2010 Pro Bowl

I watched the Pro Bowl from 7:30-8:00 on ESPN. I believe that the audience of the pro-bowl is primarily sports enthusiasts of all ages who have a favorite football player or football team. This is different from the Super Bowl’s audience because the Super Bowl is marketed to both sports and non-sports enthusiasts.

Many of the ads involved some of the NFL players who were playing on one of the pro-bowl teams. There was a commercial with Aaron Rodgers trying to get donations for relief effort in Haiti and another had a Colts player who was in an advertisement for a vehicle. Having a football player in a commercial caters to the sports audience, which is what advertisement companies’ use to get people to purchase their products. If your favorite player or team has a certain car, or favorite place to eat, a lot of devoted fans will want to do the same thing. There are many food commercials and everyone knows that football and food go together, which is why it caters to the audience. There were also commercials for other sports and the air times on ESPN because many sports fans enjoy watching other sports besides football.

The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures

In class we had learned that the language an author uses helps to persuade the audience. For example, when we read How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldua used her native tongue and English to capture the audience in a specific way that makes her story on a more personal level, and really makes the reader understand her situation by the use of effective language. Words are “baskets of emotion,” and we learned that an effective story has your own personal point of view because that is what draws the reader in. The article, The Bias of Language, The Bias of Pictures, talked about the levels of language whose purpose is to describe, evaluate, and infer an unknown bias of what is known. It talked about how everyone has their own bias, and will interpret pieces of writing differently because of that bias. Since everyone has their own way of interpreting writing there will always be multiple perspectives. The article gave the example that for one person an idea may be explosive, and to another it may just seem trivial. Everyone will read a piece of writing differently, for no two readers will read (or ignore) the same items.

This article also discussed how pictures are a language, but the pictures “differ radically from oral and written language, and the difference are crucial for understanding.” A single picture usually speaks only to particular things, and is usually limited to “concrete representation.” The picture itself doesn’t present an idea, but we do use language to make the image into an idea. The article talked about using pictures and videos with sound in terms of a newscast. The downside to using a picture is that it can be interpreted in so many different ways that it may not be the way the news wants you to interpret it. However, the use of videos can present an audience with emotion and ideas that the news wants you to feel.

Fox News

I watched the Fox News channel after the State of the Union Address was completely finished, which was around eleven o’clock. The first thing that the newscasters discussed was the State of the Union Address that Obama had just made. They talked about how Obama was to have a new agenda for 2010 and it involved everything ranging from health care reform to job creation to immigration reform. Then the topic completely switched and moved on to how Toyota has extended its recall to Europe, how a woman who won the lottery died in a car crash on the same day, the weather all over the world, and news from Haiti.

The news has a very quick pace, it moves from one story to the next and you really have to keep up with the politics to not get confused by the terms that being used and what everything means. If you don’t keep up with the news regularly then it is easy to be confused about what is going on. I also noticed that sometimes there is a ticker on the bottom of the screen that shows other important news while the main story is going on. Last night the news was definitely dominated by Obama’s speech, and Fox News had a lot of interviews with politicians right after. It’s good to hear every opinion no matter what party the person was associated to. The news should do a good job of showing all sides to the story, but I noticed that that always isn’t the case. I also found that the way the news anchors would go on location and broadcast makes for a larger impact on people, especially when Haiti’s devastation was shown.