Written By: Daniel McNulty
Everyone knows the term “Fake News” and it has lost the initial punch it once had, due to its presence in today's memes. Most people write it off as something conservatives say about a source they don’t necessarily agree with. However, the term is based in truth and still remains an accurate description of some news sources, including but not limited to CNN, Daily Mirror, Buzzfeed, and the New York Times. Obviously there are sources that lean heavily towards right-winged politics, but for now, we’ll talk about media bias for “the Left”. While some sources (such as CNN) lean more Left than other sources (like NYT), they all share some commonalities. Every single “Fake News” source will use heavily loaded language to invoke emotional responses from people and to imply something or redirect your attention away from the facts, or they just leave things out completely.
Now you may be thinking, ‘yeah this kid is saying all these things, but he has no proof’. Luckily for you, I have just what you’re looking for. Back in March 2018, a young black man was shot and killed by police in his grandmother's backyard. The CNN article will have you believe the man was running from police, and when he got into his own backyard they shot him dead. To quote the CNN article directly, “Clark's grandmother said she was inside the house when the shots were fired and saw him with an iPhone.” Seems like a totally legitimate and trustworthy source, right? Wrong. The grandmother went on to tell Fox News that, “'The only thing that I heard was 'pow, pow, pow, pow,' and I got to the ground,'" she said”. Now I don’t know about you, but it seems hard to know that your grandson was shot holding an iPhone when you said you were on the ground in your house. The CNN article includes a lot of words like ‘anguish’ and ‘murder’ and others of the sort. They even go as far as to include a picture of the grandmother reacting to seeing her grandson dead. Conveniently, this picture is taken in broad daylight, so you think to yourself, “how could the police mistake a phone for a camera?”. CNN does mention that the young man was committing crimes before he was shot, but they didn’t really go into detail about the number of crimes he was committing. The CNN article tells us, “Sacramento officers responded to a report that a man had broken car windows and was hiding in a backyard”. What it doesn’t tell us is that he had broken into at least 3 cars and possibly attempted to break into a house. CNN also forgets to mention that after the police shot him, they initiated life-saving procedures. However, it DOES include a quote from his brother saying “he changed his life around. He stopped stealing.” Um, obviously not if he was breaking into cars and houses. Oh yeah, and they forgot to mention one of the racists, white supremacist police officers were black.
One example not enough for you? Lucky for you, I’ve got plenty more. We all know about families being separated at the border when they are caught attempting to enter the country illegally. CNN tells us that the parents are now sent to a federal prison, where the kids aren’t allowed to be held. While the paragraph explaining why people support the separations only mentions that 58% of Republicans support this, the paragraph against this is much more emotional. With words like ‘immoral’, ‘inhumane’, and ‘ child abuse’, some people are bound to start getting emotional opinions, rather than factual ones. They even go as far as to compare the state of these facilities to those of the internment camps the Japanese were kept in during WW2. It doesn’t seem to mention that people are going to these “camps” and are saying they’re better than the projects they grew up in. The simple fact of the matter is, children are separated from their parents all the time when the parents commit a crime. If one of my parents were to break a law, they would be sent to prison, and I wouldn’t see them as often. Why should it be any different for these people?
Pretty much the moral of this article is don’t believe everything you read online. If you want my own personal advice, here you go. Before you form an opinion on something that has happened, read the CNN article. Then read the corresponding Fox News article. Then, read at least 3-5 other, 3rd party sources and see what the commonalities are between them. Then, once you feel you have as much information as possible, form your opinion. But you should never read just one source and base your opinions off that source.
Comments