In one of my communication classes a teacher of mine mentioned something interesting about September 11th. She said that when she really wanted to know what h*** was going on that day she looked to online newspapers from other countries to get their perspectives. Hmm... interesting. I wanted to ask her what she found out but i didn't get the chance. I decided to take this into my own hands for my Mass Communication class and formulate my research proposal around news sources from other countries besides the U.S. If YOU get the chance look at other online newspapers like the Asian Times, Aljazeera or The Guardian, look at the ways that the stories are framed and constructed, alike or differently.
One day when I was browsing these sites I noticed the Asian Times and Aljazeera newspapers had stories that the United States military forces, located in the Middle East, had gone into Syria and accidentally killed civilians there. This might not sound so "interesting" at first, but then i decided to look into msnbc.com and cnn.com and see what they had to say about the incident....lo and behold i couldn't find a story about it from either site. The way that the Aljazeera site framed the story was in a way that the U.S. had violated some territory laws that were known and had killed innocent people. The site said that because of this incident American schools were being closed down in Syria and there were major protests. The Asian Times had a similar story. I venture that if the U.S. newspapers DID have the story on their site it would not be framed in the same way. My guess is that it would be something like this: U.S. Troops might have been given false information or there was a malfunction of some kind that lead to this "attack".
Culture has a big impact on the way that stories are framed....what kind of message do the newspapers want to give to its readers? What do the readers want to read? What stories will get the most subscribers or make the most money? These are all questions that we can look at to try to understand why stories are framed in certain ways.
2 comments:
I agree.
Even though media is widespread and as many people can access one thing as can access another, there's always going to be a slant or omission. Sometimes that's the downside to how instant our information has become -- so many people with access to information that they believe is right just because it's there.
I don't know why I am always so shocked by stories like this, but I am and they are terrifying. It's like there aren't just two sides to every story, but nine, or twenty five, and to get all of them pertaining to just one event takes so much time, it is overwhelming trying to understand all those different sides for EVERY piece of news that comes out. It just emphasizes the huge influence our media has on us. Questioning our source of knowledge leads directly to questioning the knowledge itself, and then it feels like we know nothing.
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