Fear

One of the most ridiculous quotes I heard while watching Bowling for Columbine was that even though the murder rate has decreased by 20%, coverage of murders on news had gone up by 600%. This was astonishing to me and I think is one of the reasons many believe that the media instills fear into the public. Every night when the news comes on I hear about at least one gun shot victim and usually more. If you watch or read the news from other countries, it's clear that their priorities for what's newsworthy are very different from our own. I can't decide if the media really does do this to scare us or if it's because it's the only thing that grasps our attention to even start watching the news in the first place. Let's be honest, people crave scandal and sensationalism and by covering multiple murder cases, that's what the news is giving up. So who's to blame: the gatekeepers of the media or us?

America's Culture

after the class discussion on Thursday it seemed clear that many of us deem common American values as matieralistic and for the most part, based around appearance. I think we were forgetting about a lot of the good that this country is based off of though. We forget how many freedoms we have compared to other countries because to us they just seem mundane. Free speech and right to assembly for example are 2 freedoms that most people around the world dont get to practice. Also in class everyone was giving reasons why celebrities arent good role models, but we forget about some of the good they do. We talked about how people only drive hybrids because it's trendy right now, but many of the celebrities are the reason that so many people drive them in California and ultimately this is a very good thing. In addition it seems that whenever a celebrity promotes a charity, more people throw their support to that cause and who's to say that's a bad thing?