To Read or Not To Read
To be entirely honest with you, I rarely venture beyond the safe bubble that is my CBC News app. Sometimes even, (re: rising COVID-19 cases earlier in the year) I’m hesitant to even click onto it. But, almost always, my curiosity wins and thirty seconds later I’m incessantly scrolling and clicking to my heart’s desire. It does help that the app is nicely designed, with an easy to navigate layout and news that gets mostly to the point in the nicest way possible, which seems fitting for a Canadian news source, but I digress. Instead, you can imagine the confusion of my fingers’ muscle memory as they typed two unfamiliar words into my search bar, hitting the “F,” “O,” and “X,” keys in quick succession of one another before clicking down to the Google suggested Fox News.
I opened the page: a big blue banner had been imposed over a particularly irritated looking Donald Trump that read “Trump’s Warning;” an ad for a website that boasted all Presidential and Vice Presidential elections invited viewers by promising “the United States’ greatest showdowns;” a cautionary looking Nancy Pelosi hidden behind a caption that read “seeds of a coup?”
My eyes jumped from word to word and back: warning, showdown, coup, warning, showdown, coup. These were fighting words… oppositional words… war inducing words, if you want to even go that far. I was shocked, honestly, nothing here felt like news; it felt, instead, like intentionally divisive propaganda which seems like a juxtaposition considering that under a Fox News Election Day Countdown (which ticks down ominously by the second, I might add) is a poster that reads America Together.
I found myself thinking about people who didn’t watch the news. There is a high chance I am just nosey but I could never understand people when they would say they don’t, or to quote them in verbatim, “can’t” watch the news because it is too “grim,” “scary,” or “sad.” I couldn’t comprehend why people wouldn’t want to be informed about what was going on in their world. But, if I were one of these people and found myself on the FoxNews site thinking it to be reliable for all the mention it gets in and out of pop culture, I too would be scared.
It does make everything seem scary, and not just in regards to politicians: “Booby-trapped Trump-Pence sign leaves Mich. worker injured,” stay six feet away from the nearest person and the nearest sign, cool. By this point I had long since clicked off, but I could not help but feel particularly morose. It was current events, yes, but as seen through a Republican lens. I reflected over the next 23 hours on the role this lens, and any news lens for that matter, had on its viewers. Almost definitively, with how stark the contrast between each site was, it seemed to me that the actual results of the election is not so much dependent on the politics of Republican v. Democrat as is the politics of the news source of each respective voter.
Works Cited
Fox News. www.foxnews.com/.
