Adam Clemiss, Shijia Lian, Paige Caldwell, Richard OBrien

Adam Clemiss

Part 1 News Websites.

Breitbart: Twitter may create Special Label for Trump Tweets That ‘Violate Rules’:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/03/28/report-twitter-may-create-special-label-for-
trump-tweets-that-violate-rules/
- Twitter might start having context to the Presidents and other politicians tweets,
which violate their new policy. The article also says that twitter did not take down
calls to violence against conservative high school students. The biases on this
article are pretty clear, Twitter has often been under scrutiny for having liberal
biases, and Breitbart uses an example where people were calling for violence
against students.

Breitbart: U.S. Projected to Add 1.5M Illegal Aliens to Population this Year
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/27/u-s-projected-to-add-1-5m-illegal-aliens-
to-population-this-year/
- This article talks about the catch and release policy that border patrol has for
illegal immigrants. When immigrants are caught trying to cross illegally but are
claiming asylum, they are released and given a date to show up in court to see if
they will be given asylum status. Breitbart’s bias on this is pretty obvious, they
call the immigrants unskilled workers and try to scare people with huge numbers
like there is an invasion occuring at the border.

Huffington Post: NRA Official Sought Sandy Hook Hoaxer to Question Parkland
Shooting, e-mails show.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exclusive-nra-sandy-hook-hoaxer-parkland-
shooting_n_5c8aa54de4b03e83bdbe59eb
- This article claims that an NRA official talked with a conspiracy theorist to
question the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In the emails the theorist was
poking holes in the police report asking questions on how the shooter got into the
school with a backpack when he was no longer a student. In the article the case
between Alex Jones, and the mother of one of the Parkland shooting victims was
 brought up. The mother is claiming that Jones caused intentional emotional
damage. The article takes a more liberal view to many things including opinions
toward the NRA official who contacted the conspiracy theorist.

Huffington Post: The Human Costs of Kamala Harris’ War On Truancy.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-truancy-arrests-2020-progressive-
prosecutor_n_5c995789e4b0f7bfa1b57d2e
- This article is about Kamala Harris’s time as the attorney general of California,
and the tough laws passed on the parents of truant children. The article mainly
talks about the arrest of Cheree Peoples after her daughter with sickle cell
anemia missed 20 days of school because of frequent hospitalizations.

Part 2:

I looked at Fox news and MSNBC’s coverage after the Muller report was released. Both
news sources had their own biases on what should happen to the president, and the
report itself. MSNBC took a strong stance that the full report should be released for the
American people to read. FOX headlines were saying that the president should be
exonerated due to the findings of the report. Each station appealed to their audiences
regarding the findings of the report, calling for either more information to be released, or
finding the president fully innocent of any crimes.

Part 3:

After Trump’s inauguration he claimed that the crowd in Washington was “record
breaking”, showing pictures of crowds that were much larger than what actually
appeared that day. After the inauguration a photographer admitted to editing the picture
to crop out empty spaces and make it seem like there were more people in the
audience. This is a great example of how fake news can sway people's opinions. With
so many unfiltered news sources out there it is sometimes impossible to determine if a
source is credible or not.

Part 4:

1. Radio News: Radio era was the first time in history where you could get news
from everywhere in the world within the day. People were more connected than
ever, but that also meant that people could spread whatever information they
wanted. Radio stations could bypass the regular media which would usually fact
check what gets published. This was evident with the “war of the worlds” incident.
If I had to rate this time I would give it a 5/10, people were connected, but there
was a lot more room for fake news to spread.
2. Muckraking: In the early 1900’s many industries were not regulated by the
government. One of the most famous cases of muckraking was in the meat
processing industry. The sanitation in these factories was atrocious, nothing was
cleaned, and diseased meat was constantly making it into stores and consumed
by the public. If I had to rate this time in history for it's media coverage I would
give it a 9/10, due to the multiple investigations into private companies that were
undermining the public.
3. Todays Echo Chamber: This is the most connected we have ever been in history,
and like the radio era, it is very easy to voice your own opinions as fact. Because
of social media and the internet, anyone with an internet connection can make a
blog and sway people's opinions based on false information. I would give the
current era a 4/10. We are more connected than ever, but anyone can say they
are a news source covering real stories.

Paige Caldwell:
https://video.foxnews.com/v/5852265573001/#sp=show-clips
 This video is from the Fox News website. The video includes several types of bias, the
most prominent being selection of sources. The selection of sources bias is defined as including
more sources that support a point of view than another. This video is titled “How do Texas
Voters Rate Trump’s Performance?”. However, only those attending a Trump rally in Texas are
interviewed about the president’s performance. A conservative perspective on the president is
given, but a liberal perspective is not. This contributes to the echo chamber effect because it
discludes the other side’s viewpoint.

https://twitter.com/FoxNews/status/1044598558316527616

This is a tweet from Fox News that has a video clip of Trump speaking at the 2018 UN
Meeting. Fox News shortened the clip to cut out laughter that followed after Trump’s claim,
which is an example of omission bias. They also made the caption of the tweet a quote from
Trump that sounded positive, but is not backed up by any evidence: “In less than two years, my
administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our
country.” This is an example of bias by spin because it makes conservatives sound good. It
contributes to the echo chamber effect because conservatives that only refer to this news
source would be misinformed and unaware of the full situation.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/trump-nationalist-gop-violence.html

This article titled, “Trump is Celebrating Violence and Nationalism at His Rallies” was posted by
the New Yorker Slate. The headline, and the article itself, represents bias by spin. Bias by spin
is defined as a story having only one interpretation of an event. This article is negatively
interpreting President Donald Trump’s rally in Houston, Texas. It only interprets the event from a
liberal perspective. It does not include a conservative perspective on Trump’s rally.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/23/us/southwest-airlines-sexual-assault/index.html

This video is titled, “Man accused of groping on flight: Trump ‘says it’s OK.’” First, this uses bias
by selection of sources because they featured two female defense attorneys to speak on the
issue. They were both female and african american, so they likely have liberal views, but the
video never disclosed it. Instead, the video only conveyed them as experts on the issue.
Another bias in this example is bias by spin. The headline could make conservatives look bad
since it said that Trump said it was okay, but in reality Trump did not speak on this particular
incident, and it was the passenger on the flight that brought up a comment that Trump said a
while ago.

