Page 168, paragraph 8, book number four is where your favorite quote in the Harry Potter series lives. You’ve read it for years and now even know the entire page that precedes the quote by heart. Now if you were to do a report on this quote, you wouldn’t just drop it in the middle of a paragraph; Nor would you use that one quote to describe the whole series. Events happened before and after so to grasp the true understanding of the quote, information must be provided. Well, that is unless you’re a media outlet reporting on the presidential election. That’s when the rules change.
With the upcoming presidential election, there has been 24/7 coverage of the candidates to the point of if they make even the smallest mistake, the entire nation will know in just a few hours. With so much pressure on the media to get that action filled story of, "You won’t believe what (insert candidate) said," whenever you read a headline, it’s usually a quote. However, many people fail to realize that the context of the quote is important. This is quote mining—taking quotes out of context usually to agree with the quote miner’s point of view. It’s also very convenient how certain media networks always seem to "forget" to include the context. Thus, people are inclined to share these articles without even knowing what the candidate was responding too.
It seems as if every time I scroll through my Facebook newsfeed, there are friends of mine sharing articles in which candidates are often misquoted. They clearly didn’t listen to the speech or even read the article in its entirety, which is extremely detrimental. The problem is the spreading of false information. Whichever party a person associates with, they are more inclined to find the other party as being wrong. Both sides of the major parties are asking for more people to turn out and vote, but it seems as if people are not educated on the issues. The media is simply manipulating the people to be persuaded by catchy headlines. Is this wrong though? I don’t think so, as this shows how uneducated people are on the political parties they support. People are being misled in many instances when they should do more research instead of spreading false information.
The method of ignoring the social or historical context of a work has been used for centuries, though. While this article is not meant to be religious in nature, many religions have relied on quotes from their holy text. This is not a reliable method as you wouldn’t randomly turn to a page in any other book and rely on its "divinity." Quote mining in often used to deceive people, and whenever I see quote mining, I often discredit the article as a whole. For instance, one of the most well-known examples of quote mining is of Mark Ridley, a zoologist. In an interview asking his views on evolution, he is quoted, "In any case, no real evolutionist, whether gradualist or punctuationist, uses the fossil record as evidence in favor of the theory of evolution as opposed to special creation.” This would suggest he does not support evolution. The problem is, the source fails to include his next sentence: “This does not mean that the theory of evolution is unproven,” which in turn, clearly misrepresents him.
If this tactic is used often, what can be done to solve this? While it seems as if the media will not stop quote mining, as it fits their agenda, the responsibility is then placed on the reader. As a reader, listener or audience member, it’s your responsibility to do research on the topics and not spread fallacious information. The spread of false information is harmful not only in a political environment, but as it continues to the spread to other people. This is a modern version of the blind leading the blind, which never turns out good. If you are unsure of a certain quote or information, look into it and find the source. Anyone can write an article or have a website these days and just because it’s on the internet does not mean it’s reliable. So before you share that article on a political candidate, think about the reliability of the "news" source reporting on it.
