In today’s world, the media plays a large role in everyone’s life. People can be loved or shunned from society based on one single thing they do. This may not be the fairest thing, but it’s how things work in our times. People who are consistently in the eye of the public are even more vulnerable to have to deal with the effects of their actions. One of the biggest examples of how the media could affect how a person lives is Kanye West.

Kanye has been through pretty much everything you can go through as a public figure. He did so much in the rap industry and was considered one of the best of our time. He gained support and recognition all over the world. He sold millions of albums, had sold out tours, and everything anyone could want. People looked up to him and respected him. Then at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, he changed the way most people looked at him with one action, interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. With this, he instantly lost thousands of fans. People couldn’t believe what they saw and how someone could do such a thing. The media portrayed West as a bad person. It was replayed over and over, there was no way he could change what had happened. It even made him leave the country for a while just to get away from all the negative attention. This is how the media and society can change a person’s life in literally seconds. All it took was one wrong action to change all the positive things Kanye did in his career leading up to this. Some still feel negative towards him and will never regain their respect for the rapper ever again.

For most of this year, Kanye has been back making more music and getting more in touch with the public and his fans. He’s put a lot out to the media to help salvage his image and people’s perception of him. He’s even issued a public apology to Swift acknowledging he was wrong. In my paper, I plan to show the whole rise, fall, and now rise again for Kanye West and how the media has played such a major role in it. After being put down and made out to be some type of monster by the media’s focus on one action of his, Kanye West is now using various forms of media to get his message out to society that he is a good person and deserves to be given another chance by all.

media artifact