Bias of Language + Pictures

Hello again, dear reader. It certainly has been a while. But I will reward your patience with a cohesive and well-written blog, as always. Basically, this article makes three assertions about the bias of language, that words are re-presentations of events and not events themselves, that words have different levels of meaning, and that almost all words have connotations. All of these apply to our previous discussion of rhetorical strategy, although the authors do not present them as tools for manipulating an audience directly. They rather present them as necessary evils of communication, hindrances that should be anticipated and accommodated because they simply cannot be avoided. In order to listen to or read the news appropriately, one must realize these three assertions about communication are constantly operating and judge a story for itself and not because of these limitations on true conveyance of the story. All of these ideas tie directly to our rhetorical analysis work because this class attempts to teach us how to account for these hindrances as well as to use them for our own benefit. A new idea this article presents is the concept that the news is in many senses just a means of entertainment, with stories not judged for their merit as stories but for the quality the accompanying video will lend to the entertainment of the viewers. This is a fascinating and yet disturbing side of the news, one that I believe we are all aware of subtly. However, this article brings the ugly side of televised news into the foreground.