Friday, April 5, 2013

Fairly balanced or misinformed: how do you take your daily news?


It seems to me, that a person that was exposed to "fair and balanced" news would be more knowledgeable than someone who was exposed to an altered media source.  This seems to be the case with Fox News.  They are notoriously conservative and hence write their stories with that persuasion  Thus, it follows that strictly Fox News viewers, would have less knowledge of, perhaps, the scientific truths to global warming or fracking.  

We have seen this appear in several clips that we have watched in class from Fox News, where their explicit bias resulted in a skewing of the facts.  In this particular video, Fox investigates the cause of contamination resulting from fracking.  Poor well construction is the scapegoat here for water contamination in a specific well in Pennsylvania, and no mention of any other cases of contamination are mentioned.  The video also cites an "environmental group" as saying "fracking doesn't pollute water wells."  This environmental group, the Environmental Defense Fund, turns out to have just as controversial motives as we saw with the EPA.

As we can see in this short clip, a news source's political background influences every aspect of how they present a story.  This includes everything from where they get their sources, how they interpret what their sources say to how they cite their sources.  All of these factors are unfortunately, easily manipulated by underlying biases and intentions.

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