"Deception Is Just As Bad As Telling An Outright Lie In The Media"
In class, we watched a documentary focused on the way Al Jazeera portrayed the American invasion in Iraq and how the Arabs and Americans reacted to it. Relating this back to the statement we discussed in class (slightly altered), I still continue to disagree with the statement.
As one of the reporters, head of Al Jazeera I believe, mentioned that no news media is completely 'objective' and they all have an agenda. This statement is very similar to what the US marine official, Josh Rushing, said about showing a polar perspective in order to balance out the Arab world's perspective. I believe that showing only one side in order to get your point across is a way of deception because it is intentionally hiding one side of the truth and this can't be equally compared to lying as lying is saying something that is not true. Even though I believe that these two are incomparable, for the sake of argument, I'd say deception can be worse, just as bad or not as bad as lying in the context of media. It is very unrealistic to say that media should be completely objective because human nature doesn't allow it. Additionally, without any hint of subtle or blatant bias, news is just not as interesting and it wouldn't appeal to any audience. An example of this would be when Mr Michael stated that whenever he reads anything opposing his ideology (relating to Canadian politics), he tends to completely disregard it however, it would surely appeal to the audience that does agree with that ideology. In a way, it also appeals to the audience that is against the ideology because personally, I sometimes read articles that is opposite to my ideology just to mentally laugh at the irrational perspectives so I'd classify my appeal to such articles as negative appeal nonetheless. This shows that media with a bias tends to have a strong audience supporting them along with an audience completely disregarding them yet they still have the attention of the audience that disregards them
On the other hand, the American media and the American president at that time claimed that Al Jazeera picked up random civilians and put them at the site where the bombing happened just to evoke strong emotions amongst audience and the Arab leaders believed that Al Jazeera was pro American. Since both the major parties involved in this situation portrayed Al Jazeera in a negative light, it shows that even though Al Jazeera may have shown disturbing images of the civilians and soldiers in order to fulfil their agenda, their way of 'deception' by using imagery for the purpose of empathy didn't necessarily contain strong bias and additionally as they didn't have a political agenda, it shows that in this context, deception isn't as bad as telling an outright lie in the media. In fact, deception was beneficial as in this case; it acted as a bridge with the two extreme perspectives since Al Jazeera had Arab guests along with American guests on their talkshow even though, from what I believe, their way of deception with the American guests was by manipulating questions in such a way so that they'd receive the answer they wanted.
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