Is the News, Really What is Going On???

      In their essay, " The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures", Neil Postman and Steve Powers, talk about how the news and the people reporting are brought to the public and how each type of media differs in its approach and ability to affect its readers or viewers. They write about the television news, newspapers and even stationary pictures in today’s news.  The authors are also giving us their view on how what the media show us is not really the whole story but merely just a way to grab the public’s attention.

    The authors speak of how, “By itself, a stationary picture cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract.”(Postman, Powers, 2008p.485).  A person can only interpret what they see on that piece of paper, not knowing what the story is behind the picture that was taken. That is where the written word comes into play, “Our words are baskets of emotions. Smart journalists, of course, know this.”(Postman, Powers, 2008p.484). So, journalists try to give their audience an interpretation of the picture that will grab their attention and make them want to keep reading.

     Of course, it is easier to keep an audience’s attention, by flashing different pictures on the screen, especially those pictures are moving. Except for specific details, these moving pictures can pretty much tell you the tale of what is going on. That is where language comes into play again. Now there is the news team on the television broadcasts bringing the viewer the details of these moving pictures. But, they most likely don’t include every single detail, because part of the audience might not stick around to watch the whole show. So they just give the public enough information to “keep them informed” of what they just saw. “The fact that television news is principally made up of moving pictures prevents it from offering lengthy, coherent explanations of events.”(Postman, Powers, 2008p.489).

     Let’s face it, it is the truth, the news broadcasts that are flashed on television are done in a sensationalistic fashion to try and keep us, the public, tuned in to that particular station that the TV is tuned to. If the music didn’t catch our attention, if the videos of police lights flashing down the expressway were in no way brought to our attention with the words, “In Breaking News”, how many people would even care to know what is going on in some other city or even state across the country or half way around the world?





References:

Postman, N., Powers, S. 2008 The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures. In Gray-Rosendale, L. Pop Perspectives: Readings to Critique Contemporary Culture. McGraw-Hill. (pp.481-489).

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