I give you: THE TRUTH

Hello, internet! First of all, I have to apologize for the lateness and simplicity of this post. I’ve been sick for the past five days, and I’m just now able to sit up in bed and feebly type this out on my laptop. I’ll do my best to make it interesting, but humor me if I don’t.

Neil Postman’s article “The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures” was about how we must watch the news on tv critically. Postman, along with Steve Powers, talk about how the news is simply an approximation of what really happened, not a true representation. The news anchors have many goals in mind, only one of which is presenting the news as it happened. News people must also take into consideration the fact that they must retain audiences, their news must fit between commercials, and that it all has to fit within a one hour block.

This is related to our conversations about language at the beginning of the semester. For example, look at the following situation:

I just went to go see this new movie, “Hours Over”, starring Faraday White, Brad Kane, and Kevin Daille (not a real movie, this is another of those hypothetical situations I like to use). You ask me what it was about.

Well, in the beginning, Sarah (played by White) is working at her step mom's restaurant. She has a crush on the popular kid, Chad (played by Daille), who doesn’t notice her. Mr. Reslie (played by Kane) is the principal at their high school, and is being investigated for embezzlement of school budget (by the way, they’re all in high school). In the end, Reslie is arrested, Chad falls in love with Sarah, and the step mom’s restaurant burns to the ground.

Sounds like a fairly detailed description of the movie, right? How about this movie?

This movie is about a school for blind children run by a man who may have mob connections. When two students band together to discover the truth about the faculty, they discover the truth: the principal has been accepting bribes from the mob to cut down enrollment at the school through arson and pocket the budget for the missing student’s school supplies.

So you probably realize that these are two descriptions of the same movie, just from a different angle. The first focused on characters and made the movie seem like a chick-flick with a weak “b” plot. The second made the movie seem like an action adventure film about blind people.

This is similar to how the news works. There is no “true” description of what happens, only representations of the truth. And because truth isn’t something that can be conveyed through words, each news story has a spin on it, just like the two plot summaries above. When we watch the news, we must keep in mind that we are only hearing one person’s attempt at conveying the truth.