After reading the article connecting Shakespeare to bin Laden, it brought me back to the day he died. I thought it was interesting that parties were thrown, mass gatherings around the White House occurred (I have friends in school in D.C. who posted pictures of the gatherings), and in general people were celebrating the loss of another human life. Obviously, the man in question was undeniably evil and cause pain and suffering to so many people, but our response to that day was just as awful and caused so many more deaths. I could not see it in myself to celebrate the death of another human despite everything I knew about this man. I did not pity him either – I was just neutral. His death did not change anything; the war is still going on and nothing changed on that particular day. News reports said it brought justice, but bin Laden was only one person involved and where was the justice for all the people killed overseas?
I learned about what happened because of various Facebook statuses, so wanting more accurate information I turned to CNN. I couldn’t find the exact article from that night, but the first line was something along the lines of, “America’s biggest enemy has been killed when Navy SEALs stormed into bin Laden’s secret hideout. And finally justice is brought to the American people…etc., etc., with a pile of adjectives that showed the journalist’s bias.” It was written like an action story and seemed so utterly unrealistic that I took a step back and decided to view an international news source that wasn’t stationed in America. So, BBC was my answer. This news was the headline on the website as well so I clicked the article and the first sentence went something like this, “The leader of al Quida, Osama bin Laden, has been killed during a raid on his supposed hideout by American Navy SEALs.” Then, as expected from a news article, it listed details and said they would update as soon as more was clear. The juxtaposition between the two articles was surprising and it really went to show how biased a work can be and how the author can easily manipulate the reader to feel a certain way. The CNN article tried to bring out a sense of patriotism and made the event into a spectacle instead of giving the public straight, unbiased facts. I thought this fit in well with this class and what the author’s intentions are. Sometimes, the intentions are not as clear or obvious unless you have something that you can directly use in contrast.
I think when looking at the texts of bin Laden's you have to remember the background of the two news sources. While I'm in no way saying that CNN is unbiased (lets just say it tends to ride to the left), I'm not quite sure that I agree that the authors were trying to manipulate the text on purpose. I believe the the manipulation of one text compared to the other has more to do with the authors nationality. I know personally that many other American news stations wrote articles which radiated patriotism, and I believe that this was different from the british news source based on the grounds that the life of bin Laden effected their lives in a different way then ours. While Great Britain has dealt with their fair share of terrorist attacks, I don't think they can ever truly understand the terror and fear that came from being an American citizen on 9/11 2001. Its this difference, that I believed, caused the authors to unconsciously add different layers to their texts.
ReplyDelete