The News: The way they see it??????

I have always been a reader of Chomsky ( not bragging hahaha, just saying festivus to all) and I feel that what he has to say has brought more insight into what I think and feel about government and politics along with media than any other writer (other than Micheal Moore, but I was young and stupid, and bought to fully into his one-sided biased view of everything). Chomsky is enlightening and definitely well informed, and relates all this to the reader as more of a provider of information than with a sense of anger at those which he is writing about (which can not be said in the case of Micheal Moore).

With this excerpt from his novel ‘Manufacturing Consent’ he again brings another subject to light concerning the way in which the news that is reported on and consumed by the audience is, more often then not, a very different thing then the actual factual event that took place.

We are always given one way of looking at the events that took place; the way the new broadcaster and the reporters feel is the truly the way it happened. I am not saying that what we are given is the end result of huge line of alterations to the true story (but it wouldn’t be far from the truth, in some cases).  As anyone knows when given a story there are always many sides to the story and if you ask a group of people individually what they saw, you will undoubtedly get a slightly different story from each individual (the news broadcast is nothing more than a retelling of the story in the eyes of the people that heard it first and it will always be different depending on who they heard it form and how they were informed). That being said it would be ignorant to think that there is no influence as to what is selectively reported on. The major company in the end has the choice of what to air and, out of all the stories, what they feel is the most important topic to discuss, and this choice can be directly linked to the views and beliefs of those with vested interest in not only the public interests at heart but also in other more self-indulgent interests as well.

What is funny is that when it comes to some stories the news broadcasters are so ready to pounce on the story without getting all the facts straight, which can lead to the news company looking like idiots (unfortunate though that these things are all easily forgotten by most people and the news company are rarely held accountable for their misinformation, When a news provider does misinform, the erroneous story is on the first page and the retraction is on the last page mixed in with the classified and the personals).

Just think about election night news, that spoke up early in saying thatAl Gore had won the election in 2000, only to have to go back and say to all those individuals that they were mistaken (They weren’t, but a judge said they were) and what does that say about the news we are taking in when many news companies can get something as big as the election results wrong and it becomes a funny tidbit the next day. How many people went to bed thinking one thing only to wake up the next day to completely different result.

In the case of the Venezuelan president, there are not as many other media to bring the full story to the masses in which the limited amount of companies that do report on this type of information have the ability to show the story from only one vantage point and in this case all people know is what is available to them.

I kinda went of topic, but what I am trying to say is that, as with anything else, we have to think critically about everything we take in (even the news) because we are never told to whole story, we are only told the side that these reporters know, be it truth or fabrication.

So when you think about the information you get from these news broadcasters, take it as one reporter is fond of saying:

“And that’s the way I saw it” (notice he didn’t say that’s the way it happened)