A great line depicting the state of mass media. 'see mass media as reflecting not a world out there, but the practices of those having the power to determine the experience of others'.
Newspapers are a vital tool for the historian. As this article discusses how reliable are they? Bias and commercialization all have a role in the words we read on the page, The argument that what we read is simply the editors view on an issue can be strongly supported but hard facts cannot be disputed.
Using the newspaper as a source can be a gamble but as this article continuos to say is that a broad examination of newspapers in needed to look at a specific event. Thus eliminating the viewpoint of one specific editor and incorporating the ideals of others to formulate a hypothesis of the event being reported.
In order to support the validity of the report it would require a study of other sources on the event such as police reports government reports and stats.
This is a very informative article detailing extremely well the method used when taking newspapers as a source. The problems that are encountered such as what papers to select and what issues to be looked at to method used in collating the data all are easily picked up.
One issue I have in reading the article is that it is a very long winded and tries to back up the arguments immensely. Don't get me wrong it is a very informative piece and very useful but a simple bit of editing and it would work wonders.
I found the article online and here it is for anyone out there wanting to know how to properly use newspapers as a historical source
The Press as a source of socio-historical data.
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