Media Law and Lit

For the past couple months, and really the last three years but this is just the newest thing, the mainstream news outlets have been showing 24 hour coverage of the Trump-Ukraine hearings.  This started when an unnamed whistleblower, now known but not confirmed as Eric Ciaramella, leaked information regarding President Trump and a conversation he had with representatives from Ukraine.  This sparked the latest in a long line of impeachment queries that have been launched against Trump since even before he was sworn in as president; and, as the evidence has been flushed out, it now seems that Ciaramella never had any firsthand knowledge of the claimed incident.  While this is a bad example, it is an example nonetheless of whistleblowing: the act of alerting the masses and news media of wrongdoing by an official or their administration.  Chelsea Maning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Ellsberg are names that generally come to mind when people talk about whistleblowing.  These are people

We are living in a world where people prefer safety over privacy, or at least think they do.  Many plots from major blockbuster movies over the past couple of years have revolved around this subject, and the dangers of what happens when people give up their liberties to feel safe.  Google, Facebook, Twitter, and pretty much any big tech company you can think of have been involved in privacy scandals over the last few years, but they have gotten little to no repercussions for it.  Most of all, here in the U.S., our government has taken surveillance to a whole new level, with drones, satellites, cameras, and even our own phones being used to watch our every move.  As we have learned in class, restrictions of privacy are rarely, if ever, a good thing.  But, people today have done something that the people in the past never did when it came to their privacy: they are giving it up willingly.  While these people may not say they give their privacy away if you ask them, but, when you exa

In class this week, we are researching and presenting on different theories and ideas as it applies to people's perspectives.  I am researching confirmation bias, and I think there is no better place to research this than in America right now.  First, confirmation bias is the idea that people will look for facts that support their own biases when researching a topic.  Take gun control for example.  Two different people may look at the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School form two years ago, but come up with two totally different conclusions based on the biases they had going into their research.  I think an example like this, which was very prevalent in the weeks after the shooting, is the perfect example of confirmation bias, and America's current thought process as a whole.  It seems like everyone is playing into their confirmation bias in today's culture, instead of actively trying to understand all points of view.  People today are too worried about being ri

  T here is no denying the impact social media has had on thew world over the last decade.  Facebook has dominated the industry, Twitter has gone from a niche for friends to use to a news platform, and Instagram has become a career for some people.  But, with all the benefits social media brings, it comes with a fairly big amount of detriments.  First, the rise of social media has made people more comfortable with giving out private information.  As we learned in class, and as America has seen over the past couple of years with the Facebook privacy scandal, social media businesses are just that: businesses.  Their main goal is to make money, and they do so through some fairly suspicious ways.  Social media platforms, like Facebook, sell information to third parties, like Cambridge Analytica, in order to make money.  These companies then go and use the information to target things such as ads and websites to these people out of nowhere.  The joke of "I talked about buying shoes a

  In class, we have gone over Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations and Ideas, and attempted to plug things into the graph to see its trend.  For this blog, I will be using Drones, and seeing their trends as related to what we have learned in class.  For the graph, there are 5 main parts: Exploratory, Uptake/Ascent, Tipping Point, Saturation, and Laggards.  Exploratory holds the pioneers or inventors of the product, and says that only people who invented it or use it for a specialized field will have need for it.  The Uptake/Ascent category holds the Early Adopters, who are the people that saw the benefit of the product or idea earlier than most.  The Tipping Point is the point where the product has been accepted as necessary in society, and many people have one or are planning to get one.  The saturation line shows how as time goes on, and more people buy the product or accept the idea, it becomes more and more assumed that everyone will have one.  Finally, the laggards are people who

As we have talked in class this year about the First Amendment, we have gone over all the different aspects of it, and why they are each individually important.  This week, we have gone over the Eight Values of Free Expression, which are all detailed in the link below, and all cover different aspects of why free expression is essential to a functioning society.  The one that stuck out to me most, and the one I believe is most important, is the idea of Promote Tolerance.  I believe the freedom of speech is the bedrock on which the American Experiment was laid, and without it we would not have lasted as long as we have.  The idea of Promote Tolerance is the idea that the First Amendment protects all speech that doesn't incite action, even speech that we don't like.  The idea of the government making rules on regulating what we can and can't say seems blatantly wrong to me, and to virtually all Americans, but the rest of the world is beginning to disagree with that.  More an