How does social environment, mass media, and interest groups influence public opinion?

It influences public opinion because people will listen if they feel it's a reliable source.

Explanation:

Take corona for example. We're all going through it right now. The public media is telling people not to worry and that everything will go back to normal after this passes. This is a false fact. The reasons why is because the stock market has crashed. Another way to show this is that the public media reported that the virus came from a bat that someone ate in China. The true facts of this is that it is a bio weapon that was made in the US and sold to china for billions of dollars. Then soon after china accidentally released it on their own people. People will listen to public media because they feel it is a reliable source. There is one last point to this. The public media is influenced by the party that owns it, this means that if the republican party owns the media station, it will have more positives about  republicans, and same for the democrats.

I hope this helps.