Thiago blog 10

This week we had to listen in to Orson Wells’ War of the World broadcast, and what I found interesting about it was how many people were tricked into thinking that an actual alien attack was taking place. I think this is ridiculous, but I guess hindsight is 20/20, and maybe if I had listened to the live broadcast, and had also missed the disclaimer in the beginning of the show, I probably would been scared shitless too. This brings up an interesting point that we as viewers of TV news shows and listeners of radio news shows take it for granted that everything said in the news is real. That’s not to say that we are all just gullible, but rather that we expect in good faith that news programs and journalists will report the truth to the best of their knowledge. So this frees up the viewer or listener to just absorb the information without having the responsibility of verifying if it’s true or not; if info is from a reputable news station, it’s probably true. This means that media and its members have a huge responsibility to report the actual truth, since the audience will take it as such and if someone fails to uphold this responsibility, the audience will no longer trust them. For example, in 2006, Dan Rather retired from, and another producer was fired from the news program 60 minutes after a story they had reported and defended about President Bush’s military record ended up being false.

The movie Sonic Outlaws also dealt with this subject when the band Negativland was shown to have leaked a fake news story which the mainstream media got a hold of and began reporting as truth. So the reporters and journalists failed to verify the truth in this case. And if the audience isn’t expected to questions the truth, and the journalist who are expected to aren’t doing their jobs, then it’s kind of scary to think of how people can be manipulated into sharing a collective false belief, which gets into the realm of propaganda and group think—all bad things. But then again, what do I know? I get my news from the likes of the Daily Show, SNL’s Weekend update, and even UF’s Alligator.