PressEthic

In Thursday's Press Ethics class the question was raised as to whether or not America tends to portray itself as always being in the right within its own media outlets. I definitely think so. If all news reporting is biased because people naturally have their own opinions and it is almost impossible to separate the two then why wouldn't America only see its side? Would you expect anything different? The media world is still a business, a corporation and it has to protect the interests of those who support it. As a supplement to the conversation Professor Penenberg emailed a link to an msnbc website that showed the different regional covers of the news magazine Newsweek. In Europe, Asia and Latin America all of the Newsweek magazine covers displayed a picture of a Taliban soldier with a gun with a large caption that says Losing Afghanistan. On America's Newsweek cover there is a picture of the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and her three children. With everything going on in the world it is very obvious and deliberate that the American cover says nothing about Afghanistan. I think it is because the war looks as though it is going bad for us. The president continuously promises us relief from what he calls terrorists and if the war isn't going as well as we thought or hoped why would Newsweek put that in our faces when it makes us look bad? I think that the American public wants to know the truth but unfortunately we as a whole are very lazy and are more content to believe what we are told. Europe, Asia and Latin America thought the article on the Taliban was the most important for the October 2, 2006 issue... America didn't. Instead it boasted a picture of America's Best Known Photographer with her three blonde angels. I think this cover was a statement intended to pull us back into America culture and maybe incite a little patriotism? The picture of the Taliban soldier is very brash, he looks angry and the menacing gun sure doesn't help. So no, I am not surprised that America did not run this picture nor the caption because frankly it makes us look bad. I think it would have made more of a statement to run the picture because again it raises negative questions about the media and our government that American citizens should not have to even think about.