Megaphone

Saunders very clearly sets up the metaphor of the man with the megaphone to represent today's media. I think this is a very well-crafted metaphor because it has different parts.
(1) "He's not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he's got that megaphone." The media does not always feed us correct information, but we listen because it wouldn't be on TV, or in the newspaper, or in a magazine if it weren't important, right? The people at the party can't help but listen because all they hear is the megaphone over everything; we can't help but listen, too, because the news and media surround us. News stations broadcast every hour, the newspaper is updated each day, and advertisements on buses and benches and billboards catch our attention all the time. The media is everywhere.
(2) "These responses are predicated not on his intelligence, his unique experience of the world, his powers of contemplation, or his ability with language, but on the volume and omnipresence of his narrating voice." The people at the party slowly started listening to the guy with the megaphone and changed the topic of their conversations as he changed the topic. Did the guests do this on purpose? No, they couldn't help it. All they could hear were the cues of the megaphone which brought ideas and topics to mind and then infiltrated them into their conversations. We hear weather predictions, breaking stories, bad news, good news, war stories, etc. everyday and, like the guests at the party, infiltrate them into our own conversations. As new stories come out to the public, the old stories are left behind, and the subject of conversation follows the patterns of the news.
(3) "Let's say he hasn't carefully considered the things he's saying. He's basically just blurting things out... Because he feels he has to be entertaining, he jumps from topic to topic.." The guests at the party would be fed false information that was decorated, if you will, to make the information more appealing to them. Today's news sums up very complex stories in two minutes, cutting out anything that isn't exciting or compelling to viewers. How can we really understand what's going on if we're not given the full, detailed, true story?
(4) "This yammering guy has, by forcibly putting his restricted language into the heads of the guests, affected the quality and coloration of the thoughts going on in there." The guests have no choice almost but to think about all the false, unconnected information the guy with the megaphone has thrown at them. They interpret his feelings and opinions as fact and believe every word he says. We watch the news to "be in the know" but we don't learn much about what's really going on unless we ask questions and contact different sources. The news affects the way we think about problems in the world by including subtle connotations into the presentation of information.