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Cops Subliminal Messages Essay

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Viewers of the show Cops are victims of the shows ideas, their perception of what happens in the show vs reality becomes altered and molded into what the show wants one to see. Ideas that one pick up from the show are things like cops always being the winners and the majority of criminal’s being uneducated drug addicts, which, majority of them happen to be African American. Although viewers may not realize the ideas that the show is planting in their heads, the viewers unknowingly receive the message. By using Gerber’s Cultivation theory, the process of how the show Cops reshapes conceptions of criminals and cops in reality to its viewers illustrates the effects that the show has on heavy and light users, how they become affected by the …show more content…

Heavy users constantly see the criminals that are being arrested in cops fall under the stereotyped image of what criminals look like that they begin to think that such arrests happens every day and all criminals are exactly how they the show portrays them to be . Viewers of the show Cops may not submit to the messages early on and the effects won’t be too apparent but the more exposure that they receive from the show the more vulnerable they are to the messages that were planted in their mind, which gradually grows and soon begins to cultivate their perception of reality to what is being presented to them from the show. “Heavy television viewers tend to believe the world is more dangerous than it actually is” (Ricci )viewers then becomes affected by the mean world syndrome and starts to view the real world as a place that is infested with uneducated drug addicted criminals that are always going to get caught by these superior beings otherwise known as cops. Not only are their views on criminals biased but also racial, an majority of the criminals that are shown on Cops happens to be African American. After seeing countless images of African Americans being portrayed on the show viewers then begin to view all African Americans as petty criminals that will be, conveniently, captured by cops who happen to be white. Their views on what the real world looks like becomes distorted and twisted into

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