Yesterday I came home from school having heard that the much anticipated event of Cheryl Cole performing her new single on The X Factor was no longer going to happen. ‘WHAT?!’ was my first reaction, but so many people had been talking about it? Surely it’s not true? The whole country has been nervously waiting to see if she would live up to expectations or fall flat on her face, failing to reach those high notes. And we all wanted to see her outfit for the night, and would there be backing dancers? And what would they be wearing? And...

After my initial panic, I thought I would find out for myself if this horrific news was really true, or if it was yet another rumour to provoke the exact reaction I just had in the rest of the nation.

So I’m at home, sat at my laptop scouring through pages for information. But phew, it was made up, panic over - she is still performing. Although, many of you will be interested to know: it has been revealed that she will be miming, but then again, who knows. Now before I got into a rant about how it’s not fair, she’s on a show about singing, all the contestants work so hard with their intense schedules... I thought to myself, what am I doing? Am I crazy? I’m getting into a frenzy about an event that will have absolutely no effect on my life personally, I will not die, nothing serious will happen to me if things happen either way. So why do I care? This made me decide to look into why more than a few people have become so dependent on the media and let it take them over.

It seems today that our lives are becoming more and more controlled by the press. Every day we encounter several forms of media, ranging from your daily newspaper, to adverts on billboards, to television, many involving celebrities. All the articles we read and all the images we see have an impact us, but we don’t necessarily notice how big the influence is. Soon we become absorbed into another world and begin to crave the latest gossip.

I personally love magazines and am an avid reader of heat magazine, it’s great to know what’s going on and to be able to talk to your friends about things you have read. But I know about the effects on people too as I noticed when I found myself regularly visiting heatworld.com (the website linked to the magazine), where I could find out all the “Latest celebrity gossip, news and celebrity pictures”. I thought about how I was subconsciously becoming obsessed, if not addicted, to reading celebrity rumours and nosing around their personal business.

I also noticed that at the top of the website it says “miss an hour, miss out”. This compels people to become even more obsessed than they may already be by feeling that if they do not visit the site, they will not know something they feel they should. I have found that many people read magazines as if they were bibles and idolise celebrities. They rush to get the latest issue just to find out what diet Angelina Jolie is on, what Victoria Beckham wore on Wednesday, and read about whoever’s latest breakdown/arrest/ drunken night out/ boyfriend.....

Believing that magazines have power, I realise how it’s down to them if somebody becomes famous or not, they decide what the latest fashions will be, they make us interested in what they write about and make us want to look like the pictures they print. They report on celebrities’ private lives so we can invade and laugh at them or feel sorry for them, generally agreeing with whatever we see written.

For example, at the beginning of last year, the aforementioned Cheryl Cole was just an equal in her pop group, Girls Aloud. This was until her husband was accused of cheating and the whole world seemed soon to know about it so she became a household name. It was because of the way she was presented in the magazines that she was seen as the victim and everyone felt sympathy towards her. She instantly became the nation’s favourite along with being a fashion icon just because of people’s hunger for gossip. If there were no magazines, no one would know about this and there is no reason why people should know about it. She now has Great Britain on her side and is always appearing in everything you read and see; most recently you’ll notice posters with her face on advertising L’Oréal: there are three in Surbiton high street alone.

In this case she was lucky that the publicity has helped her, some people are less fortunate. Last week saw the departure of the first act on The X Factor, Kandy Rain. They had previously been mentioned in many newspapers that brought up their past, looking for a juicy story to turn people against them. More and more magazines soon began picking on them for their jobs as strippers and some people believe that the reason the girl group didn’t get enough votes last Saturday was because people judged them on their history, and not their singing ability. Is it fair that people looked into their personal lives and drew viewers’ attention away from the purpose of the show? I think not.

Another case of bad press could be the situation with Britney Spears last year. Everyone knows about her and her breakdown, which was largely caused by her having too much publicity and her mental health deteriorated. A number of individuals, who had previously been fans of her music and liked her, now began to dislike her while she went through a series of states. Imagine if the world hadn’t known all about her problems, maybe she could have coped herself or it could have been privately handled, in fact she might have never had the breakdown. Or even if the media had shown pity towards her, her followers might have encouraged her back onto the right track.

Magazines can also be extremely manipulative relating fashion, for instance if magazines started saying orange snakeskin dresses were going to be popular in the spring, everyone would go to their nearest shop to get one of their own even though now we might all think that would look hideous. Imagine if what we are wearing now had never been mentioned in magazines, we would probably all be wearing completely different things, or possibly mocking people dressed as we are now.

Magazines can also be judgemental in the way they look at celebrities’ clothes and the way they interpret what they say. It’s not fair to the celebrities as a lot of them have come into the public eye through their amazing acting talent or singing ability so we should be appreciating them when really we often just criticize them.

Essentially, my thoughts are that the media makes an incredibly large (even if sometimes unnoticed) impression on our views across many subjects, and we should probably contemplate the effects. We should frequently reflect on what we read and decide whether our opinions have been decided for us before we even start to peruse an article or if we have been able to determine them ourselves. I will certainly continue reading my magazines but almost certainly with a more open mind in future.