What’s the Point?

After watching Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism I questioned the reality of the points made in the documentary. I boycott all television news programs so I have not watched the Fox News channel in over four years. I questioned the validity of the documentary’s outtakes since it’s really easy to tape a segment and use it out of context to prove a point. Basically, its about as reliable as statistics, there is always a one to backup a point regardless of how outlandish it may be.

In twenty minutes, the Fox “News” channel had touched on many of the topics that Outfoxed identified. The Kennedy’s and Chappaquiddick, Al Gore, same-sex marriages, gratuitous, obnoxious political-correctness that enrages the majority of the democratic party (or the dominant white, middle-age males), anti-war, abortion, the Protestant God and Jesus Christ. All by one person, Sean Hannity on his show “Hannity’s America”. The majority of time centered on a fifteen minute expose on democrat Al Gore and his hypocrisy about his concerned over global warming. “We’ll let you decide for yourself” Hannity claimed before he described Gore and his democratic comrades as “environmental alarmists” and “leer-jet liberals.”

In 2006, Al Gore and director David Guggenheim released a documentary titled An Inconvenient Truth which described the effect of Global Warming and how societies need to reduce their “carbon footprint” to prevent an environmental catastrophe. In 2007, the documentary received two Academy Awards. It also has been well received by critics, RottenTomatoes.com gave it a “certified fresh” rating at 93%, a percentage calculated by polling movie critics from all across America. It gained praise by scientists and has been integrated into many high school science curriculums. At the end of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presented a list of suggestions that people can do to reduce and help reverse global warming.

Hannity took two of theses suggestions, “flying responsibly and riding a bicycle to work” to demonstrate prove how Gore was a hypocrite since he arrived in San Francisco in a private jet. He also listed “living in a straw house” and a “compost producing toilet” to demonstrate the ridiculousness of environmentally-sound alternatives but quickly skipped over or ignored some of the other more pragmatic suggestions of turning off lights, purchasing hybrid vehicles, and/or planting trees.

Not only that, Hannity had twisted the words of Gore’s saying people were required to do all these suggestions, otherwise they are responsible for “the destruction of the world” when in reality, Gore said “here are some ideas, if POSSIBLE put them into use.” Romano (1986)
stated that journalists have a requirement to “report the actions of their chief local governmental figures” and to report on issues “on which people vocally contend and seek action” (p. 45). Apparently Gore’s popularity and the world’s positive response to his raising the public’s awareness about global warming and his call to action threatened the elite Republicans. Hermann and Chomsky (1988) stated “If the government or corporate community and the media feel that a story is useful as well as dramatic, they focus on it intensively and use it to enlighten the public” (p. 32) or in this case the Republican government and big-business. Through its control of the Fox News channel, they can promote their agenda of smearing Al Gore and his message of Global Awareness.

Hermann and Chomsky also predicted the method the media would use to validate a story that was considered useful to the elite, “the process will get under way with a series of governmental leaks, press conferences, or white papers [an authoritative report]” (p.34). Hannity routinely referred to a report released by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research (TCPR), described by ABC News as being“an obscure conservative think tank” (2007). The TCPR first charged Gore in 2006 with hypocrisy when they publicized his $30,000-a-year in utility bills. Hannity restated at least three times in the eighteen minute segment that this bill was twenty times more than the average American paid in utilities. Overtime, if Hannity’s report garnered enough interest “the propaganda themes quickly become established as true even without real evidence” (Hermann & Chomsky, 1988, p.34).

But Hannity was not the only Republican using negative propaganda to undermine Gore’s popularity and message. In 2006, shortly after the release of An Inconvenient Truth, YouTube.com posted a short video called, “Al Gore’s Penguins” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI). It quickly became popular and viewed by many. A reporter from the Wall Street Journal became suspicious and discovered that the video originated from a DCI Group, a public relations and lobbying firm. Two of DCI clients were General Motors and Exxon (ABC News, 2007).

Al Gore’s hypocrisy proclaimed by Hannity to validate the propaganda approach used by Fox News, DCI, and the Republicans demonstrated the accuracy of Chomsky, Romano and Outfoxed hypotheses: that big business, the elite, the controlling powers recognized the importance of media. The elitists have infiltrated and used the trust of the American public to promote their own agendas and maintain their control over them. However, all the blame should not fall on the Fox or the elites, individuals need to demand “fair and accuracy” and “objectivity, to “identify their cultural and political beliefs, to read publications that oppose them, so that the hidden assumptions they encounter across the journalistic spectrum are exposed“ (Romano, 78). So it wasn’t about, truly, Al Gore or global warming, it was about social control and a willingness to be controlled.

References:

Greenwald, R. (Producer/Director). (2004). Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism [Motion picture]. United States: The Disinformation Company.

“Hannity’s America” Fox News Channel [Television]. (September 22, 2007). United States: Fox News.

Hermann, E.S. & Chomsky, Noam (1988). “A Propaganda Model” Manufacturing Consent, New York : Pantheon.

Romano, Carlin (1986) “THE GRISLY TRUTH ABOUT BARE FACTS” Reading the News, (Manhoff and Schudson, Eds.). New York: Pantheon.

Rotten Tomatoes. “An Inconvenient Truth (2006)” RottenTomatoes.com. Retrieved September 19th, 2007. Web Site: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/inconvenient_truth.

Tapper, J. (2007, February 26) “Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’?-- A $30,000 Utility Bill” ABC News. Retrieved on September 23, 2007. Web Site:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=2906888&page=1.

