Fox News vs. New York Times: How to Help Planet Earth
On April 22, 192 countries join in recognizing and celebrating Earth Day. This holiday is celebrated by more than a billion people every year and is the largest secular holiday in the world. Despite our apparent love for this Earth, it is dying because of our pollution. The human race is leaving irreversible marks on the planet and we are running out of time to right enough wrongs to even have a planet to call home in the near future. Unfortunately for our planet and for us, though, many people have different opinions on, first of all, is our planet is even in jeopardy, and second of all what we can do to help. Two articles from two very different media outlets published articles on Earth Day and the messages each one conveys and the language used are drastically different.
The first article I came across was one published by the media outlet, Fox News titled “Rich Wilkerson, Sr.: On Earth Day, remember that taking care of God’s creation is not a political issue.” Fox News is a media outlet considered to be very Republican, conservative, and a more extreme or unfair report of the news, and this article seemed to directly reflect that. The article was featured in the opinion section of the Fox News website and was written by Rich Wilkerson Sr., the pastor of a church in Miami. Wilkerson was putting this message out there to “make a difference as stewards of creation if we just perform one honorable act at a time,” or in other words to create a rise of Christian men and women ready to perform good deeds for the planet each day while remaining grateful to God for creating such a place for them. In this message, a mainly Christian point of view is represented as it is written by a conservitave Chritian pastor who believes God created this Earth for people to care for it and show their responsibility and spirituality through it, it still does not belong to humans as God is it’s creator. While some people may agree with this and decide that yes, they should tune in to their inner spirituality in order to help care for the planet, others like me may see this as just another vague solution that has gotten us nowhere so far. The article uses spiritual language like “steward,” “Garden of Eden,” and “God’s creation” to pull in religious audiences and make them connect the Bible to the Earth in how God supposedly described how he wished for them to care for the Earth. The article also uses very flowery language like “absolute majesty,” “wonderful,” and “flourishing” to make this religious view seem even more appealing by adding positively connotated words like the ones I just referenced. While I do think this message could be effective as an opinion piece to rally more supporters for Earth’s preservation, I think the article could include more ways that people could become involved in helping rather than just saying that they need to do good things for the planet to please God. This planet is all of ours and if we want to live on it together, we have to work for it together.
The second article I found, and the one I am going to compare to the previous article I wrote about, was published by the New York Times and titled “It’s Earth Day. Here’s How to Make Less Trash.” The New York Times is very different from Fox News, it is a media outlet considered to be a very fair interpretation of the news and takes sides a lot less than Fox News and it’s mainly Republican staff seems to. This article was not an opinion piece, instead it was simply reporting on an employee at the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Buisness’s efforts to reduce waste coming in and out of the building. The message of this article, to use alternatives to wasteful products like plastic and reduce overall waste, is being released in order to inspire change by offering viable options and resources for people to have access to who want to make a difference in the future of their planet. This message also helps spread knowledge of small things that people can change in their lives that are not an inconvenience or extremely inaccessible. The author uses this story of Ms. Doud-Martin’s success at her U.C. Berkely campus to draw me in to try the options presented in the article to help the environment, giving credibility to the ideas. I think that people could view this message as overly optimistic or difficult due to the massive changes it would bring to the environment, but really the steps one could take and insignificant to the damage that is being done to our Earth that will leave us homeless if we do not act fast and soon. I think the prices for a range of products and ideas from reasonable to cheap to expensive could have been added to this article so that people would not have to research extra to find products to help themselves out in this mission, because as we know, people are lazy enough to not dave their home so they are obviously lazy enough to go pretty deep into research on last minute ways of how to do so now.
I think that both of these sources provided at least a few good points on how we can come together to help save the planet, but it is all about the wording that makes that New York Times article so much more powerful and helpful than the excessively worded Fox News article that simply called for action, it did not push you in the direction of how to do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/us/california-earth-day-berkeley-chou-hall.html
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