Media Bias

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 appare

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for USA Today, Jarrett Bell, offers a different statement of the facts: Call the New York Giants a dangerous speed bump en route to Sunday's NFC showdown at the San Francisco 49ers (Bell 1). The colorful language offers a metaphor of a road and drives the story down that road, with the Cowboys being the team taking a journey and the giants being no more than a bump in the road. The next element in the schemata is the body of the story, the details of the main event as indicated by each of the writers. The details are the same in both cases--the Cowboys won the game with a certain score. Some of the action of the game is described by each, and the manner in which these details are described is very different in the two stories. Each writer selects the detail that they see as of greatest interest, and each describes the action as if the details they have selected were the most important of the game. The fourth element is background, meaning historical context. Both writers include some reference to earlier games, to the ranking of the teams, to members of the team and their histories, and to recent events that each writer may believe impacted the game. The Associated Press writer, for instance, discusses the loss of offe
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Some common words found in the essay are:
San Francisco, Salt Lake, Kennard Cowboys, Cowboys Interestingly, , Parenti Vandik, C3 Obviously, York Giants, Associated Press, Dallas Cowboys, salt lake, fighting cowboys, san francisco, sports stories, november 8, november 8 1994, 8 1994, fighting cowboys demolish, cowboys demolish, story inside, demolish giants, outcome game, cowboys demolish giants, san francisco team, usa november 8,
Approximate Word count = 1880
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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