Max Biddlecombe - 'We Media' and Democracy

One piece of news I have learnt were the explosions in China’s northern city Tianjin. The video popped up around my social media circles most notably ‘The LADbible’ of the explosion and I originally saw the video there. However a few days later I saw news coverage of it on the BBC news app and I saw to the true extent the damages that had been created from the explosions at the chemicals factory. 

The dominant meaning of the text which I saw from the explosion from social media was how ‘big’ or ‘amazing’ the explosion off was and was uploaded and shared more because of how ‘phenomenal’ the explosion look rather than the true story and the devastation it may have caused. However, when I read the whole story on the BBC news app, its dominant meaning was aimed at how the explosion happened, why it happened and the devastation it caused including the crater that was created and the block of flats which was wiped out. From both sources, the stories main point was the sheer size of the explosion which had happened in Tianjin. I trust the social media sources to some extent because they have actual footage of the explosion however I do not rely on the viewpoint of the videos that ‘The LADbible’ posts. The BBC news app however is a reliable source, this is because they had a correspondent John Sudworth inside the blast zone after the explosion happened reporting first-hand the events that had happened with a story written about it and a video of him reporting from inside the zone.

Another story I read about was the tension at the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between South Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). South Korea began evacuating a border town near the DMZ due to the DPRK’s firing of artillery into South Korean land. I first read this story on the website infowars.com as it was shared on my social media by someone. The dominant meaning from the text was that the South Koreans fired artillery in response to the DPRK’s firing of artillery earlier that day and how the South Koreans began evacuating the area due to the fear of more artillery. In addition, the dominant meaning the producer may have intended was that that DPRK was to blame for the incident and that South Korea was innocent for what has happened there. However, the BBC news app (being impartial) wrote in their coverage that both sides were to blame as they began firing artillery at each other and the South’s use of propaganda speakers at the border.

I trust the source from infowars.com as they posted which source they were able to gain and report the information on which in this case is RT. However, I may not agree on most of their posts as they may be biased in their posts for example in this story aiming the cause of the South Koreans evacuation at North Korea. This may be because the website and the people who report onto the site are American and would be biased towards South Korea due to the Americans alliance with South Korea. The BBC story is reliable even though it reports the same information it is impartial coverage and is not biased in its reporting. This is because the BBC is not American and hasn’t had the same history as America with Korea.

Another story I read during the summer was the meeting between Home Secretary Theresa May & French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve in Paris about the Calais migrant crisis. The story was about the proposed deal to be signed to do with security at the channel tunnel and to tackle the issue of the immigrant camp and the people trafficking around the Calais area.

I read this story on the BBC news website one day and the dominant meaning which the text had written about was the problems which the meeting between the two ministers would attempt to tackle and what plan they would create in order to defend Britain from the rising numbers of illegal immigrants trying to cross the channel or be trafficked across. The story was a reliable source because it was reported to the BBC direct from one of the correspondents out at one of the immigrant camps and that the. The BBC is an impartial site too which makes the story more reliable as the story isn’t aimed for a specific message to be received but to say the facts as impartial as possible without them implying a message. This is why I believe this to be a reliable source of information when I read this text.

The last story I read about was one shared to me by a friend on Facebook. It was the story of Prime Minister David Cameron eating a can of pringles on an EasyJet plane heading to Portugal, the Prime Minister did this when heading to Portugal to meet with the Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho. The dominant meaning of the text was to show people the even though David Cameron is the Prime Minister, he didn’t use tax payers money on a private jet or an expensive motorcade but on a normal cheap travel through EasyJet in the business class isle. 

This was shared to me by a link posted onto my Facebook from the Daily Mirror which surprised me as the Daily Mirror has always been a left sided news agency and that they are reporting something like this shocked me as they normally create stories about MP’s spending tax payer’s money on personal objects. However, this source seems to be reliable as they posted that it was from the twitter of the girl who filmed David Cameron on the jet. However the Daily Mirror is still biased against the Prime Minister as they still managed to turn the story against him saying in a negative connotation that it was his second holiday of the summer. Even though they were biased, I still see the Daily Mirror as a reliable source as they were able to use original sources to report the story.