As we all have heard before, a picture is worth a thousand words. In the Bias of Language, Bias of Pictures essay, Postman and Powers discuss stationary pictures, moving pictures, and language. A stationary picture is basically just a simple photo, whereas a moving picture would be more described as a video. Both of these types of pictures ties into a type of a language, which is the third main point. Language is defined as the method of human communication, which can be spoken, written, and even nonverbal through actions. All these things ties into Postman and Powers larger point in the essay, which is how newscasts portray their version of news. Stationary pictures, moving pictures, and language are all important when it comes to the news. They use stationary pictures to get an idea of certain topics, moving pictures help show what happened and is more specific, and then language is all based off of how the news writes or talks about certain things that have happened. The big point in this essay is that everyone portrays things differently, and that we should not take the newscasts news so seriously all the time, since they may not be explaining things exactly how they happened, but more so, in their own opinion of what happened. This makes sense to a point. News is something that people don’t know what actually happened since they weren’t there and didn’t see it for themselves. Unfortunately, people have to rely on the news to get an idea of things that are occurring in the world today. Whether it is 100% accurate or not, it’s the only source the average person has.
