Ryan Graham
Dr. Grapsy
Persuasion
March 22, 2017
Thank you, doctor, for the educating comment. When I first came across this article it was when it became popular for being proven false. I wasn’t truly able to experience first hand the public outrage caused by the article other than the outrage at it being false. I had thought about how you mention in your reply that there are sadly many stories like the one I reported on that tend to be exaggerated events that have more speculation than fact. I wanted to implement that into the main goal of my paper, which you suggested that I go into a broader examination. Perhaps I can find many of these kinds of stories and discuss the broader topic on how both sides use these kinds of stories to create public attention as you mentioned. This would allow me to not be limited by just one story and let me focus on the big picture.
I believe that I did use the wrong words in discussing the professional media's role in all of this. When you mentioned that the idea of the media trying to push their own views on the public wasn’t accurate; I was puzzled and I wanted your input on this. You later mentioned that these media outlets are profit-driven industries that can advertise stories like the one I reported on to start a public discussion, but can’t that be seen as a way of pushing their own views? If these news outlets realize that large majorities of people do not support President Trump’s policies, then wouldn’t they perhaps be riding off on a particular group of people’s views? I guess an example would be how CNN is usually seen as left leaning and Fox as right leaning. I think I actually did include a potential example of this when Fox went to the mosque leader that originally proved the article was false. The coverage on the leader seemed to randomly include a portion where the mosque leader discussed his support of Donald Trump. This seemed quite odd to me and I wondered if this was perhaps some way of Fox trying to push the pro-Trump idea. However again, I cannot be sure, and this is only one example so I am definitely eager to hear your response to this little problem I’m having. I do want to be able to improve on my ability to discuss the media properly in my paper.
I must admit that I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into the title of my post. I will definitely take more time to come up with an interesting and informing title. I can see how the more common practice of media outlets running a story before actually checking the facts thoroughly can be a big problem in news media today. Isn’t it the job of the news to be able to provide accurate presentations of a news story? Perhaps this can also be a topic to bring up in my paper and how the media can maybe improve their fact checking. This story was indeed picked up by multiple news publications, including, Fox and Washington Post, as well as some lesser known outlets. A large discussion did take place over on Reddit where I originally found the article. Although I believe that the discussion was more focused on the article itself and not the administration's efforts. I'll include the original link below if you are curious and want to check it out.
Thanks again for the response.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5rhvvp/man_who_claimed_mom_died_in_iraq_after_trumps_ban/#bottom-comments
