Politics Nation with Al Sharpton
April 9, 2012
I watched the Politics Nations with Al Sharpton to see who/what John Stewart was going to make fun of next. The first subject that Sharpton discussed was the Treyvon Martin case. One thing that stuck out to me was the personalization that Sharpton and the guest speaker portrayed. Bennet discusses this in his article The Politics of Illusion. They asked the audience how they would feel if their loved one was shot while they were talking to him/her on the phone. Sharpton and the guest speaker tried to make the audience relate to the situation so they would have a since of connectivity to the case. I’m not degrading the death of Treyvon but this incident occurred over a month ago, should this event still be a headline on national news? There are multiple other events that are taking place that have political significance that can effect the entire nation. For instance the Republican primaries. After Sharpton quit discussing the Treyvon case, he then began to discuss how there is “strange and ugly talk coming from the right.”
“Strange and ugly talk from the right” was Sharpton’s headline for his next topic. The first concept that I thought of was fragmentation bias in the mainstream media. This type of bias is a lot more obvious when watching the mainstream media than personalization. When President Obama adds finally got done and Politics Nation started again, Sharpton showed a copy of Charles Grassley’s, a Republican Senator’s tweet that said “Constituents askd why i am not outraged at PresO attack on supreme court independence. Bcause Am ppl r not stupid as this x prof of con law.” This does not surprise me that a known ‘left’ news media outlet would show this but how Sharpton portrayed this is what was disturbing. As Sharpton was announcing his headline that there was “strange and ugly talk form the right” it was showing Mitt Romney in the background making it seem like Romney said the negative things instead of Grassley. As we have said in class many people just get the headlines of news and be on their way. Headlines can be very deceiving as we can see from MSNBC. MSNBC is not the only media outlet that does this though. Many news outlets are only worried about making a profit so they portray things that they believe will make the most money. Thomas and Nain, authors of Who owns the media? agree that many news outlets will do almost anything to attract people just to make money. This is very disturbing since many Americans rely on the mainstream media for their knowledge about the news.
Another aspect that bothered me while I was watching Al Sharpton was that he placed all Republicans into the same category. I understand that a lot of Republicans think the same but not all of them are as radical as he is making them out to be. As we have concluded in class there is no such think as objective news but there should be a middle ground between objective and subjective. MSNBC’s Al Sharpton along with FOX’s Geraldo Rivera and many others are examples of news reporters who are very subjective and bias. Bias in the news is inevitable, however it should not be as strong as Al Sharpton’s.
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