Invitations will be mailed out soon to SPJ members and supporters, and contest entrants. The deadline for reservations is June 15. Special thanks go to David Shapiro, managing editor of The Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Gerry Burris, editorial page editor of The Honolulu Advertiser, for judging the essays. Nearly 60 students from across the state submitted entries. The media in all of its varying forms, from newspapers to the Internet has an enormous impact on our lives.
Some sociologists even go so far as to say the media shapes our personalities.
Within the last decade, however, Americans have become increasingly dependent upon the shifting images and ideals projected by the media for a sense of identity and value. Although the media does have the ability to regulate a person's thoughts and beliefs to a certain extent, that is not to say that we are all helpless victims of some tyrannical brainwashing machine, or that we have no control over the images and ideas we allow to enter our consciousness. On the contrary, thanks to the freedom of the press provided for by our Constitution, Americans have at their fingertips a vast array of media entrees to sample from. A woman displeased with the way her local television station is covering the news can satisfy her intellectual cravings by subscribing to a newspaper or magazine that caters to her particular point of view whether it be Democratic, Communistic, Christian or atheistic. If America's free media were to cease to exist, the prevalent ideologies of the day would merge together to form a single dogma by which everyone would live.