True Enough...

After being assigned to read Farhad Manjoo’s book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, I honestly was not excited about it. Usually, books like these are dull material, filled with monotonous information about events that occurred in the past. Rarely, do I find myself reading the book to actually read it. True Enough was different. Yes, it was an assigned book, but within it, was loads of current events and information relevant to journalism, which is the field that I want to eventually be a part of. The book clarifies how the news media can influence people to believe one thing or another based on how they present a story. Manjoo explains about how the news media has a responsibility to help people understand the world. However, Manjoo makes clear that these processes are often backwards. Depending on which news medium covers a story, the angle or slant of the story could be biased toward Republicans or Democrats.

What Manjoo discusses that I find appealing is his explanation of how media fragmentation has changed the way people use mediums. According to Manjoo, media fragmentation is the way information, everything that you know about the world, was once scattered by a handful of organizations. Today, people can retrieve news from many directions. Television, radio, Internet, iPods, and cameras are just a few ways information is spread. This revolution of media outlets is so different from even twenty years ago, when literally the news markets had control of how people saw and thought of news stories. Manjoo argues that all these media outlets are negative because someone skilled could distort images and video, exaggerate, even fake stories, or even lie to people more effectively than ever before.

The example Manjoo showed was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who managed to show Democratic candidate John Kerry in a negative light just by saying questionable things about him. Republicans against Kerry ate up this new information and some media news outlets presented the details as fact, when it was not conclusive whether it was or not. Even some Democratic supporters were wary of Kerry after hearing this information off of news sites, again, with no idea if the information presented had any truth to it. I see examples of the media influencing people all the time. The paparazzi and gossip sites like TMZ.com are always spreading rumors about celebrities. Everything from the mistreating of children to new celebrity lovers is covered, and for some reason, people usually believe what these Web sites are saying. It just shows the power of how media can influence the way a person thinks and feels about another person.

What interested me the most about Manjoo’s book is his explanation of selective perception and how it is prevalent in today’s society. Selective perception refers to the idea that people will react to things differently based on their beliefs. Our minds can block things out unconsciously if the topic is against our ideals or beliefs. An example that happens to me often is when I’m reading a story I’ve written, I often miss a few grammatical errors because my mind, while I reading to myself, corrects the answers my eyes see. I never notice the errors until someone else shows them to me. The example of selective perception that Manjoo uses is very common among sports fans today. He explains how a study was conducted among students from Dartmouth University and Princeton University. Each person was asked to watch a hard-hitting football game between the two schools and write down the number of illegal or questionable infractions by both teams. The results indicated that Princeton students found few infractions by Princeton players, but nearly double as many for Dartmouth players. Conversely, Dartmouth students decided that Princeton football players were playing violently and marked down as many as 10 infractions, compared to very few by their own school players. According to Manjoo, when sports fans claim to witness the opposing team’s players playing dirty, rather than their own team’s players, that is really what people see. Their mind blocks out or shrugs off any questionable plays by their team, but focuses all their attention on the actions of the players on the opposite team. It shows how our beliefs can supplant of perceptions of what is real and what is not.

Overall, I am glad I’ve read this book. The insight and real-world examples are interesting and give me an idea of what things are ahead for the media. Will the news mediums continue to influence the way people perceive news? Will they show objectivity and let the people watching decide whether they agree or disagree with the statements, or will news bias prevail? Time will only tell.