Shijia Lian

Part one:
Fox News:

Tucker Carlson: Smollett isn't innocent. He's something 'better' -

privileged, famous and above the law

This news article from Fox News showed a clear bias towards the event discussed. half of the
article was constructed upon the pure assumption that Smollett used political power to get
himself out - which, once again, is purely an assumption, and should not appear in a news
article, nor should such assumption be made based on information we have now.

Trump vows to release FISA docs now that Mueller probe is concluded,
slams 'treasonous' FBI
This new article of Fox News titled “Trump vows to release FISA docs now that Mueller probe is
concluded, slams 'treasonous' FBI” talks about Trump’s planning to release the Mueller's report,
and Trump’s towards the people who pushed for the investigation, calling them “liars” and
“treasonous.” I would argue this news article is biased because, in this article, the author wanted
strongly the reader to think that Trump is innocent. The author put in a lot of Trump’s quote
against those people, some of them were pretty offensive, while there no explanation regarding
to why those persons are skeptical about Trump.

As news platforms intentionally use their political biases, either leaning left or leaning right, as a
way to attract and please readers, certain readers would naturally be only willing to receive
information from those sites that agree with their viewpoint and political standpoint and avoid
any other sites, a tendency that was granted the name “echo chamber effect”. At a fundamental
level, this kind of news reporting is the soil for echo chamber effect and also has always been
reinforced by the effect itself and financial interests.

Part two:
I watch both Fox News’ and MSNBC’s report on the Smollett case and each side showed a
different political espect to the event. MSNBC’s reporters thinks that the judge dropped the case
because of an important evidence source has been determined incorrect and the whole faking
hate crime thing wasn’t what actually happened. Fox News, on the other hand, insists that the
judge either took bribes from Smollett or received great pressure from above, either ways are
related to political corruption.
This kind of news reporting of cable news contribute to echo chamber effect in the same way as
online news sites.

Part three:

This news article regarding house speaker Nancy Pelosi announcing a scheme to take down by
lowering the voting age to 16 is one of those fake news. According to the fact-checking site
Snopes, the person mentioned had never announced such scheme, and the campaign of
lowering the voting age(supported mostly by democrats) was not intended to “take Trump
down”, at least it was never publicly stated so.

Fake news articles oftentimes have clear intentions of condaming one side of a matter and/or
praising another side. Like in this particular one mentioned above, the author wanted to make
the democrats seem bad by revealing their “filthy” “scheme” against Trump which is total
nonexistent. The biggest problem fake news might cause is people being misinformed which
could come in affect something like presidential election, making the result unfair and
unrepresentative, just like the last election.

Part four:
Yellow Journalism(1/10): started and flourished in the 1880s and lasted throughout the next 40
years or so, It was arguably the darkest age of journalism. During that time, newspapers were
taken over by many big business. As a result the press started to report things that could help
make more sells, which oftentimes meant modified or totally fake stories. People were always
fed with big stories that are not real and that had caused many problems like Spanish-american
war. This era is related to today’s media environment in a sense of today’s fake news and the
biases of each news site. Both are intended to attract readers and satisfy the financial interests
of the creators/publishers and are very similar to Yellow Journalism. The lesson to the media
today is to try not to once more get back the age of yellow journalism as it’s already looking like
that will likely happen if no external regulation are going to intervene.
Muckrakers(10/10): During early 1900s, Detective Journalism was at its peak. Many journalists
dedicated themself to finding and exposing public risk and political corruption in order to inform
the public and promote good social reforms thereafter. Many essential reforms made that time
are still in effect today such as antitrust laws and sanitation check on foods. This kind of
journalism can still be seen today but rarely has same amount influence on the public, either
because today’s world has already been improved to a extend that very little improvements can
overcome the pressure from opposer or because of the raise of sensationalism where people
have so much other sensational things to entertain themselves that they are too distracted to
stand against the subject matter of those reform-promoting reports. Judging from the social,
political, and news environment or current day, I think media today can rarely have that much
influence on one matter unless the matter itself is really really important, but that shouldn’t affect
the media reporting bad social phenomenons promote good changes, since as long as the
media concerns about what’s happening, specially those bad things, business institutions,
individuals, and the government wouldn’t dare to do bad things under the risk of being seen by
the people.
Vietnam War(9/10): It was the first time when average people saw violence of war and deaths in
their TVs in their homes and the media had ultimately changed the public opinion on the
Vietnam war by exposing many shockingly brutal acts committed not only by the Commie
Vietnameses to Americans, but also Americans to vietnamese civilians, which eventually led to
an end to the war. It was like the age of muckrakers, but with journalists and cameramen go
deep into battle zones, puting their life at risk to expose something that was unjust and need to
be stopped. I took off one integrity point because not all reports from that era were to help end
the war, some were even to promote the war. But to be fair, muckrakers’ reports could represent
conventional news reporting at the time which they were actively exposing. Today’s media’s
reporting on war matters isn’t nearly as active as during that time, little battle field reports and
little effort to end costly wars were made throughs the past few decades. The media should
report more on wars, specially those ones that are costly and not unjust, it is the only way to
turn the public against and hence to correct a mistake made by the government after all.