I was first directed to Days of Rage by Dr Loh’s comment which I’d stumbled upon online. Curious to find out what exactly he meant, I watched the episode, featuring the 1955 Hock Lee bus riots, on Channel News Asia’s website.
The bias in this “documentary” is even more glaring than the expression I wore while watching this latest 45-minute exercise in the perennial partiality we’ve come to expect and almost accept from the mainstream media. This conspicuously suggestive documentary is so fastidious in its concern with propagating the story of one party as the whole truth, that it neglects basic journalistic tenets like fairness, accuracy, objectivity, or proportionality – becoming, in the process, a sad piece of substandard journalism that ignores relevant, critical information through omission, conveniently forgetting to ask “why” questions, engaging in false-balancing, and utilizing regressive, misleading, fear-mongering narrative techniques that seem to be employed just to distract audiences into believing the specious theses that are rampant in the film.
What is perhaps most distressing is CNA’s audacity to produce such a slanted documentary and position it as indisputable history. This is why it is important for us to not only repudiate such media but also rebut such work with logical, concrete, legitimate arguments. We need to, as a collective society, take action to critique what we take as truth, unearth the real, often multi-layered, facts, and commit ourselves to spreading this to others – especially the young who will lead us one day.
- http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/02/historians-question-accuracy-of-cnas-historical-documentary/
The bias in this “documentary” is even more glaring than the expression I wore while watching this latest 45-minute exercise in the perennial partiality we’ve come to expect and almost accept from the mainstream media. This conspicuously suggestive documentary is so fastidious in its concern with propagating the story of one party as the whole truth, that it neglects basic journalistic tenets like fairness, accuracy, objectivity, or proportionality – becoming, in the process, a sad piece of substandard journalism that ignores relevant, critical information through omission, conveniently forgetting to ask “why” questions, engaging in false-balancing, and utilizing regressive, misleading, fear-mongering narrative techniques that seem to be employed just to distract audiences into believing the specious theses that are rampant in the film.
What is perhaps most distressing is CNA’s audacity to produce such a slanted documentary and position it as indisputable history. This is why it is important for us to not only repudiate such media but also rebut such work with logical, concrete, legitimate arguments. We need to, as a collective society, take action to critique what we take as truth, unearth the real, often multi-layered, facts, and commit ourselves to spreading this to others – especially the young who will lead us one day.
- http://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2014/02/historians-question-accuracy-of-cnas-historical-documentary/
