Response Exposing Media Myths

Essay #1: Summary-Response Exposing Media Myths

According to Joanmarie Kalter, she has written many articles on television news and the press in the third world. Kalter has an extensive background as a freelance writer; she is a graduate from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1981. Afterward became a staff writer for TV Guide in 1984 and 1989 returned to freelance writing for numerous diverse periodicals. As well as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and The African Report. Kalter uses her experiences as a writer to brake away at the “False Truths” of the news myths as she so skillfully puts it.

“False Truths” what is “False Truths?” Can it be a misleading statement from the actual truths or is it only half truths? Of what news media wants its viewers to know. According to Kalter, she disagrees with the poles conducted and that the questions asked were misleading conserning the percentile of vewers that watch the news and those that read the newspaper each day. The first poles taken were that more people prefered watching the news than those who read the news paper. However when scholars came up with a less general question the results were different it was 67% that read the newspaper and 52% watched the news on television (Dr John Robinson Professor of Sociology University of Maryland.) Research is an on going study and percentages are always changing with each generation. Therefore, these poles can not be 100% accurate. However, they do give us an idea of where we as a society get our news.

Furthermore, Kalter does not believe that the news media is trying to set a public agenda, but is only informing us as to what is going on around us. It is a known fact that journalist will hold onto a story till it becomes of public interest. Kalter gives one example, the Watergate scandal(1972-1974) which it took awhile before the public became concerned about the scandal and it became a public agenda. Before this scandal, America watching its first reality show televised all the way from Vietnam. The Vietnam conflict was Americas first televised war shown in every home across America. We had front row seats every night, and society watched it religously, this conflict was televised on every news station, and the more the people heard and saw our soldiers