two films Children of Men and V for Vendetta. But she also incorporates information to deepen her argument from texts like Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. Contextualizing current political events within the dystopias and control societies of the films, she suggests these two films offer powerful and useful counter-narratives for our media-anchored, oppressive political atmosphere of total uncertainty. In the time we are living in, the "second modernity" & "world risk society", Martin argues for a wake-up call to the nature and workings of the media, and how they often support the dominant corporate political power elite while trying to appear to be presenting information neutrally. Like the landscape they generate a continuous fuzz in front of, the media themselves are a continuous war zone.