Vagueness In News Media

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In recent discussions of vagueness in news media coverage of tragic events, many issues have arisen concerning vague and manipulated information to audiences. Before understanding how vagueness may affect an audience, it is first necessary to understand what constitutes as vague communication. Vague and ambiguous language can be characterized as a discourse that does not clearly state or show what one may express, and may often leave room for interpretation from the audience. The past century in modern English writing has been abounding with issues of ambiguity in all areas of discourse, but most recently in the mass media. As technology advances at an alarming rate, there are many new ways and sources to receive news media. However, the most …show more content…

This is clearly shown when Lombrozo describes the incident where Dick Cheney had accidentally fired a round, hitting a man named Harry (Lombrozo). As Lombrozo had quoted, Cheney manipulated the discourse from him accidentally shooting another man, to displacing the action onto the gun being the culprit. With this, Cheney is able to gain public opinion and discern the idea that the crime was his fault. In view of this, one may now understand how events can be misconstrued with vague language usage to implicate the opposite to an event. Lombrozo asserts this information clearly is manipulated with the sole purpose to mislead the audience, shifting the blame from an individual or idea to …show more content…

Jaclyn V Schildkraut, in her " Mass Murder and the Mass Media: An Examination of the Media Discourse on U.S. Rampage Shootings, 2000-2012," discusses the implications of vague and ambiguous language when discussing mass shootings. As previously mentioned, vague language may often inevitably leave room for interpretation by the observer, but Schildkraut discusses the direct implications of such events on viewers. More specifically, many news reporters will dilute the information down to its bare skeleton and avoid pertinent information in objective reporting as well as manipulating statistics to further create an alarming hysteria to its audience. In response to these findings, Schildkraut asserts:
Personal opinions may override objectivity and facts, and O’Toole (2000) notes that news reports may provide information that is “not necessarily complete, balanced, or accurate” (p. 3). For example, though Adam Lanza was eventually named the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School, initial reports claimed that his brother Ryan was the shooter and even circulated his Facebook photo … on Facebook nearly 10,000 times.

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