CMC and Dating

Recently a friend of mine (I will call him Mike) met someone he had met through Match.com. For those who do not have any online dating experience or knowledge, Match.com advertises itself as helping people to meet others who share similar interests, personality characteristics, and something else with the help of Dr. Phil all for the low, low fee of twenty-five dollars a month. Their advertisements claim, “Last year on Match.com, more than 400,000 people found someone to keep them warm at night. That's four large football stadium's filled with couples who've been walloped by love” (Match.com). With those figures, why should not everyone give this a try? Right?
My friend did. He met someone, a lady named Teresa, who had the highest point match with his his “portrait” based off of twenty-nine different questions. They began emailing back and forth to each other in December. In June they began talking with each other on the phone. Teresa decided that she wanted to visit Alaska and her “relationship” with Mike opened an opportunity to kill two fish with one whack of the gaffing hook. Teresa contacted Mike and they coordinated a twelve-day vacation in which he could show her the wilds of Alaska and they could see if their compatibility extended beyond emails.
Apparently they did not. Afterwards, I spoke with Mike and asked him what occurred. He said that she did present an accurate picture of herself online and through her emails. She did not make any outlandish claims that were insupportable. Regardless of their compatibility to write emails and talk on the telephone, FtF demonstrated their “real-life” incompatibility. The hyperpersonal interaction created by the limited interaction allowed for Mike and Teresa to idealized each other, creating a perfect persona, one that did not allow flaws or contrary human characteristics. Kevin Wright, discusses this tendency in his article “On-Line Relational Maintenance Strategies and Perceptions of Partners within Exclusively Internet-Based and Primarily Internet-Based Relationships” for the Journal of Communication Studies. Wright applies the theory of hyperpersonal interaction to predict “when cues are limited, and people do not have additional disconfirming data, they often develop idealized perceptions of their partner, even in cases when a partner is relatively a stranger. Perhaps the daily interaction with on-line acquaintances for people in the cues-limited EIB relationships developed skewed perceptions of attitude and background similarity based upon frequent, but incomplete information (due to the lack of cues that might disconfirm their perceptions).”
The failing of Mike and Teresa’s potential match, was not the fault of their misrepresenting themselves through emails or through their online identities. Nor was it Match.com’s method of identifying potential matches. The willingness of Mike and Teresa to view a hyperpersonal relationship does demonstrate compatible personality characteristics that could support a Computer maintained relationship. They had attempted to use the strategies outlined by Crispin Thurlow’s book Computer Mediated Communications to reinstate the “socio-emotional content in CMC” prior to their first face to face meeting. They used emoticons, they each had identity markers on their personal webpages, the bent the language rules, integrating computer-text acronyms and jargon, and they also went multi-model.
The factors that led to Mike and Teresa not being finding the compatibility implied by Match.Com developed from their spontaneous face-to-face behaviors and the removal of controlled textual interaction. CMC allowed for them to “engage in selective self-presentation, creating within their messages highly preferred personal and relational cues” (Wright, 2004). In other words, they got to present a representation of themselves that did not include their warts, bad habits, and annoying non-textual based communicative idiosyncrasies. They also got to choose when they communicated. With their relationship being ninety percent email based, they could chose when they wanted to respond and to what topics they wished to address. The delayed-time allowed for emotions to build or to recede depending upon the provocation, in which they could project numerous emotional responses that might or might not be accurate in regards to the other person, rather only represent how they wished the other person respond.
Prior to meeting Teresa, Mike decided to remove his profile from Match.com and the other dating sites he was a member of. When I asked him why he claimed that it was because that the women he met were not really real. That they were two-dimensional and if they became three-dimensional they often did not live up to the promises he imagined and/or they projected. Furthermore, the majority of the women he did meet lived outside of Sitka, (no surprise there), and while they may say they would consider moving, the reality of this island was often too much (even for us locals). He had made a number of FtF friends that he met through CMC, and he sees them when he is down in the states, so he had not completely wasted his time. And I do believe that one of the aspects he most enjoyed was answering the personal questions since it required him to become introspective and discover more about his own wants and dreams. This experience with online dating had not caused any negative repercussions, instead only positive. And in time, Mike might be able to have a better relationship with whomever he gets romantically involved with because of the emotional growth brought about by CMC.
In my personal opinion, I do believe that if a person lived in an area that would allow men or women to use computer-dating services to match, CMC could work. It would allow people to “weed out” the total losers, and to focus their attention on those who have a higher potential.



Works Cited

Match.com retrieved on September 9, 2007 from < http://www.match.com/howitworks/index.aspx>.
Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., Tomic A. (2006) Computer Mediated Communication: Social Interaction and the Internet. Sage Productions: London.Wright, K.B. (2004) On-Line Relational Maintenance Strategies and Perceptions of Partners within Exclusively Internet-Based and Primarily Internet-Based Relationships [Electronic Version] Communication Studies, 55 (2). Retrieved on September 5, 2007 from questia.com

Unbiased Opinions (oxymoron)

My professor has assigned an essay in which I am supposed to respond in an eloquent and insightful manner using my text book as a primary source. However, I cannot. The authors of Computer Mediated Communications are so biased that I immediately doubt every conclusion and judgement that they make. Even the list of resources at the end of each chapter I doubt since I cannot believe they would actually include anything that may counterargue the topics they address. It's like reading the most ra-ra self-help book, everything is great only if a person follows these simple steps.

I also have a difficult time selecting a topic for examination since I DON'T know enough to begin guessing where and how I might begin researching topics without having to wade through a bunch of garbage, wasting my time when I need to be writing my paper. The obvious choice which would have a HUGE selection of research would be internet and pornography. But I don't want to do this since I already have an opinion in which i would consciously and unconsciously select information that would validate this opinion. I could not offer an objective critique, therefore becoming the very thing I am railing against. I almost feel insulted by the authors and how they address me.