How to Detect Bias in the News

     Football is one of the many things that keep me going in life, I am a big Arsenal fan, and as anyone who follows football will know how heated and competitive the transfer market is every year for the football players between the clubs. Here is where the media comes to play, especially as an Arsenal fan, you read stories everyday of how player X comes out to the media to talk about how desperate he is to leave his club for another one, only for the player to come later and completely defy what was said about him or what the newspapers claimed he said. Now there is a lot of reasons why newspapers would tweak ones words and make them look or feed into a certain direction, like was discussed before on this blog, they might be following a certain agenda, or for the simple sake of exposure and to sell more.

Calling a 1 - 1 draw a win... an extreme case of bias!

     A very simple example that I can call of the top of my head is how my uncle once told me about the time he was waiting in line for the counter desk in a supermarket, and a famous celebrity magazine cover caught his attention that had its main title saying "Shakira threatens to murder on of her fans!"... Upon further examination of this article, it was very clear that the title did not really reflect anything that happened in reality, the story was about how Shakira was heading out of some party and the paparazzi were following her and taking picture, she was really mad at them so she screamed at one of them saying "get out of my way or I will kill you!" she obviously did not plan to kill him. But titling this story with "Shakira gets mad at paparazzi" is Boooring, and would not really catch anyones attention, as opposed to what the other biased title did to my uncle who really would not even look twice at these type of articles!

     Now how can we check the credibility and the accuracy of something we read in a newspaper or a magazine... the following is a few simple steps that I believe might work:

1. Common sense: like give me one good reason Shakira would threaten one of her fans in broad day light ? who would actually buy something like that ?
2. Research: you can read more about the background of the author or the newspaper he is writing for, to have an idea about what might be his intentions or agendas.
3. Cross-checking:  next time you read about a certain number of causalities, the performance of a team or anything that you suspect might have been tweaked, look for other newspapers of different backgrounds and other news sources to confirm.

Finally, read this article by a media awareness website about the types of bias in the news, a very useful website too that might help in the MCM 102 course itself.

     Best regards,

            Ahmed Yosry Fouda

Hitler Reacts to being used in many YouTube videos!

     In this weeks blog I want to discuss the parodies that most of us are familiar with and watch for laughs on YouTube and other video-sharing/social websites. One of the most successful and very well known spoofs is the "Hitler Reacts to ......" parodies that have been going on for almost three years now! The scene is based in a room that has Hitler and a lot of  very high ranked army generals facing him. He then orders most of them to leave the room except for a few, and then goes on an anger rampage yelling at them in disgust and disbelief. From a filming point of view, the acting in this scene was  amazing and it makes you really live in the moment, which made it a very fertile soil for a parody, especially since it has the very well known Hitler in it, who was known for his no nonsense attitude and his awful history. The original movie that this scene was extracted from a movie called the Downfall (or Der Untergang in German) released in 2004 this German/Italian/Austrian epic war film is directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, it depicts the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's life in his Berlin bunker and Nazi Germany in 1945, so you can only imagine how serious and climatic this scene was originally planned to be!

     This entry of Ranker describes it best, the author of this entry says:

"Usually the video clip starts with someone informing him of something horrible, Hitler brushes it off as a solvable problem. Full of fear, his commanders tell him that his solution is not possible. He tells everyone who isn't important to leave and then goes on a huge tirade about something. Of course, this meme has always been in German, so people replace the subtitles in the original German film to make Hitler rant about pretty much anything. Examples include everything from Disney buying Marvel, to random movie reviews, to the lack of new features in a new tech product." 

Click on the link to read the rest of the entry and watch the top 10 Hitler Downfall Parodies Of All Time.

  
     After a lot of research to know how this specific "Hitler Reacts" parodies started I got to a close approximation after some discussions with people in famous forums and blogs. It is said to have started with the Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, and rightly so, the oldest one on the internet is this one, uploaded on the 7th of June 2007 with an astonishing 6,191,322 views so far! Thousands of other similar parodies have been created following this one.
     Additionally, the director of the movie was once interviewed and asked about what he thinks of all these parodies that they made from his movie, his response was really positive.

     One of the funniest "Hitler Reacts" parodies I watched was the one made by one of our very own AUS students, who in this parody makes fun and mocks the problems an AUS student would faces when registering his courses on banner, in this Hitler in AUS video. This shows you how popular and spread out this parodies are! People normally love this stuff because you can fit in as many racist/pop/inside jokes as possible, it was also a mean in which news could travel really quickly. Many people would not even know who Usain Bolt is for example, until they watched the parody and then read/reasearched/wikipediad him to know what the parody is all about, so in a sense these parodies can act as a very powerful media/news tool!

Why YOU are a Victim of Stereotypical Thinking ?!

