Blog Post #6

 

Progression: Tracing Antiwar Voices from the Progressive Era to Today's Digital Backgrounds

In today's society, finding and consuming media is done much quicker and convenient than in the previous years of the media. News is spread through various platforms, headlining some of the biggest stories, recognized rumors, and passing information through different generations of the public within all different approaches. Media has gotten so rapidly spread, creating various perspectives on situations and popular occurrences, causing controversy and false reports within society. 

In topics such as war and military operations within the United States and the entirety of the globe, media can be recognized for having strong antiwar voices that can rarely be heard or seen on mainstream news media. Personally, I am not sure of why exactly it is so hard to find such important knowledge on news such as this, however after being raised with this prompted question of 'why not?' I have considered a few major reasons as to why information that can be shared by strong antiwar voices are not headlines or represented in our mainstream news as part of our society, today. 

Trust- a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. Now a days, our media is bias based on viewers perspectives or credibility and trust it consumes from the public. The fortunate yet unfortunate thing is, the media either tends to trust the viewers, or the viewers trust the media. The idea of bias is so rapidly consumed within the perspectives of journalists and the media in general, that the idea of actual knowledge or facts that are being consumed are taken for granted and unheard for its meaning. According to Washington State University, bias can be affected by the way journalists and writers characterize facts, decisions on what stories or facts they may cover, and the amount of time and space they use to cover facts. Media bias is one hundred percent a factor of what makes such important information so hidden and hard to see from the world. News sources are known for making an impact on viewers opinions and causing bias from all parties of government. However, what is said is not always true, and opinions are quickly turning into facts due to the way word-of-mouth gets around impacting what the public wants or does not want to hear.

Journalist, Robert Jensen recognizes anti-war voices and society. He suggests that to many people in the news media, when the antiwar movement agrees on certain principles, criticism is unleashed and thought that the movement is known to read the first and last lines of the article, and nowhere between the lines. This represents distrust and disrespect of the importance of this information, with its given little coverage in the news.

As for exactly why anti-war coverage is not spread within major mainstream headlining news, it is unknown. However, trust and knowledge within an organization is a leading factor as to what possibilities may be the cause for it.