The essay by Neil Postman and Steve Powers explains how important language and pictures is to the modern media world and how it is used to capture the attention of its viewers. It aptly describes how they all work together to make a news show what it needs to be in order to deliver its news to the world. “A newspaper, for example, can easily afford to print an item of conceivable interest to only a fraction of its readers. A television news program must be put together with the assumption that each item will be of some interest to everyone that watches.” (Rosendale, 2008) The writers claim that the difference between pictures and language is the emotion that is heard when a reporter is telling of an event and the absence of it when it is just seen as a picture. This is important to have them together because if a person just sees a picture of a ship in the ocean, they don’t know that it is a marine ship in the Indian Ocean, just that it is a military, possibly not even American.
Source:
Rosendale, L. (2008). Understanding Lives and Jobs. Pop perspectives; readings to critique contemporary culture (p. 161). Boston, MA; McGraw-Hill.