Discuss How to Detect Media Bias and Propaganda.Only a small number of citizens are skilled in recognizing bias and propaganda in the news disseminated in their country.
Instructions for the Interactive Assignment
American Government Interactive Assignment
How to Detect Media Bias and Propaganda
Only a small number of citizens are skilled in recognizing bias and propaganda in the news disseminated in their country. Only a relatively few are able to detect one-sided portrayals of events or seek out alternative sources of information and opinionthe over-whelming majority of people in the world, untrained in critical thinking, are at the mercy of the news media in their country (The Foundation for Critical Thinking).
Most major news channels present biased information and even go as far as to present fact-less even untruthful information. In response, there is a growing number of hoaxster websites that purposely present information that is not based on any known facts but tend to rely on conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, most Americans rely on the news to learn about political events and either believe the story or do not bother to check the information against other reports. This perpetuates political spin, leaving many Americans to wallow in a political echo chamber and this impacts our political process. There seems to be a correlation between news media bias and a trend towards polarization. Americans and their elected officials are moving further left or further right such that middle-ground politics and policies that rely on compromise cannot be reached.
The main purpose of this assignment is to increase your awareness of news media bias, to learn to fact check and to analyze how this affects you and our democratic political process. In this assignment you will learn to be a critical reader/listener. You will then apply this skill to expose biases and untruthful information and then analyze the short and long term affects your findings will have on our democratic political process.
GENERAL GUIDELINES:
This written assignment must be typed and saved as a Word document (.doc or .docx). It should be 5-7 pages, double-spaced, one inch margins, 12 pt. font. No Cover Page is necessary, but parenthetical in-text citation and a Works Cited page (MLA format) are required. Be sure to include your Works Cited IN YOUR assignment document file. To learn more about citation, use the Purdue Owl website and avoid plagiarism: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. .
SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS:
CHOOSING MEDIA SOURCES
News media bias is most profound when news media sources take on very specific political perspectives. Yet, most Americans choose only news media sources that match their own political perspective. This creates what many call the echo chamber. For this assignment, you must choose two news media sources with very different perspectives. There are several political perspectives; the two most common are conservative (right leaning) and liberal (left leaning). It is up to you to figure out the political perspective of the sources you are considering. (Here are some links to help get you started: http://www.allsides.com/about-bias (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.;
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/10/21/lets-rank-the-media-from-liberal-to-conservative-based-on-their-audiences/?utm_term=.551a19b03773 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
There are several formats from which to choose your sources; these include print (newspaper, magazine), radio, television and the internet. You may choose your sources from any combination of these formats (i.e. two internet sources OR one television source and one internet source).
CHOOSING YOUR TOPIC
You must choose one topic from the list below. You will then search your two news media sources for this topic. You may need to further narrow your topic so that both of your news media sources are discussing an important element of the topic (i.e. Gun Control might be narrowed down to background checks for gun licenses). These topics are current, so be sure to find recent information presented by your two news media sources (within the last six months). Choose ONE article/broadcast from EACH source (TWO in total).
Gun Control
Immigration/Refugees
NSA Surveillance/Wikileaks
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