Wanda Sykes Friday Assignment

For Friday night’s assignment I watched the Wanda Sykes Show from 11:00-11:30 PM. Seeing as how it was at a later time, I expected it to have slightly more adult content than shows on at prime time because more kids would be in bed and I also expected it to have a visible slant because it is hosted by a person who has guests on and they take turns expressing their opinions. On both accounts I turned out right, because on subjects they touched on they went more into the adult side such as their discussion on Tiger Woods where they did not focus on the wrongs he had committed but rather the fact that this should be expected from superstars like him because, as one guest said “he has poontang raining from the sky.” You could also tell that Wanda’s opinion was one of disgust for Tiger, but also for his wife who had, as Wanda said, gone snooping and was going to find something. Even the commercials seemed a lot more slanted towards adult audiences with commercials focusing around telephone dating services and bankruptcy lawyers. After the discussion on Friday regarding different ways of showing a slant it was obvious about the slant in this show.

The Bias of Language

The reading from The Bias of Language was a fairly interesting piece of writing, which examined how words and descriptors can be used to change people’s minds about certain subjects. It went further into depth when it talked about how we view the news as a source of true information, but how even the news uses different styles of words to portray the writers views. The beginning part about how everyone has a different way of telling the same story and their different views on it reminded me of the beginning of the year when we first began discussing truth and how everyone has their own separate truth. Just like there is no absolute truth, there is no absolute version of a story, instead everyone will retell it a different way. Furthermore, I enjoyed the writing about how there are words which are purely descriptive, words, which evaluate a situation, and words which infer something that is unknown. I had never really thought of this before and found it to be something to think about. Overall, though the reading was long and semi-tedious at parts, it was a fairly interesting piece to read.

News From Monday

Last night we had to watch the news for thirty minutes in order to better understand the media and its effect on the people and the government. I decided to watch the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams because, though some may allege that it is slightly left leaning, it is generally fairly unbiased. Throughout the thirty minutes they covered a variety of topics, ranging from the presidents State of the Union address to a Toyota recall of certain cars with sticking accelerators. They also covered the continuing tragedy in Haiti, the revealing of the iPad and the new PETA stance that angered many people. PETA now believes that the ground hog used for the national celebration of Ground Hog Day (Phil) is under stress and should actually be replaced with a robotic ground hog. Throughout this news cast I found no trace of the left leaning attitude people talk about, and in fact they were fairly critical of Obama’s first year, mainly due to the fact that they have to realistically look at his first year and critique him for it.