One of President Trump’s most fervent cries was “Fake News.” The aim of this project is to discern an accounting of real events from misinformation. Often news is presented slanted to garner certain public opinion. In your text, the authors hold that many issues are tainted by racism, classism, gender, and ageism. We are also experiencing the impact of Russia’s internet agency on our social media.
Identify one issue and look at how it is reported by two different outlets ( example Fox vs. ABC) and on social media. We are looking at public opinion and how it has been shaped by the media in presenting that issue.
You are to write in APA or MLA. Your bibliography should include one periodical; one book; two sources from the Internet (URL); one newspaper article; social media-Twitter, Snapchat, FB, and your textbook. The two chapters we are pulling from are chapter 10 on polling and Chapter 11 on the media. Your paper topic has to be different from your PowerPoint presentation. You can include a graph or chart to contrast different accounts of the issue.
From the Librarian:
A good place to start would be the Opposing Viewpoints topic page on Media Bias: https://link.gale.com/apps/portal/AAA000036218/OVIC?u=pa_de_ccc&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=5ad6e22a
(Links to an external site.)
. This page leads with an overview of the topic and then offers opinion pieces (called Viewpoints), magazines, news, academic journal articles, and more. You can also use Opposing Viewpoints to search for media reporting/commentary on specific events. For instance, search January 6th Insurrection and find a few news and magazine articles.
A great source for media coverage of specific events would also be ProQuest Global Newsstream, which offers newspaper coverage for hundreds, if not thousands, of publications going back to the mid-1980s. This includes the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, and a lot more.
You can access polling resources, Polling the Nations on any topic in the search field (ex: Insurrection, health insurance, gun control, etc.) and find the aggregated data for thousands of poll questions. For example, I searched Voting Rights and got a long list of questions going back to the 1980s. You can filter dates. Here’s an example of a question and its response data: https://ptn.infobase.com/articles/UG9sbFF1ZXN0aW9uOjc2MjI4MQ==?aid=95835
(Links to an external site.)
There’s also a ton of really interesting, aggregated data on the media industry in Statista: https://www-statista-com.libdb.dccc.edu/markets/417/topic/1006/news/#overview
. This link goes to the landing page on media, market shares, consumer behavior etc. You can also search in Statista for any “hot button” issue and find charts and reports on public opinion.
You can find media coverage on any topic by searching Summon (the search bar at the top of all our web pages) and narrowing their results to news and magazine articles. You can also find books and journal articles on media bias in Summon.
Opposing Viewpoints, ProQuest Global Newsstream, Polling the Nations, and Statista can all be found in our A-Z Databases list: https://learningcommons.dccc.edu/az.php
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Sometimes searching is easy, but sometimes it requires a bit of a learning curve or some trial and error. Please seek a librarian for assistance early and often. Our availability is covered here: https://learningcommons.dccc.edu/library-services
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