In American Studies, one of the biggest topics we discussed this week was media coverage. There is always a bias to media, and a lot of the time the media that is seen is a misrepresentation of what really happened. It happens all the time in movies and television shows and magazines, the classic collage of mismatched pictures and words that totally twist what was initially said and is very clearly fake. It may seem clear that it's not right then, because in that sense there is a comic spin to it. Unfortunately, there isn't a comic spin to it when it happens in reality.
Earlier today, my mom and I were talking, and I mentioned our media discussion from in class. My mom and I then went on to talk about other things, when Bob Dold's name popped up. Robert Dold is a Republican candidate running for Congress this year, trying to fill in Mark Kirk's old position. My mom told me that she had been talking to someone who had told her that while on his last bus tour, Dold had been followed by a Dan Seals’ volunteer with a video camera. (Dan Seals is who Bob Dold will be running against this November).
The mention of video-taping a politician made me think of a video I had seen on Youtube of Bob Etheridge. In it a student asks Etheridge a question about whether or not he “fully supports the Obama agenda.” Etheridge immediately asks, “who are you?” multiple times, and finally grabs the student by the arm and refuses to let go. He then takes the phone of the student and even grabs him by the neck. To me, after watching the video, it looked and sounded like the Congressman had assaulted this student for no apparent reason. But after thinking twice about media, I’m not so sure.
As the audience of this Youtube video all I can see is the one-minute video that the person who posted chooses to show. It could be that the poster of the video had been following Etheridge around for days. It could be that those students had been sitting outside of Congress and Etheridge’s home, constantly asking him questions or trying to annoy him. It could be that they were just waiting for him to lose his temper and do something like “assault” them, like what happened. Or it could be the complete opposite, that they were innocent students who merely asked the Congressman a question after a tough day and he just blew up at them. I have no idea, or no way of finding out.
This is exactly what we were talking about in American Studies. Just like Mr. O'Connor said in his blog post about the potential Koran burning, when he agreed with Jimmy Fallows, that the, "media corrupts political discussions by deliberately polarizing and thereby cheapening political discussions." In this case it could be the students deliberately showing Etheridge in a bad light. The media skews everything we see, all that we as the public see is that one-minute snippet. How do we know if what we see is the truth?
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