essay

I don't think the media dictates what is important to most people. Instead the media takes something that's already important to some people and advertizes it. In other words the media appeals to whatever is popular at the time. If it advertized things that nobody was already doing then it wouldn't be very successful.
Before baggy pants that are about to fall off became a trend that was and is important to a lot of people, people were already wearing them. When I lived in Florida, the ghetto area, we took what we could get. If some pair of pants were on sale we bought it. The size didn't matter. We weren't following a trend but were instead following necessity. Now there aren't many people who wear the right size because the media saw what we were wearing and decided to show others the style that apparently appealed to us.
This previous example was something I experienced myself, but there are many other even more obvious examples as well. For example, models. The media didn't one day decide, "Hey really tall, thin good looking girls are something people mioght like!" No, people already liked that. The media didn't show us the idea of ripped and frayed pants either. That was something that had been happening naturally. Basically the media takes what's already there, what's already important to people and publically displays it with the mindframe, "If these people like this then maybe everyone will."
If you took the standpoint of someone looking to the media to see how other other people are conducting there lives then yes, maybe the media does determine what is important to people. For me, however, and a lot of my friends, we've often been in positions where we already found somehting important even before the media spread the idea.Therefore, no matter what the media displays, for the most part, someone already had the idea and people already found it important.