Every citizen of America is bound to live by certain rules and regulations and have some rights and responsibilities. These rights and responsibilities are made by the government to ensure that all people live peacefully.
These rights protect all American citizens:
- Freedom of expression
- Freedom of worship
- Right to a fair trial
- Right to vote
- Right for federal employment
- Right to run for elected office
- Freedom of life and pursuit of happiness
These rights discussed on the US citizen website have been added to the list after the First Amendment, which is called the “Bill of Rights.” Other amendments that are a part of the Bill of Rights are the changes in voting rights and the age for voting.
They also have some responsibilities:
- Support and defense of the Constitution
- Stay informed about community-affecting issues
- Participation in the democratic process
- Respect for federal and state laws
- Respect for the rights, opinions, and beliefs of others
- Participation in the local community
- Honest and timely payment of taxes
- Serve on a jury
- Defense of the country when there is a need
The role of media in the understanding of rights and responsibilities is both promoting and suppressing at times. In the past, the media’s role in freedom of expression and the pursuit of happiness was encouraging. We can see several campaigns that run in the past two years about the gay rights movement that the media promoted. It also has worked negatively and can be described by minimal effects theory, cultivation theory, and the hypodermic theory, in which media uses its powerful, penetrating approach to place information in the reader’s mind and change our concepts about our rights and responsibilities.
The article written by Nancy Qian and David Yanagizawa-Drott discusses the independence of media and government distortion of news coverage. The study clearly describes the human rights of US citizens, but its main focus is on the government’s distortion of these rights. The article changes our previous perception of the interference of the government in presenting rights to the public (Qian and Yanagizawa-Drott, p. 2). The evidence of government interference in delivering human rights to the public via media was also seen in the past at the time of the Civil Rights movement.
This fact is in direct violation of US responsibilities as it gives citizens wrong information about the changes that are happening in their community. The people who base their concepts on the information delivered to them will misinterpret the information, and they will not understand their rights correctly.
As a US Citizen, the right to have correct information about changes in policy and modifications in the constitution is a must, as it is the basic right of every citizen to stay informed of their rights. The article reveals that government involvement in media, especially the democratic government, raises deep and fundamental freedom of speech concerns the rights. The qualitative evidence from political scientists and government objectives shows solid evidence of government manipulation of the media and journalism.
The article changes the concepts of freedom of speech and rights for US citizens. This violation of civil rights has changed my concepts on the level of authenticity present in the news. The media, being the only source of information transfer from policymakers to the general public, if manipulated, will create anxiety in the public, and their level of trust in the government may decrease. This involvement in media also raises concerns about suppressing the rights of backward communities who do not have direct interaction with the government, and their rights may be severely violated. This also raises the responsibility of the public to raise their voices against the transparency of media so that people will know about changes in decisions made by policymakers of the nation.
Works Cited
Citizenship Rights and Responsibilities. (2018). USCIS. Retrieved 23 April 2018, from https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship/learners/citizenship-rights-and-responsibilities
Esler, Michael. “Bill of Rights.” The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2014).
Qian, Nancy, and David Yanagizawa-Drott. “Government Distortion in Independently Owned Media: Evidence from US News Coverage of Human Rights.” Journal of the European Economic Association 15.2 (2017): 463-499.
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