Posted on 04/05/2003 4:47:00 AM PST by ozone1
Seeking bias, truth in media Dennis-Yarmouth students learn how to be educated consumers of news.
By K.C. MYERS STAFF WRITER SOUTH YARMOUTH - Can the government use the media to fool the American people?
That's what Reade Whinnem has been asking his Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School media students to think about.
The class helps students become educated consumers of news.
Whinnem's district is one of several around the Cape that offers courses in "media literacy."
"Everything has a bias," Whinnem said. "You have to look at everything like it's biased and then look for the truth behind the fiction."
That includes media coverage of the war in Iraq.
"Most of the coverage that I've seen has pretty much presented the U.S. military's side of things," Whinnem said before students came in for a recent class. "Which makes sense, because how else can we get in there?"
Learning from history Whinnem has been using historic cases in class to stir debate on the Iraq war. Students just finished viewing a History Channel documentary by David Halberstam that detailed how the CIA staged a coup in Guatemala in 1954 to protect the United Fruit Co.'s profits.
The film showed then-CIA operative Philip Roettinger admitting his agency used the media's laziness and trust to fool the American public into believing the coup was to fight communism and not to protect the profits of United Fruit Co., an American business that owned half the land in Guatemala. At the time, the press widely reported that the U.S. military entered Guatemala to help peasants defeat a communist regime.
Given the widespread communist paranoia in the United States, that was all the American public needed to hear to back sending troops in to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Guatemala's elected president.
"Could this happen again?" Whinnem asked his students.
Many of the students thought the public has become too sophisticated to be so manipulated.
"If (the war) was just for money, I don't think the media or Congress or anyone would let it happen," said Sally Geary, a student.
"The media's more global now," agreed Jonathan Greenberg. "There are a lot more reporters in Iraq and a lot more people watching."
But others disagreed.
"It's happened before and it's happening now," said Ariel Cohen.
Shaping public opinion Discussion then turned to how media reports, photographs and video could shift the course of public opinion. The students listed the images that would turn Americans against the war: footage of civilian deaths, pictures of U.S. troops harming others, shots of American soldiers in body bags.
Images that would lend support to the war included U.S. troops providing relief supplies for civilians, medical care for Iraqis or humanitarian support.
Students couldn't recall seeing many images so far that would turn Americans against the war.
"They don't want to show us the bad things that we're doing over there," said Jessica Foster, a student.
Media watching the media These students aren't alone in their criticism of the U.S. media's war coverage. "With the media in tow, does objectivity go AWOL?" ran a headline in Saturday's Los Angeles Times. It referred to the 500 "embedded" reporters experiencing the war along with the U.S. troops.
"It's great to have the access, but the public needs to realize the embedded journalists are working under some severe limitations," said Geneva Overholser, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism's Washington bureau. "Also, they are bonding with the troops and it does color the reporting."
The Christian Science Monitor ran a piece Tuesday headlined "World and America Watching Different Wars."
"When I watch the CNN, so much of it seems to come from inside the U.S. military," said Ulli Diemer, publisher of Sources, an online and print directory of international media outlets.
"The Germans, for example, have much more coverage of the Iraqi people and the conditions they are under," Diemer said.
Of course, the U.S. must cover the battles, since it is the primary news event of the day.
The Los Angeles Times article quotes Bill Shine, a news producer at Fox News, saying his network has no choice but to concentrate on military advancement and tactics.
"The battlefield is the whole story," he told the Los Angeles Times.
Did this wacko ever consider the media may actually have a bias and an agenda?
By the way Reade Whinnem's email is:
whinnemr@dy-regional.k12.ma.us
How is it that people and society in general have prospered and increased their well being for decades yet the politicians and bureaucrats say we must have another 3,000 laws and regulations each year... That without them people and society face "disaster". People and society have done quite well without next year's 3,000 new federal laws and regulations. Why all of a sudden can people and society not continue to do quite well without them? The fact is, they'd be better off without 99% of them.
So who really benefits from 3,000 new laws and regulations each year? -- not to mention state laws and regulations. Politicians and bureaucrats. They create boogieman problems and with a complicit media towing their boogieman problems cast a net of false fear and unwarranted despair in people.
Quite literally, they create problems where none exist. They're sick in that they chose to frighten people and foist false despair on them and do that to collect their unearned paychecks. Their job security is predicated on deceiving as many people as possible.
Voting for the lesser of evils always begets evil. How can so many people thinking they're right be so wrong?
Wake up! Politics is not the solution -- politics is the problem.
Who are the producers?
Who are the parasites?
Praise the value producers --
ostracizing the parasitical value destroyers.
Kids, it is your responsibility to form your own questions and make your own conclusions.
Yes, but only if it's a leftist, Anti-American values government at the time.
Yah. No bias there.
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