Oct 06 2006
Time for some late night ramblings…..
I was thinking about the news media and how it’s perceived today. We think the news that we ingest is so much different than it was 5 years ago or even 50 years ago. I say to you that the news hasn’t changed any over the years, only the landscape of how we actually get our news.
Before the advent of the radio, everyone that wanted to know what was going on in the world read a news paper. If you couldn’t read it was pretty tough to get the news. When the radio came along we could get our fix daily by listening to the broadcaster tell us the news. Now more people had access to the news. Then came television and now not only could we hear the news but we could also see it, an even bigger audience. Now we have this marvelous device called a computer and we have the world at our finger tips.
But has the news really changed? I was having a discussion today with one of my liberal friends. He is not happy with the Republican Right Wingers. He believes that there religious ideology is getting in the way of their ability to make decisions objectively. This is really getting him in a tizzy. He believes that every one should be able to compartmentalize each aspect of their lives. He believes that a person should be able to form opinions and make decisions without any influence from each of our different compartments.
Now you maybe asking yourself, what does this have to do with the news? I’m glad you asked that question. But first some more setup. I believe that we, as human beings, cannot separate our different ideologies. We have social ideologies, religious ideologies, political ideologies, and any other ideology you can think of all swirling around in our conscious and un-conscious. These all coalesce, through our experiences, to become our ideology. We use what we believe about society, religion, and politics to form opinions and make decisions about everything we do.
Now with all that being said let’s think about the news. We tend to think that a news reporter would report the news, and a columnist, let’s say, would write about the news. I think that news is not this way at all and has never been this way. This is why I say that the news hasn’t changed much since the first time someone told somebody else what just happened. Our inability to separate ourselves from our ideas of the what the world should be gets in the way.
Let’s look at an example. Today in the New York Times an article was written about Michelle Malkin. (Here is Michelle’s article about it.) The writer Virginia Heffernan used these words: “Filipina Firecracker Michelle Malkin has taken aim at YouTube.” This was later changed to “Fox Firecracker” but that’s not really relevant to this article. If she had truly been reporting the news she would have just written: “Michelle Malkin has taken aim at YouTube.” By using the adjectives Filipina and Firecracker she was inserting some of her own ideology into the story. And I might add, she was also trying to stir an emotional response from the reader.
Let’s look at another example to further beat this point to death. Your local news paper is reporting on a car accident in your home town. Someone that is reporting the news might write something like this. “Today there was a two car accident at the intersection of A street and B street. Two people were killed in the accident.” Now there you have the simple facts of the incident. However add few more details of the story and we can invoke an emotional response. “A women and her child were killed today when they were involved in a two car accident at the intersection of A street and B street.” Now we have your attention and you are saddened by the news. I can add just a few more details to the report and get an entirely different response. “A woman and her child were killed today when the car they were driving was hit by a drunk driver at the intersection of A street and B street.” See, now you’re mad. All three of the articles are factually correct, however the presentation made all the difference.
To sum all this non-sense up, we have to very careful about the news we hear or read. It is my suggestion that you know something of the person telling you the news. It’s not too difficult to find out enough about that person to help you get to the facts of the matter. It also helps for you to know something about yourself. It’s very easy for news media of all types to try and sway public opinion. It’s all in what facts they decide to tell you, and what facts they choose not to tell.
