Thursday, February 2, 2017

Sorry Trump, Its Yet Another Biased Poll


This poll from satirical news site, the Onion, uses high amounts of sarcasm to poke fun both at Trump and the institution of mainstream media. The fake poll reads as though the country is split between many responses such as "Yes the media is biased, they read a speech verbatim" and "No the media is not, that would require a sense of purpose". Every potential response is dripping in sarcasm, forcing the reader to acknowledge how absurd Trump and oftentimes media itself are. Trump's incessant claims of the media's bias are satirized in the first and last listed responses, which claim that the media is biased for reporting exact facts, or that Trump's own bias makes the media biased. The reader is forced to acknowledge how absurd Trump's claims truly are that the media is biased because it doesn't always paint him in a positive light (which would, in fact, also be a bias).

Other responses poke fun at media as a whole. One option claims that the media is biased against Trump because he is a powerful white man, none of whom have had very much success at getting positive media representation. Given much of the criticism in the past few years about how the media does the exact opposite of that, and the call for more non-male non-white representation, this statement causes the reader to remember those criticisms and think of what biases the media does have and how they affect the way Trump and others are portrayed. Another potential response claims that the media would have to have a sense of purpose to be biased against Trump. The sarcasm here comes from a rather pessimistic perspective, claiming that the media has no principle or purpose anymore, and leading the reader to think hard about whether or not the media is trustworthy and useful or if it just all flashy and for show without a regard for facts.

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