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Zoe Young

ENGL 1S/ 242A

Professor Valerie Fong

12 November 2017

Media is to Trust

Media can be boiled down into one massive concept: trust. Trust is the aspect that ties

together every ounce of information presented to a given audience. That audience either trusts

that they are being given credible information, or it trusts that there are flaws in the information

presented and thus understand that they may be misled. From this, other issues, such as the

influence of public opinion and the possibility of an agenda, begin to appear. The media has been

abused in the past and undoubtedly will be abused in the future, however, that is no reason not to

learn how to recognize it.

Pathos, an appeal to emotion, has been used to manipulate the mind of the people in the

greater consciousness that is known as the public mood. Brooke Gladstone in her book, The

Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, remarks that reporters are celebrated

or condemned not because of importance or truth of their story but according to whether their

story suits the public mood (40). The public mood is constantly fluctuating and shifting as time

passes and new minds bring new ideas, especially in the realm of morality. New journalists have

a challenge, in this way, to compete with the overwhelming contrary opinions of older

generations along with the need to appeal to a diverse audience from all backgrounds. Now-a-

days, the new generation of journalists have, in one faction, devoted themselves to change the

conversation as a means to be the seed to grow acceptance. Others are devoted to bring light to

the truth of our world today. The execution may be intended to horrify the public into action or
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to give hope that humanity still is worth preserving. Janine di Giovanni exemplifies the former

approach in her Ted Talk What I Saw in the War. Di Giovanni opens her speech with the

devastatingly abrupt way that war comes to small towns and cities. She compares the sudden

effect as life as you know it [going] into suspended animation. It stops (00:12). Di Giovanni

continues to talk about a woman she came to know well during the conflict in Bosnia. She

describes the scene as her friend in a crowd of people [pushed] with her infant son in her

arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take

children out so they could be safe. And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front,

crowds and crowds of people, Take my child! Take my child! and her passing her son to

someone through a window (01:53). The emotional effect of this scene would be enough to

motivate a majority of readers to move to action purely based on their compassion and empathy

to such a heart-breaking situation, however, this does not mean that the event itself happened

necessarily in this way, not to discount the experience. It is very true that the use of language in

this story has a profound effect on the psyche of the public at large. By focusing in on the story

of this young mother passing her child through the window of the last overflowing bus to safety,

the audience is asked to humanize and relate on a personal level to this womans situation. This

woman was not the only parent saying farewell to their child that day, yet by singling out this

story highlights an empathetic response to the situation more so than other present and possible

examples. In this way, media uses this story to manipulate the audience in an attempt to generate

a volatile response of outrage and sympathy toward the plight of the Bosnian people.

The emotional approach, as shown by di Giovanni, has received backlash when it comes

to the issue of pandering. Gladstone in her book addresses the massive controversy in the media

world ... over whether news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This
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debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs and that there actually

is a unitary public, (36). The public is very a diverse mass. It is true that certain stories will

have a similar response from different people; however, people and their responses have a

gradient spectrum. No two groups of people will have the exact same response because they

themselves are differently minded with different experiences and perceptions. Pandering, in this

way, is a faulty concept when trying to appeal to the entire audience. Most propaganda creators,

knowing that appealing to the emotion and logic of the entire public is near impossible, instead

try to generate an emotional response in the audience, becoming far more effective. The

propaganda is designed to tell the public how to feel. This can be applied to such terrible things

as hate media.

Hate media is the use of media outlets to create a response of hatred toward a group or

groups of people. These forms of attack tend to be purely fueled by emotion disguised as logic,

meant to twist and pervert the fear of many to an unrealistic proportion of perverse human

behavior designed to ridicule and persecute a designated target group of people. This is how

genocide is born. David Hoffman in his book, Citizens Rising: Independent Journalism and the

Spread of Democracy, discusses this point in reference to the unfortunate events in Rwanda. In

1993, a ceasefire agreement was signed between Hutu and Tutsi peoples called the Arusha

Accord. Not more than a few days after the signing, the Radio Television Libres des Mille

Collines (RTML) was established and began broadcasting highly inflammatory messages

against the Tutsis and the moderate politicians who supported a peace settlement, (117). Most

of the stations language and racist ideology came from stories and articles published in

the Kangara (Wake Up) newspaper shortly after the invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front

(RPF) in February of 1990, which spewed ever more vicious propaganda against the Tutsi
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and began to suggest their elimination, (117). The situation progressed drastically after a

popular Hutu president was assassinated by Tutsi army officers, which set off a series of

massacres on both sides, (117-118). Hutu extremists began compiling a list of targeted Tutsis

and moderate Hutus, going as far as to practice burning houses, throwing grenades, and

hacking up dummies with machetes, (118). The RTML put forth a great effort in colloquial

speech to demonize, delegitimizes, and dehumanize the Tutsis to ensure a massacre of

immense size (118). RTML announcers used the fear presented by a terrible history repeating,

coupled with incendiary language to incite fear of an attack by the RPF, along with the invention

of horrible massacres that never occurred to promote theories of Tutsi foreigners that would

justify their expulsion or extermination, (118). As terrible as it may seem, many Tutsis found it

necessary to carefully follow the RTML in order to get a sense of upcoming action, (118).

It is hard to believe that so much death and destruction could occur over the course of one

hundred short days, and the unrelenting genocide of a people, generated by an explosion of hate

media, could go unnoticed on the greater world stage. Hoffman states in summary that the UNs

failure to respond was the greatest injustice suffered during this tragedy; however, the situation

may very well have been different had the situation been made real to people internationally.

Incorporating a visual bias would have pushed the issue into focus on the world stage.

Visual bias is the most effective means of making a horrible situation real to those that

would otherwise brush off horrible things as no more than unreliable embellishments to an over

blown situation that has nothing to do with their life. In this way, there is a level of psychological

truth to the idiom you must see it to believe it. Gladstone states that news that has a visual

hook is more likely to be noticed pictures [make] us notice, and this absolutely does not

change when it comes to any facet of the media.

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At the end of it all, it is the purpose of a journalist to witness, to bring a voice to

people who are voiceless, (di Giovanni 9:42). In this way, the media is trusted to tell us the

story of countries, people, and events. It is up to the public to weed out what we believe. It is the

duty of the people to remember the history and discretions of those who have wronged the world

at large, so that we may learn and grow into the best of humanity.
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Work Cited

Di Giovanni, Janine. What I Saw in the War.TedxWomen, Nov. 2012,

https://www.ted.com/talks/janine_di_giovanni_what_i_saw_in_the_war.

Gladstone, Brooke, et al. The Influencing Machine. W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.

Hoffman, David. Citizens Rising: Independent Journalism and the Spread of Democracy. CUNY

Journalism Press, 2013.