Media Law and Lit

This will be the last entry in my blog for the class, and I believe it has been very helpful for me to do.  While it has taught me many things, I believe the most important part is how it has given me a new reference point for media, and how people consume it.  This blog has been my opinion, and I think that has been obvious and good.  For this reason, I believe that everyone can be, and to some extent is, a blogger themselves.  While they may not have a weekly blog where the write down all their thoughts and opinions, the have a social media presence, or platform at work, or discussions with family, or some form of discourse that they share with others that reflect their beliefs and opinions.  That is good, but I think there is an art to it, and that art is dying out.  Less and less people seem to want to hear others' opinions, but want to make sure there opinion is heard by everyone.  As a media and communications student, this worries me for the future.  I'm tired of ha

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