REFLECTION ON CHAPTER 4:

LANGUAGE AND THE MEDIA

Each chapter is a new approach to different features of language use in media products.
Chapter four, in particular, provides me a thorough view of media filters, how to identify
a reliable source, and fake news.
First, with regard to manufacture of consent, media owners often present the news by
adding filters. A story can be retold, interpreted from different viewpoints and connected
to the audience they are targeting; hence, “a reader with no prior knowledge of the events
could get a very different perspective on the story depending on which newspaper they
followed” according to the Sun in 2015. My teacher also took typical examples to
illustrate this argument. In the activity 4.1, she asked us to think and decide what
ideological position each headline can refer to. Moreover, she also mentioned the way
our government called the war as “the rebellion”, which enabled them to have the right to
put down the reactionaries.
In addition, I also had the opportunity to note down the criteria for a source to be reliable
and neutral. The source must be named instead of anonymous and independent rather
than self-interested. Also, there must be multiple, verified and authoritative sources. And,
I also remember that I need to critically read different sources of a sort of information to
have a thorough viewpoint and make a right judgement. From my perspective, I do
believe this point is noteworthy because I used to make wrong judgements as well as
have critical attitudes to hot news in Ho Chi Minh city. Two months ago, it was a girl
studying the university of languages who died while having a military training. Many
online newspaper updated about it but there were no exact information of that girl in
terms of her identity. They just told about how she died and the actions of the soldiers
there. However, the students, typically like me, did not check whether this news was
reliable and started to criticize why that girl could face desperate situation and who need
to be blamed. And two days after, the news turned out to be fake and misinterpreted. At
that moment, I felt shameful and questioned myself a lot.
For all the above argument, I reminded myself to find reliable sources and read it
critically as well as judge them reasonably.