ethos and pathos in today

The ethical responsibilities that an author has is not to use ethos and pathos to manipulate the story. The author must be responsible and use ethos and pathos to accurately depict something. To me it isn’t so important for fiction as it is for non-fiction, because fiction is false anyways, but non-fiction is the truth and is facts. If the author uses ethos or pathos without ethical responsibility then the writing may no longer even be non-fiction from the changes.

The news today doesn’t always use ethical responsibility. They have used the use of ethos and pathos incorrectly on a couple of occasions. When we went to war in Iraq, they major belief was that there were weapons of mass destruction located there, and that was one of our main reasons for going. Now that we’ve infiltrated and found that there is no WMD’s, then what are we to believe? Some of the media made it seem that there were WMD’s and we believed. Our emotions were falsely changed and the info was incorrect. I feel that a lot of the time the media over exaggerates, which plays on ethos and pathos. It plays on ethos because it’s the information we receive and it always isn’t necessarily true, and pathos because they make it seem more important that what it is or the downplay it and we don’t know exactly how important it is. I feel that the news today is not ethically responsible for how they use ethos and pathos.