“The quickest way to end war is to lose it” This famous quote inadvertently states that wars are normally very long. For war to end someone has to lose. It’s human nature not to lose. For example, if you were to play a simple friendly game of tic-tac-toe, you will want to win even though the game has no significance. I strongly agree with this quote because, I am not a fan of losing. I put all my effort into winning, because society glorifies the winners and shuns the losers.

Since the war in Iraq has started, the media has influenced our opinions on the war. Our media coverage: CNN, MSNBC, as well as our Canadian national news coverage mainly focus on American tactics and heroism of the war. However if you look at the media coverage of Europe, Asia, and Islamic countries you’ll see they cover other aspects such as the human cost, the wars affect on the people of Iraq, and they show videos of war casualties. The way that the North American media affects our understanding of the war in Iraq is through filters, media biases, and gate keeping. I think that our media coverage is very biased and they take sides, which I think goes against the ideology of being providers of information. Our media coverage has to be more like the European and Asian news coverage because they are not biased and they don’t take sides.

One factor of how our media doesn’t show all the important news is media biases. Advertisement clients and many other factors affect the bias of the newspaper towards many stories and events. An example of media biases can be seen with the fact that Conrad Black, the owner of the National Post, personally dislikes the Prime Minister and so it is no coincidence that the Post is biaed towards the Liberal government. This just goes to show that because media ownership in North America is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals there is a limited variety.

Filtering. It’s one of the main uses of the media. The media engage in whats called filtering news from the public. The term filtering the news refers to the media selectively using facts and information to tell a perspective of a story. An example of filtering is CNN because they use the facts that they receive from Iraqi news and tell their own perspective of the story.



Another factor is Gate keeping. Since the quantity of news is a lot more the amount of coverage a paper can offer, the media has to decide on which stories because important news. For example, poverty, hunger and disease have been causing problems in developing countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and many African countries. It wasn’t until aid groups began photographing the children who were suffering. These images were produced on TV and the public became financially supportive towards the people in these countries.

These are just a few examples of how the media influences our opinions on the war in Iraq and many other topics. The media ownership, in North Americans put in the hands of few individuals. Our news coverage is very limited, we tend to be biased and we show our own perspective of stories form other
non-biased media in Europe and Asia