Garrett Grigg
Ms. Smith
ERH 101-01
11-13-16
Same Facts Different Story
Medical Marijuana, perhaps one of the most popular and controversial medical topics of our generation. With that being known, America is a nation that is made great by essentially allowing the people to choose their own futures whether that’s how they are medicated, cared for etc.. However although it is the peoples choice that does not mean that there will not be media available that will attempt to expose certain facts to the general public and persuade opinions from being for something to being against it. When referring to a controversial topic especially in in the field of medical science it becomes evident that articles written are generally slanted to either being for or being against something and the incentive behind writing the article can be different for each writer.
When looking at an article one of the first things each reader should look at is whether or not the article is coming from a credible source. One of the first things I did when analyzing an article that CNN put out on Medical Marijuana was to see who wrote it and what their qualifications were. The author of the article “Its time for a medical marijuana revolution” was Dr. Sanjay Gupta who also happened to be a chief medical correspondent for CNN. After doing some research I was able to find out that Dr.Gupta is a practicing neurosurgeon who had spent years learning about marijuana before writing the article. So with that being said I knew it was safe to conclude that he was certainly entitled to having his own opinion on the topic. However that did not mean that everything he said was an absolute fact.
After finding out the writers qualifications it is important to know what audience the author is trying to reach and whether or not the author has a bias or not upon writing the article. In the article Dr. Gupta wrote it becomes rather evident that he is trying to reach out to a younger audience predominantly people 18-34. My reasoning behind this number is that the article he wrote was essentially a conclusion to a show that he was a feature on CNN’s prime time documentary “WEED”, this award winning documentary was the No.1 show on cable t.v in its timeslot and it controlled most of the younger crowd and according to the national data from Nielsen. so naturally a concluding article would certainly be for the main audience of the show. Secondly with Dr. Gupta having a message to send to the younger crowd you must wonder what he wants them to do or if perhaps he is simply telling them something that he knows they already believe in, in order to gain popularity. In order to see if the author for the article has a bias or not we must look at things like the vocabulary or phrases included in the article that are put there in an attempt to persuade the reader one way or the other. In the article “time for a medical marijuana revolution” it becomes extremely evident that the author of the article is for medical marijuana and thinks that it should be legalized. One of the reasons we can be sure about this is because the very last sentence of his article was So, here it is “We should legalize medical marijuana. We should do it nationally. And, we should do it now.”. However even if there was not that quote at the end of his article and even if the title of the article was different we would still as readers be able to identify his position on the topic based off of his rhetoric that took place during his article. Throughout the entirety of the article Dr. Gupta primarily focuses on success stories of medical marijuana and does not list any of the possible risks or dangers that have to do with the drug.With that being said this does not mean what Dr. Gupta is wrong nor does it mean that he is a poor journalist. All it means is that basically he favors the legalization of medical marijuana and that it in turn affects his literary style when writing on the topic.
However although the article for CNN was written by a medical professional that does not mean that the article was a essentially a medical review of the effectiveness of medical Marijuana. A good example of an article that puts out a medical review of the drug would be an article titled “medical marijuana and the mind”. This article was published by the Harvard health publications which is also the same publishing that is used for all articles put out for the Harvard medical school. The article is composed of data collected from several different articles including the “The Science of Marijuana, Second Edition” which was published by the oxford university press in 2008 along with “Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine” which was published by Yale in 1997. Without question the data listen in the article can be concluded to be accurate do to the extraneous s vetting system done by the Yale and Oxford publishing companies before putting there name on it. The main difference between the CNN article on medical marijuana vs, the Harvard article is that the Harvard article seems to portray a much more neutral stance that is more factually based. This can be seen in the Harvard article because there are valid points made supporting each side. An example of this can be seen at the beginning of the article when it speaks on the problem with research in medical marijuana in itself. Harvard addresses the fact that the majority of the research that has been conducted on marijuana was done on people that had been smoking it recreationally vs. Just for medical purposes. This type of research can produce confusing results because marijuana is going to have much less of an impact on a healthy person that is a regular consumer vs . An unhealthy person that has never used the substance before. With that being said the article continues to go on and state that medical marijuana can be proven to be very effective when someone is experiencing nerve pain or chemotherapy nausea. Medical marijuana was also proven to be effective in increasing ones appetite and helping people with AIDS wasting syndrome. Although medical marijuana was proven to be useful for the medical conditions listed above the Harvard article goes on to say that medical marijuana is not a safe form of medication in regards to psychiatric disorders. Contrary to the popular belief that medical marijuana can be used to treat psychiatric
disorders such as PTSD or Bi-polar disorder, The Harvard article proves tries to point out that it is more of a risk than a reward to try and implement the use of marijuana as a medication for these disorders. One of the main reasons for their argument that marijuana should not be used to treat psychiatric disorders is because the majority of the studies done with marijuana in regards to psychiatric disorders are found to be inconclusive and the reasoning behind why they are all inconclusive is because the human brain is affected differently by the drug based on the dosage of marijuana that is consumed. Additionally, the effect of marijuana on each person can be different for each person due to their inborn genetic vulnerability.
With that being said, when analyzing the articles next to each other it is clear that there are many similarities and differences that can be found in them. One of the first differences you can notice in the articles is not a small difference in a certain fact or a simple disagreement between the two. The primary difference in these two articles is the way in which they are fundamentally written and the intent behind writing them. Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN had been more focused on writing a article that would inspire people to joining the medical marijuana revolution and due to that he primarily focused on sharing success stories and the pros of medical marijuana without really bringing the cons into question. Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s article was more of a statement of how popular culture is changing into the support of medical marijuana. Contrary to Dr. Guptas article for CNN. The Harvard health publications put out a article that was primarily neutral. The intent of the article was not to persuade people in one direction or the other and it was not to comment on how popular culture now felt about the substance. The article from the Harvard health publications was simply a published list of facts that weighed the pros and cons of marijuana in order to determine whether or not it would be an effective drug for physical and psychiatric disorders and illnesses.
How is it that two articles that both contain similar facts be so different? This is taken place through the rhetoric used within each article. The rhetoric that an author uses is crucial to the message
conveyed to readers because your rhetoric is essentially everything from your vocabulary to your sentence structure which in turn creates a tone which then in turn creates a clear message that the author wants his readers to understand. In the case of these two articles it was clear that one author was trying to inspire a revolution and the other author was just trying to formulate an opinion bases off of scientific facts, although they both highlighted medical details about the substance it was due to the rhetoric contained within them that they were both able to reach out to such different audiences.