Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
If you think that watching television news programs or reading newspapers is a waste of time, you could be right because it is the way most people may want to digest their leisure hours. If you believe that news reports have no connections with people's lives, you could not be more wrong. The media and the public can mutually influence each other through the advertising businesses, although it is not at all clear how much the media can influence public opinion and how much public opinion can influence the media.
The news industry connects people's minds by manipulating public opinion. In this Information Age, whoever controls the news media controls the minds of the masses as well as consumers' pockets. In reporting news to the public, there is no denying that television is the most influential medium, followed by the radio, the Internet, and printed circulations, all of which making people stay connected constantly. You may say that it is connection that people are after in most media since such relationship is based on the popular desire to be informed about almost anything that feeds news desire--crimes, wars, drugs, diseases, and natural disasters, side by side with breaking news, world events, sports, businesses, weather and so on. As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, you could not fail to realize that news is actually the bait to attract buyers.
Relatively, much less is addressed regarding how much public opinion can influence the media through ratings. In their daily lives, most people habitually connect themselves with the current rumors, speculations, predictions, and especially baad news. You can see that it is exactly what the news media outlets are doing in order to please the public. For that matter, it is not entirely the media's fault that they are, for the most part, the bringers of bad news since bad news gets higher ratings and sells more advertisements than good news, and therefore produces more commercial connections Trying to calculate the extent to which this relationship reaches is irrelevant, and what is certain is that the two do have inevitable links. However, it is worth mentioning that about 99.99 percent of what happens on earth is not on the news because it is not worthy enough to motivate the audience to "waste" their money and time.
Contrary views are of course understandable; nevertheless, news reporting in the media maintains invisible connections with people's lives. Apart from that, the question whether watching or reading news is a waste of time may depend on who you ask. What really matters then is that the media can deliver news and give the public what is wanted and desired; and the public can give amazing ratings in return.