     Let me describe to you a very well known phenomena around the world, let us say that some long time ago a group of people with the same ethnic background exhibited a certain behavior or trait and until this date, people around the world would prejudge anyone of this race and think that they all have this same habit everyone is said to talk about... this my dear reader is a simple explanation of what a stereotype means!
     Some of the very famous stereotypes floating around these days are... "all Russians are alcoholics, the British have horrible teeth, Asian people can't drive, black people love fried chicken/watermelon/sugary-stuff..." and the list goes on and on (I stopped here so that I don't offend anymore people. Say what you want to say but I am pretty sure everyone reading article has some kind of stereotype at the back of their head that they truly believe in. You might think that you are the most unbiased person you can think of, very noble, and very smart, too good to be driven away like the general public and believe in stereotypes, but unless you really work on it and put a lot of effort in order to stay away from believing in them, you are most probably a victim of this way of thinking too, and it is not completely your fault. Its human psychology, there is a process in the human brain that is called confirmation bias (click on the word) that makes us vulnerable to believing in stereotypes. Rather than basing our judgments on pure unbiased analysis, our flawed brains tend to look for evidence and interpret them in a way to confirm and go with preconceptions we had about any issues we face. This leads to a huge error in our mental statistical analysis of almost everything, not only when judging people around us.

If you laugh at this, you are a racist!

     I hope that the next time you meet a person from a certain race, you forget about all the things that people tell each other and judge them for what they really are. Your fingers don't all look the same and the same applies for the people around you.

Finally, here is a video from Family Guy illustrating the famous stereotype about Asians!

News Stories & How They Affect the Way We Learn About What is Happening Around Us.

     As an Egyptian, January and February of this year has been remarkable! It marked the start and the end of the Egyptian revolution, something that came to exist almost 30 years late... However, this is not the topic I am going to discus today, I want to talk about a specific incident that happened during this time.

     The Egyptian revolution was planned and executed successfully by the Egyptian youth, who planned it all using the new popular media like facebook and twitter to gather and start it. Later on, the Al Jazeera channel worked full force along with other numerous news channels to cover this rare event(at that time) meanwhile, the Egyptian local news channels also covered the ongoing revolution, in their own way that is. With a desperate attempt from the ex-government to stall the news until they can get everything under control.

     I hope this previous pictures gives you a clear idea of how the naive the media was thinking that people would buy what they are selling, now the reason I mentioned this example is to show that news stories, especially the ones that shows on local news channels, or even corporate ones, do not really give a realistic view of what happens in reality, this is because governments and the owners of such channels have their own agenda, everyone has an agenda and naturally this agenda would affect what to show and what not to show on their news. Governments normally like to stay on the top and make sure everyone knows that everything is under control and super Okay! Corporate news channels want to have the most views in order for their adds to sell and influence the world... we can take a very good example of Rupert Murdoch, the man who "owns the news" (click here to know more) 

     But here is when things get interesting, with the emergence of youtube, twitter, facebook etc. there are many ways in which people can easily share and interact media pieces with each another. This makes things more exposed and opened for verification just like what happened during  the Egyptian revolution, had the internet not existed during this time, the Egyptian revolution wouldn't have happened and the rest of the world would not have the slightest idea of an attempted revolution all together. With these social networks, one can easily and quickly verify anything that comes up in the news, I personally developed the habit of going on these websites to verify any piece of information floating around be it from the news or people gossiping around.

Here is a video from Youtube that is made by Onion News

mocking the modern news channels that use catchy news

to fill air time and get the most views.

Sorry for the language in this video...

     This concludes this weeks article for this blog, Thanks a lot for taking the time to read it!

Ahmed Yosry Fouda

Men Vs. Women thinking

So I go into my first MCM class this semester in the new SBM building, it was really lovely and the class was going great, until the professor brought up the question "Do men and women think in different ways?" naturally almost the whole class nodded in agreement, to which the professor replied to by "How so?" then comes the interesting part, without thinking and without really choosing my words, I say "Women are irrational". I could already feel most of the females in class hating on me, not a great way to make a first impression I know, I then went on to try and explain my point of view(under several angry stares), I really did not mean what I said, it was merely a poor choice of words, but I think not everyone was convinced and it is going to take more than that to clear the air!

How many times do I have to tell him its orchid and not purple!

Men and Women do indeed think differently, its obvious since our bodies are wired in different ways, these traits that affect why men and women think differently are hard wired into us for thousands of years now, probably because of the different roles that men and women had to play in society throughout history. Blame it on evolution ? may be. I do have enough evidence to back myself up, what I really meant to say by women are "irrational" (the more I think about it, the more I realize how stupid I was to say that :D) is that women seem to have emotions affecting their decision making while on the other side of the coin, men are very focused and they do not let other extraneous factors affect their way of thinking in a specific topic for example. This makes a very interesting subject for both genders and enable them to excel at different task or group of tasks! Click here or here or here to see what I am talking about.

Well, in my defense, no one told me that this car does not drive on railroads!

However, the professor later then explained that this way of thinking that is being noticed in both genders might be due to the way in which each gender has been raised in different societies, I have to admit that I did not really think about it in this way before BUT it somehow compliments my original theory and the findings that has been discovered my many researches (here & here) on this matter, if the way you raise each gender affects this gender's way of thinking then I am pretty sure the way men and women operated since Adam and Eve have a bog role into shaping up this modern male and female psychology.


Finally I would like to conclude by saying that there is no right or wrong way of thinking. Each gender has their own strength or weakness which makes each of them excel at a different tasks or group of tasks, I read sometimes back an article in which the author said that women for example can see colors better than men since they were responsible for getting berries and knowing the poisonous ones from the good ones by the slight variation in shades, while men are better in directions since they had to find their way back to the cave after a long day of hunting! Sorry for writing such a long article (I did not know it will turn out like this :/) and I would be more than happy to explain any ambiguity you find here, just drop a comment below.


You can also follow me on twitter @Ahmed Yosry