Analysis Of The Representation Of The Laramie Incident In Different Forms Of Media

After the Laramie incident in Wyoming, people were left with a great impact of grief, and sorrow. The brutal assault of the 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, Matthew Shepard, had affected a lot of people and had raised concerns about the society’s rising issues, such as intolerance towards a different mindset, also known as bigotry, which causes hatred and negativity to take over our actions. Among those affected people were artists like Melissa Etheridge and news reporting agencies like New York Times. They both produced different forms of work describing the incident in different manners. Etheridge, uses her profession as a singer/songwriter to show her interpretation of the incident in a parnassian fashion, while The New York Times gives us an authentic and factual description of the same incident. Melissa Etheridge is a singer and songwriter who is famous for making emotive songs and influencing her audience’s feelings. Her song “Scarecrow” gives us a poignant reminder of the brutality Shepard had faced simply because of being a part of the LGBTQ community. She establishes a melancholic theme in the song and attempts to create a pensive mood in her audience. On the other hand, New York Times, a well established news reporting agency, publishes an article informing it’s audience about the Laramie incident. Unlike the song, it uses an explanatory and informative tone to describe the event. It uses facts to convey its message to the audience, contrary to the poem, it lacks emotional connection but provides the audience all the factual information of the incident. Both, Etheridge and the author of the article, were influenced by the same incident. They used different methods to convey the same message and their primary objective was to spread awareness about the incident. Etheridge’s purpose was to to inform the type of people that are driven by emotions thus consider these kind of stirring compositions over simple details. At the same time, there are people that prefer facts over feelings, therefore they choose the factual elements of the incident rather than the emotional connection in the composition. Etheridge composed a poem to explain her feelings for Shepard and the cruelty he had faced. The poem contains emotive constituents explained in a poetic fashion. For instance, if we look at the verse, “Angels will hold carry your soul away,” we can clearly identify that this work of art is classified under the poetic category and is meant to target audience with interest in poetry. In contrast, if we take a look at the New York Times’ article, we realize that it has no such compositional techniques used in it.

However, it is composed of fact-based and realistic information which is clearly a journalistic work of composition. Melissa Etheridge and New York Times use different methods and have crafted different genres of composition to raise awareness about the brutality faced by Matthew Shepard, a victim of violence caused by hatred and bigotry, a noticeably common issue in our society. Etheridge composes a poem describing her grief and sorrow for Shepard using her poetic work of composition, whereas New York Times gives us fact based description of the same incident in a distinct form.