Assignment Part B - Coursework Example

Part B. Reflection It took me a long time before I can decide on the newsworthy event that I should present in the creation of the information cycle. When I looked back to the past decade, what immediately came to mind was the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Because it is a developing story, I decided to just deal with the impact and opinions of the public during the onset although I also had to mention some points about the more recent updates regarding this in order to emphasize the changes. While looking for sources, I found out that there were so many sources to gather information from that the problem I had to solve was on determining which of the sources would be used.

Later, I realized that information on the onset of the war was mostly from the American mainstream media and that most of these packaged their news in a manner that their bias for the invasion really shows. Media outfits from other countries either relied on the information by the American news networks or were themselves consciously silent regarding the other side of the story. Only Al Jazeera attempted to engage in this. In the selection of sources from the American media, I decided use CNN and the Los Angeles Times because, of the many I was able to gather, these two have presented the news information in a more balanced way.

Nevertheless, these were still not able to shake off the biases that the rest of the media had on the war. I also used two book sources which try to sum up observations and opposing conclusions on the mass media’s handling of the war.