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Media Bias

News articles display communication patterns and the use of rhetorical devices and patterns. The text of a news article may seem to have a straightforward factual structure, but the text can be analyzed for what it is doing and thus for what it means and how it means. A comparison of two sports stories on the same subject shows how common these devices and patterns are as well as how different writers may approach the same essential material and may use somewhat different patterns in conveying their meaning, both literal and symbolic.

The two stories under discussion concern a football game between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys, a game played November 7, 1994 and reported November 8, 1994. One story appears in the Salt Lake Tribune and the other in the national newspaper USA today. Neither of these publications is directly involved in the story in the sense of having a home-town stake in it. The next game to be played will in fact be with the San Francisco team. Clearly, though, the audiences for the two newspapers are very different, a local audience in Salt Lake City or the national audience reading USA Today. the Salt Lake story, however, has a national connection in that it was actually written by the Associated Press and then distributed nationally, and the Salt Lake paper has picked up the story and run it.

Parenti analyzes rhetorical patterns to demonstrate ways in which the media misrepresents reality through biases that may not be readily apparent to the average reader:

We have noted the media's tendency to favor personality over issue, event over content, official positions over popular grievances, the atypical over the systemic. Supposedly these biases inhere in the nature of the media themselves, specifically, the imperfect practices of reporters, the visual nature of the camera, the limitations of time and budget, and the need to reduce a complex development into a concise story (Parenti 191)....

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Media Bias. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:17, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702421.html