Module 5 Reflection
The articles and video revolved around how there is bias in our news and world today. The book The news bias: Distorting reality and feeding fears states, “confusion between seeing and knowing, and seeing and understanding, is used by television to manipulate people” (Radford, 2003, p. 66). They use fear and headlines to capture the peoples attention. This book reminded me again how important it is to become media literate. Like the other articles we read in this module it will help us know the difference between truth and false as well as opening our eyes and seeing how biased our media representation is. The television distorts our reality. Someone watching the news is most likely to believe everything they hear and see because it is being reported but according the Radford, “ Television, by its very nature, distorts the reality it claims to reflect and report on. Events are compressed, highlighted, sped up. Thus a person who occasionally watches sports highlights on TV will likely see more home runs and touchdowns than a person who attends local games regularly; television viewers are likely to see more murders than a police detective, more serious car crashes than a tow truck driver, and more plane crashes than a crash investigator” (Radford, 2003, p. 69). I thought this was perfectly said and a great comparison to what the news shows us and how reality is. I don’t know how many times I’ve see re-runs of the same thing over and over again when something big occurs in our news. They take it and shows us different parts of it but its the same thing and made to be very dramatic.
Becoming media literate is import especially for detecting bias in the media. The How to Detect Bias in the Media from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting was a good article to help you ask questions that will ultimately lead you to realizing the sources, lack of diversity, points of view, double standards, stereotypes, assumption, language, and context. Knowing all this is important to make sure all voices are represented. “It is essential that news media, along with other institutions, are challenged to be fair and accurate. The first step in challenging biased news coverage is documenting bias” (FAIR). If we do not challenge what is wrong then nothing good will ever come out of it. Another article which shows the bias in our news today was Who Gets to Speak on Cable News? by Peter Hart. They did their own research that showed bias in our news today. The article stated, “ Eighty-four percent of guests were white (848). The most and least diverse shows in terms of ethnicity were both on MSNBC: People of color were 27 percent of guests on All In and only 6 percent on Maddow. Just three of Maddow’s guests were people of color; none of these were women” (Hart, 2014). Not only are the people who show up as guests on world and local news made up of the white gender but women again are very low.
The video called Who makes the News GMMP was another eye opener. Starting off with the facts that 51% of females make up our population, but only 24% of the people in the news are female is shocking. You would think by now in our society we would have at least half female in the news since female make up half the population. Local news comes with a lot of power because according to GMMP, the news has the power to influence people and also have the power to help change local and foreign agendas. This video reminds me of the activities we have done where first we had to tally up how many times we saw a different ethnicity or gender on the television screen. The other activity in this module also showed how frequent the newscast people were mostly white male speaking and the topics did not relate to a wide range of people. The video made a good point saying, “ the world reported in the new is mostly male. Which means a societal underpinnings of gender inequality and discrimination against women are reinforced through the media” (GMMP, 2013, video). I could not agree more and this is where GMMP comes in. GMMP is Global Media Monitoring Project, who try to tackle problems like this by contributing their time to making a difference, with people who think that change for women needs to happen too. It was interesting to see depending on the topic then the gender would change. For example crime, economy, and politics would usually be presented by a male newscaster. Another important fact was that only 6% of the stories talked about gender inequality. This means the less talked about and less resources then the rest of the percentages are missed opportunities to help raise awareness to the public about these problems out there in our world. Not only are women lacking but the way the are misrepresented as well. Women are invisible and we need to have change. There are article and news stories that do highlight the greatness of women but we need more of it.
Sternheimer had a different look on media and our problems in society. She does not blame our popular culture for our problems but it seemed as though one things leads to another. Teen pregnancy related back to poverty, and then teen pregnancy related back to higher divorce rates. All these different problems play off of each other like a domino effect that keeps going in a circle until we do something about it. According to the book it mentioned how poverty and inequality are connected but, it is easier to blame the media for the problems then taking responsibility for it. Even though we have many more problems to deal with we have seen progress and small changes. Sternheimer stated, “ As much as we might hope to believe that the civil rights movement and later electing a black president ended all traces of racial inequality, it was a beginning, but certainly not the end in the process of creating equality” Sternheimer, 2013, p. 281. There are small and big problems from schools, to poverty, to violence but one thing we really need to focus on is inequality with change will come equality and other problems will slowly diminish with it. All the other articles, books, and videos talked about how media is not good for representation and being bias, but Sternheimer does state that pop culture and media matters. Media analysis is a tool to help us expose these issues and problems we need to face. Instead of having the media direct us in the wrong direction it can direct us by capturing our attention to our societies problems instead, bringing awareness, and give us that wake up call we’ve been needing.
