Top 10 Media Revelations (in no particular order)

1. There is no liberal media, (policies and politics changing our news)
Before this semester I thought that the majority of the news that I was reading in the Boston Globe, NYTimes, CNN, BBC, ect… swayed further left then it did right when it came to the political spectrum. However that couldn’t have been further from the truth. The material we covered in class, specifically the films we watch (The Propaganda Model, The Obama Deception), helped me start to recognize the tone in which news is packaged for us.
In this sense I felt a lot like Titus in Feed. It was hard for me to understand and critically examine the news media because I’d never really known any other way. I had never been asked to critically examine the media before taking this class, so not only had I become use to the bias, but I’d in some way become desensitized to it. Titus encountered a similar inner conflict toward the end of Anderson’s book when he is forced to confront his media environment after he looses Violet, (pg 293). Titus’s confrontation with his world was much more abrupt and bitter than my confrontation with my media environment, but I could relate to the feelings of confusion and ultimately disbelief that Titus felt. Like Titus I felt that because I’d viewed media as a one sided medium that it had been hard for me to relearn something that I’d been taught for most of my life.
One passage from Media and Society book really showed me how much I didn’t know about the political tone that our media is saturated with. This tone can be traced back to the source, regulation. Liberals and conservatives have long been at odds on the issue of regulation. The issue of regulation is entirely political with “liberals” against content regulation, while “conservatives” say that content control is necessary to protect society from “graphic violence and pornography.” This idea of regulation and politics in the media is ongoing and is well explain in Media and Society. (pg 98)
Now when I read of hear a piece of news I try to trace back the ties. Who owns the media outlet that I am getting my information from? Has the content or its subject been changed or edited because of ownership? I am confident sorting through the news clips and sound bytes now, knowing full well that I will be able to spot both hidden and open bias if it is present in the article. That being said, the clip of Glen Beck that I have chosen clearly demonstrates how the bias in the news media is ultimately changing the face of our news.
This clip is satirical in nature. It opens with Fox news talk show host Glen Beck running a segment on how evil, liberal, and misinformed American media has become. Beck, an open and very vocal conservative, spends the entire segment showing how an interview he did was twisted and mutilated to fit the liberal media’s agenda. I used this clip because it showed how far right “conservative” media outlets really are, and how truly middle of the road the “liberal” media is. (If you are looking for more clips of Glenn Beck making a fool of himself there is a great montage.)