Distorted Media

Paper Summary:

This case study examines the U.S.-China standoff from the perspective of three newspapers: the privately-owned "Washington Post" and "USA Today" in the United States; and the state-controlled "People?s Daily in the People's Republic of China".

From the Paper:

"An event is a fact. It happens. People witness it. People talk about it. People report it. In today's world, the event may be recorded for posterity in a variety of ways. It may be capture on videotape. It may be captured in the voice recordings of an airplane's "black box." It may be tracked line by line through a printed transcript that contains the exact words of the participants. Recorded. Exact. Fact. We associate these words with what we read in newspapers, hear on the radio, or see on television. We assume that the news, as it is reported, is wholly truthful and accurate, but is it? Is the reportage of real-world events by the "unbiased" media free from the filters through which we all observe and analyze the world around us? Children play a game called "telephone." In this game, a group of children sit in a circle. One child goes first, whispering a message to one of the children alongside him. This child in turn whispers the same message to the child next in the circle, and he to the next, and so on, and on, until at length, the very last child to receive the message repeats it aloud to the entire group. The final result of this children's game is almost always uncontrollable laughter. Why? Because the message that is repeated aloud at the end of the game is almost always entirely different from the original message. Somewhere along the line, that message was changed. Whether intentionally, or accidentally, a fact " in this case the original message " was completely distorted by passing through the "filter" of different individuals. It is the same with events of world importance. The media and their governments present the news in ways that reflect their relative points of view. They fine-tune their representations in order to shape public opinion, carefully guiding it into the desired channels."

More papers on Distorted Media:

• Persuasive Essay # 100759 : "Misrepresentation of Gender and Race in the Media"
• Persuasive Essay # 132591 : "How the Media Influences Our Perceptions of Economics"
• Cause and Effect Essay # 67911 : "Body Image and the Media"

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