I'll start this post today by answering the question I asked in my last post about gun control. While doing research, I came up with the folliwing statistics of how many people get killed in major countries by guns whether by suicide, sccidental or homicide.
"gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in the world's 36 richest countries in 1994: United States 14.24; Brazil 12.95; Mexico 12.69; Estonia 12.26; Argentina 8.93; Northern Ireland 6.63; Finland 6.46; Switzerland 5.31; France 5.15; Canada 4.31; Norway 3.82; Austria 3.70; Portugal 3.20; Israel 2.91; Belgium 2.90; Australia 2.65; Slovenia 2.60; Italy 2.44; New Zealand 2.38; Denmark 2.09; Sweden 1.92; Kuwait 1.84; Greece 1.29; Germany 1.24; Hungary 1.11; Republic of Ireland 0.97; Spain 0.78; Netherlands 0.70; Scotland 0.54; England and Wales 0.41; Taiwan 0.37; Singapore 0.21; Mauritius 0.19; Hong Kong 0.14; South Korea 0.12; Japan 0.05. " http://www.guncite.com/cnngunde.html
It turns out that America does in fact has more deaths per capita than any other country in the world with Brazil trailing behind us. What does this mean? Are we just natural violent? No one can know for sure but with these statistics, we could sure afford to have better gun control in our country. Perhaps if we did, this number would decrease.
This past week we finished up Bowling for Columbine and even though it made some excellent points about gun control, we learned that he made some of these points unethically. In Michael Moore's documentary he used many clever techniques to make people look bad and make it seem like things were happening that actually weren't. At first I didn't notice it or pay much attention to it, but after a while I started to notice some of the tricky editing techniques he used to twist the reality of a situation instead of presenting the true straight facts.
Some agree and dissagree on Michael Moore's documentary being unethically made. As for me, I agree 100% that it was made unethically. He used guerilla interviews where he would randomly come announced to speak to a person on the spot and sometimes in his documentaries only shot their answers to the supposed "question" even when the question wasn't shown. One of the most unethical things he did in this documentary was editing and piecing together different parts of Charleton Heston's speeches to the people of the NRA. Michael Moore made it seem as thought Charleton didn't care about speaking 10 days after the Columbine shooting but really he did and Moore conveiniently left that part of the speech out and instead replaced parts of his speech after Columbine with a clip from an earlier meeting Charleton had. He also used misleading statistics in his movie as well as asking rhetorical questions to others in an effort to make them look bad.
Class this week prompted me to think about all the bias and unethical methods the media uses in modern day society. Do we see it as much anymore? Ofcourse. Almost every news show has some sort of it. Lots of radio shows and TV shows about celebrities have it as well. And now, more and more documentaries are starting to show unethical principles. We as American citizens who just want to ear the straight facts have to learn how to sort through the bias and editing techniques used.
For example, on the Tv show TMZ which deals with filming celebrities doing crazy or unexpected things. They never seem to be showing the whole story of what really was going on at the time the incident happened. They often use music to provoke a certain type of mood from the viewer and also edit sounds bits and throw in many fallacies to make the celebrities look even worse than they already do from the film that the got.
The main observation I've had this week is how gullable some people are when it comes to sources being bias. No one would believe bias anymore if they were educated properly on how to seperate bias from reality. People need to take notice of selective editing, false headlines, photos and video that don't seem to be 100% real, bogus statistics, random sources and word choice. Just imagine, if every person in the United States had the ability to take notice of these things, would there be anymore reason for news and other media to even put out biased news?
I'll end this post today with a question about editing and bias in regards to the media: What other tactics does the media use to make news sound more fascinating or more untrue than it actually is?
GunCite: Gun Control and Second Amendment Issues. Web. 03 Oct. 2010. http://www.guncite.com/cnngunde.html.
"Pro Gun Political Cartoons Thread...." DOWN RANGE TELEVISION with Michael Bane - DOWN RANGE TV - DRTV. Web. 03 Oct. 2010. http://www.downrange.tv/forum/index.php?topic=1975.0.
"Media Bias Against Israel." Welcome to Palestine Facts. Web. 03 Oct. 2010. http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_1991to_now_media_anti_israel_bias.php.
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