Good afternoon Mr. Harding and fellow students. Today I'm going to evaluate the roles and responsibilities of the media. The media is a large body of organizations that relay information to entertain and inform the world. To be more specific, when I say media, I am only referring to the informative media, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. We rely on it every day to inform us about upcoming events, politics, weather, tragedies, etc. The media is inescapable, your alarm clock wakes you up to it, it is thrown at your house in the morning, the internet and television are bombarded with it. It would be impossible to go through a day without being affected by the media directly or indirectly. Now even if you didn't read, hear or view the media yourself, the people around you who do, would influence you indirectly. The reality is, people are interested in the world and local events and like to be entertained. It is the media's role to be our link between the events and us and to convey them with a non-bias approach.
             Bias is one particular point of view, which the media expresses indirectly to persuade people. Bias can be expressed in both directly and indirectly, but can still have the same meaning. The following article was found in this Weeks issue of Time Magazine involving the dispute between John Howard and East Timor's lead negotiator, Peter Galbraith over the ownership of the oil and gas resources in the East Timor Sea. The article was titled "Hands off my petroleum!" with a picture illustrating John Howard pushing Peter Galbraith off an oilrig. Together these send an indirectly biased message that John Howard is acting like a child, and cheating East Timor out of their own oil. A directly bias example would be to merely say "Howard cheats Timor out of Timor oil". These two headlines have the same effect but the media can get away with using indirect language and it is more effective because most of the time, the...