Do audience members have the power to subvert messages brought to them by the mass media?

Audience members do have the power to subvert or judge messages brought by the mass media. As individuals, we have the ability to accept and dismiss anything that comes to us that we do not agree with. We can censor our minds to believe in what we hear, or we can reject the things that we hear through mass media. One of the problems is that we often rely on media and tend to believe what we hear, especially if we hear it often enough. We as listeners and viewers want what comes to us through media sources to be true so badly that we rarely check the validity of matters ourselves before running with the information. One big example of this is the social media websites. There were pictures of stars like "Morgan Freeman" and others claiming that they were deceased and wishing condolences on the families. I saw many responses to the posts saying how sad they were for the loss of these famous people but it was a hoax. This demonstrates our lack of fact checking skills and our vulnerability to mass media and what is put out there. While we have the power to filter our information, rarely do we do it.