HOW IS THE WAR REPRESENTED IN THE NEWS MEDIA?.
The media, whether it is the printed news or seen on television is saturated with news of the war with Iraq. But is this information fed to us, legitimate or does it have hidden biases not understood by the common reading public? .
The news shown to the American public is biased in many ways. The war in Iraq is represented in one perspective - which is the American viewpoint. The damage to artillery, the injuries, the casualties are all American. What about the Iraqi people, the poor defenseless victims in this war? They are hardly mentioned.
Another bias demonstrated in the local news is the minimum attention placed on international news. Although a war is raging with American troops, only 10 minutes of the local broadcast is devoted to it. Plus, the news only deals with international news which has American influence, i.e. links to American e.g. the war, Israel (Jewish population), and so forth.
Biases are not limited to local news alone. CNN, an international news bulletin has certain biases as well. Everything that occurs in the international stage, whether it is an isolated suicide bomb attack in Israel, to the Columbia space shuttle is somehow linked to Iraq. For example, CNN claimed during their broadcast the space shuttle tragedy was an act of terrorism during the first ½ hour of their broadcast. They even had experts on the show, backing up this claim. However, they retracted their statements later. .
The information coming through is from either Al-Jazeera news or through official news conferences by press secretaries. This means, the news coming towards us is filtered and hence not as objective as we would wish it to be. Also, when asked questions, the secretaries merely repeat statements they already said before, which does not answer the questions that are needed to be answered.
Thus, the news coming in from the media now is not objective or valid for purposes for analytical thinking.