American Cultures
Mr. Dell
October 24, 2012
Prompt 1 After viewing the movie American Blackout my opinion is that the movie in no way fair. It only offered one point of view on the whole issue. All the interviews and the people were one sided and only supported the director’s view. All the evidence was compiled in to the claim that African Americans who have a tradition to vote for the Democrats more often are being intentionally excluded from the political process.
One main reason I believe the movie is biased is because some of the facts stated seemed accurate but others were somewhat untrustworthy. I believe that voter disenfranchisement is still a prevent issue; I do not believe that the state of Florida would porously deny their own voters the right to vote. For example in the movie it stated, “Florida paid $4 million to produce a list of probable and possible felons before the election” (American Blackout). From this part of me does not want to believe that our own government would take away our most basic rights but if this is true than I am shocked. We live in a democracy voting is the most important part of a democracy, if we do not have the right to vote then it is no longer a democracy.
Another thing that made this whole documentary seem unfair to me was the lack of feedback from the other side. For example they interviewed only from McKinney point of view, but they never interviewed anyone who ran against her. Not only did the movie “hide” the other side of the story, it never even came close to viewing the president’s view on the issue. They provide a narrow minded view of the whole situation. It is also somewhat hard to prove some of the facts that they stated. In my opinion McKinney used the media to further her political career. Some of the information could have been misinterpreted to favor the opinion of the documentary maker(s).
However by no means am I stating the whole documentary biased, there are a couple of instances where the opposing side is getting some backups. For example in one instance the whole issue in Florida (2000 election) part of me can see the connection between the state of Florida, Texas, and present bush. On the other hand in the documentary there was no direct proof it and had seemed more of an assumption. It was not wrong for the documentary to do that but it was kind of fair as well. From this documentary it is very evident that there are one or two ideas go in the republican favor but the rest of the information is biased.
Without doubt I think that the overall documentary was a complete biased director’s point of view. The facts somewhat mislead the viewer if they did not have any prior information on the subject. On the other hand the facts can show you a different point of view and you can put the pieces together and make up your own assumption on what really is going on with politics in this country.
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