“It’s more suburban than Iexpected honestly, um, coming in here and so, maybe half a mile, maybe even less so, the protest was taking place from here.”— Ryan Reilly
“I don’t think they are smart enough to know what they are doing, I absoutely don’t. I’m trying to make a larger point, be careful with who you sympathize with.” — Bill O’Reilly
“Is it a justified expression of-of-of anger, frustration, of losing black life at a consistent basis.” — Alexis Templeton
“Someone must have thrown a plastic bot-, er something thrown from the crowd, and the police over the bullhorn said this is no longer a peaceful protest, you must be disbursed, seconds later where thrown tear gas cans.” — Trymaine Lee
“We know now that thugs are thugs. People who are going to take advantage of the situation are gonna do that. Especially if they know the media is all there right? Got the cameras on everyone. It’s become its own reality show.”- Laura Ingraham
“These are some of the highest ratings since the 9/11 attack. What’s important here is the huge surge of of young people that tuned in to see the grand jury announcement and then unfortunately see the violence afterwords.”- Brian Stelter
In a age where we are connected to everyone and everything, there is hardly a single thing we do not know about. We are able to connect and make friends in areas that we could never visit, yet those bonds we form with those people who live in distant lands can be as tight and close knit as those same bonds we make with people here. It is because of social media, the same thing that baby boomers and even some generation X’s use to talk down upon, that we have the ability to become more empathetic to people we have never met, to cultures we hardly know.
Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter have become social giants, connections that allow us to gather information much faster than do mass media news outlets. Unfortunately, social media have also, in some ways, become more reliable sources of information.
The pieces above all have been taken from mass media outlets ranging from Fox, to CNN, to The New York Times. This vignettes form part of these outlets’ coverage of the Ferguson incident in 2015, when a community gathered for justice due to how a young man was shot down execution style in the back. A once peaceful protest turned into an all out riot when that call for justice was not adequately answered.
Through the story of Ferguson, we were able to see media’s discriminatory portrayal. Many of these outlets dehumanized the community in their coverage, hardly focusing on why the community was mad at the police force in the first place.
My collage poem above is modeled on Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen: an American Lyric. Rankine makes a piece using the quotes reporters used during Hurricane Katrina, when the media similarly dehumanized communities of color when they desperately needed assistance: people were left on the roofs of their houses surrounded by dirty water, in the midst of unbearable heat, and with little food, while news helicopters merely looked on and captured the scene of destruction, then left.
There is a clear indication that mass news outlets are not operating solely for the people. Even though they are suppose to inform the community, they are still owned by corporations, and as corporations, they care primarily about money as well as reputation. When a company cares solely aboutmoney, a loss of humanity happens. There is a push to gain more audience, and as corporate greed soon infiltrates the media room, biases are bought just like shares for stockholders.
If there is one thing Americans are known for, it is the stubbornness to accept that there is a clear problem with how we run our country, from how we treat our fellow people of color, to the refusal to make our schools and colleges safe for students, to our unwillingness to recognize the very real danger of “Fake News.”
In the beginning of April, this video went viral, showing that throughout the United States, there was clearly something dark and massive thriving under many community network news stations. Sinclair media, which owns 173 (and growing) local news stations across the country, made dozens of news stations air their anchors reading a script. Sinclair was controlling a good proportion of what many Americans, those who once most likely bashed on getting news and information from other media feeds, were watching.
This incident calls into question the credibility ofthese networks, and as much as one laughs about the term “fake news,” this now seems to be a very real and very prominent problem Americans face. Millennials and Generation Z’s have been told that not everything on the internet is to be trusted, but now in a world where we can have photographic proof from not just one reporter in a scene but the many civilians whenever an incident is happening, it seems that times have changed, and you cannot trust what mass media places on your home screen.
In fact, a Millennial woman ironically named Reality Leigh Winner, age 25, was able to figure out that there was Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential elections, sending her information to a online new publication named The Intercept which specializes in adversarial journalism. Yet instead of being praised for finding out and letting citizens know about those tampering with our democracy, she has been arrested with no bail. We are now entering in a time where we are not only being kept from the truth, but are now being fed lies as well as half truths. We as good Americans now more than ever need to look more into our politics, and those in office. We must fact check everything we hear and see, as well as once again push critical thinking into whatever we take in, because if we do not it is not only dangerous to us as a nation. It is also, to quote,
“ Extremely dangerous to our democracy.” — (Jessica Headley, Ryan Wolf, Autria Godfry, Lisa Colagrossi, Dave Bondy, Sadie Hughes, Mitch Flick, Jenee Ryan, Rudabeh Shahbazi,…)
