Often the media twists things around to push a political agenda. In turn, one event can be retold several ways. It is kind of like that game “telephone”. There is one person that saw it one way and then told someone else and that person told someone else until the whole thing doesn’t even sound right anymore. The problem with the news media is that the people who watch it tend to hear something and take it as fact just to spew it out again. Let’s take for example Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally. For this, I took two internet articles from two news companies - CNN and Fox. Traditionally, people think that CNN is liberal and that Fox is conservative. Then there are those that argue that one or the other is “fair” and “balanced”.
Whatever you believe, here are the two articles:
If you happened to be following this story at the time there was a huge controversy over how many people actually showed up to Beck’s rally. People estimated that there were tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Fox’s article simply states “tens of thousands” showed up, while CNN devoted several paragraphs to cover the controversy of the actual numbers. Also, if you’ll note, CNN’s article was much longer and hit on many points. Not all of which were important to the event. They touch on how Glenn Beck said some very criticizing things about Obama, and touched on the idea of a Glenn-Palin campaign for 2012.
Both articles also touch on Al Sharpton’s thoughts of the rally. Sharpton lead his own demonstration, saying that Beck was being insensitive for having the rally on the same day and at the same place as Martin Luther King Jr. made his “I Have A Dream” speech. While Beck urged that the rally was not political, Sharpton seemed to attempt to turn it into that. It seemed to me though that Fox turned Sharpton into the cynical villain who tried to crash Beck’s rally. On the other end, CNN does the same thing with Beck. They say that he seems to be trying to become some sort of religious movement leader, teaming up with Evangelicals, but the criticizing him for being Mormon. If you can’t tell, this is where I get the idea that the two companies are a little more one sided than they want to let on.
For the most part however, both CNN and Fox’s viewpoints on the situation seem to be the same. They both note that the rally was meant to be religious, not political. They also seem to cite the same things - the presence of Sarah Palin, the input of Al Sharpton, the date and place being the same as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech and that there was a large amount of people attending. The main difference seems to be the writing style. CNN seemed to be all over the place, pulling old information and bringing it into something it didn’t have a lot to do with. Fox, while it stayed on track, seemed to me that they were more over trying to glorify Beck than simply report on the rally. Which makes sense, since the guy works for your network and brings in amazing ratings.
I suppose that there are always two sides to the story and that overall we should be doing a lot of research before we take anything as fact.
(Blog Wk 4, Pg. 140, Prompt 2)
It's really interesting how the two different leanings affect the story so much! I would have never realized quite how different they are. We already know that they are different, but I love how Fox goes off glorifying Beck, and how CNN drags in a bunch of old and irrelevant information. Both are fallible. Both are pushing their interests forward.
ReplyDeleteThough it's also nice to see that they still remember that they are supposed to be unbiased news sources, and do a little reporting on the matter. Of course, there were a large amount of people there, but no one seems to know how many!
Your explanation of what usually happens to get news so garbled is very good. The "telephone" example is one that nearly everyone can relate to. People can help news from becoming one big Telephone game by simply stopping for a second to research the issue before "spewing it out", like you suggested.
But then again there will always be at least two sides to every story, and some are more, well, embellished than others. I guess all we can do is read up and use common sense to figure out this world we live in. Thank you for this interesting post!
-Alley
Many interesting point have been raised here about the same event as seen through different publications. It is a lot like history where one man's myth is another man's truth. Depending on the point of view of the author, slanting can be used to convince others that what they are telling is the truth.
ReplyDeleteFrom these two articles, you can get a sense of which writer supported Beck and his cause and which had reservations about it. It can be difficult to be unbiased as a writer and still gear your writing toward the audience you want to address and this results in skewed information tilting the tables.
When we talk of war, one side is the victor and the other is the loser. When stories are told, they are speaking of the same war but the victor will be slanted to look good and heroic while the losing side will be thought of as rebels or terrorist. When you look at the war from the loser point of view, they are the heroic and just people even after defeat.
When writing,we have the choice to pick and choose the information we insert into our writing and in the process we can alter opinions. Leaving out important information can be the cause just as only presenting one side can be the cause. As critical thinkers, we can come to our own conclusions about writing and determine if skewing should ad or take away from the power of a article.