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Analysis Of Amusing Ourselves To Death By Neil Postman

980 Words4 Pages

Scrolling, sharing, liking, and refreshing “just one more time” has become the number one thing to do in the twenty-first century. People function in this day in age by refreshing their laptops, cell phones, and tablets in fear of missing out on breaking news. Breaking news has become a term to describe any sudden attention-grabbing event from a celebrity scandal; to our 45th president tweeting made up words like “covfefe”. This immediate news-seeking era has become a flaw towards people trust with knowing the credibility of live news. News broadcasting manipulates the public into thinking that biased claims are credible sources through Television coverage and distractions.
In the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman discusses the …show more content…

This is true because it can be hard to sit down and write a paper without getting distracted by a text or a tweet. The thing about distractions is that they hold people back from the truth. In news broadcasting, the truth is never given in its entirety. For example, news anchors are always moving quickly onto the next segment which can make it hard for people to really investigate the truth. The audiences to these news-broadcasting segments are given a biased story and expected to run with it, 30 seconds later something more interesting will grab their attention. Instead of sitting down with the written word and learning something of value with a credible source society is accustomed to giving the written word only a small fraction of their time because of the more entertaining media. When entertainment becomes the focus, credibility is pushed …show more content…

In the article America: Students Have ‘Dismaying’ inability to tell Fake News from real, Study Finds, explains how today’s day in age students from middle school to college has proven to not be able to tell fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles. They are not able to distinguish credibility and take what is given as facts. At first glance, teenagers might say they are able to distinguish credibility but on closer inspection by the Stanford researchers show that out of “7,800 student responses, 80 percent of them were not able to tell between ‘sponsored content’ and a real news story” (Domonoske, fake news). over 40 percent of students argued that a fake news source was more trustworthy than a real one. The lack of being able to distinguish credibility in today’s students results in major consequences follow for the future generations. These students will become the future leaders, and if they are not able to differentiate between real and fake news then the world will become gullible and everyone will have different information. This is significant because without knowing the true information people will not be able to make the right decisions, or stand for the right sides in different argument

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