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Unit 4: Vocabulary from Readings 1

This list covers "How the Media Twist the News" and "Why Partisans View Mainstream Media as Biased and Ideological Media as Objective."
13 words 7 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

  1. apathy
    the trait of lacking enthusiasm for or interest in things
    As Lippmann noted, it’s the result of “apathy, preference for the curious trivial as against the dull important, and the hunger for sideshows and three-legged calves.”
  2. trivialize
    make insignificant
    Still, there are people who would like to pay attention to the more consequential events and issues that used to be called news. These can be hard to discern when politics itself has become trivialized.
  3. substantive
    having a firm basis in reality and therefore important
    Hence the need to become intelligent news consumers: to learn how to pick through massive fields of information for substantive and fair reporting.
  4. impervious
    not admitting of passage or capable of being affected
    For these three CNN personalities, the news media themselves are impervious to the predispositions and prejudice that afflict their audience.
  5. predisposition
    an inclination in advance to react in a particular way
    For these three CNN personalities, the news media themselves are impervious to the predispositions and prejudice that afflict their audience.
  6. status quo
    the existing state of affairs
    "They never wanted my sources when they didn’t fit the mold of what they wanted the story to say. They had a preconceived idea of the status quo, and so they would always go to the status-quo sources for their standard comments.”
  7. seminal
    influential and providing a basis for later development
    “In Liberty and the News he concluded that the newspaper stories of one of the seminal events of the century (the Russian Revolution) were distorted and inaccurate, based not on the facts but on the ‘hopes of the men who composed the news organization.’”
  8. emanate
    proceed or issue forth, as from a source
    Yet over the past decade, harsh criticism of the mainstream media has also increasingly emanated from the left...
  9. pervasive
    spreading or spread throughout
    Across national settings, there is an ever pervasive belief in various forms of media bias.
  10. normative
    relating to or dealing with typical standards or patterns
    Individuals who feel most strongly about an issue tend to see their own side’s views as being more a product of objective analysis and normative concerns, and less influenced by ideology, than the other side’s views (Robinson, Keltner, Ward, & Ross, 1995).
  11. hew
    adhere to; be compatible or in accordance with
    In a range of studies, when news audiences who hew to opposing sides on an issue are given the same news coverage of the topic to evaluate, both view this identical coverage as biased in favor of the other side (Gunther & Schmitt, 2004; Vallone et al., 1985).
  12. congruent
    corresponding in character or kind
    Of consequence here is that partisans will fail to recognize bias in news that is in fact biased, in instances when that bias is congruent with their pre-existing views.
  13. polarize
    cause to divide into conflicting positions
    Americans' trust in news sources has become deeply polarized in recent years—with Republicans, for example, attributing more credibility to the conservative Fox News and less to most other news organizations than Democrats (Pew Research Center, 2008).
Created on Thu Jan 28 09:08:24 EST 2021 (updated Wed Mar 03 16:22:16 EST 2021)

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