Textbooks vs Pop Culture

My piece of news is from the website of channel five. The news is titled “Disasters put stress on children in Japan.” In short, the psychological wellbeing and stress of children in Japan is questioned. There are two psychologists who contributed their input into the article. One was Gaithri Fernando, a professor at California State University in Los Angeles. He led the study on the 2004 Tsunami specifically on how it affected children in Sri Lanka. The second psychologist is Susie Burke, an Australian who is a disaster response specialist. She was quoted saying that children are easily adaptive, but are well aware of their changing environment and affects. This article goes on giving the personal accounts of a couple survivors who were deeply affected by the tsunami.

I would say that from the context of this article, it is not like what Loewen had described in his book. There is no mention of government being involved in this article. The main participants or individuals shown in this article were also regular and average citizens. There were shelters mentioned, but they were not from governments instead they were just schools. However, I would say that the people who are in control of this situation somewhat are the press because without news networks, these victims of the tsunami’s voice would have never reached United States news networks. I don’t detect any bias in this article because it was solely just on the question of the stress conditions of Japanese children. In the American Pageant excerpt, I detected that it was as Loewen described. The excerpt distinguished between country names such as the United States, and the Soviet Union by names within some of the paragraphs. The people in power in the excerpt were clearly the government. In contradiction to modern day, I sense that there are a lot more resistance to government power in media. Loewen’s work is one example of getting the real truth out there because he gives six foreign interventions from the US and of which the US were not very honest of highly praised about. Loewen got his book published, which indicates that there are people out there who know the truth and are getting it out there. These are the people who have the power over the government because of the rhetoric that they chose to use.

In conclusion, I would agree with Loewen that textbooks are bias in using the government agency to tell the side of the story. However, in pop culture, it varies between bias and unbias and by unbias, I mean the people who have the other side of the story; the ones who don’t get well known for their impact such as what Loewen have described.