A recent article in Newsweek describes this national crisis well. Here's one symptom: "At many state universities the gender balance is already tilting 60-40 toward women." The problem starts well before college, though: By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In…
Mr. "Life, the Universe, and Everything" makes some good points. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjvSX4Y8C1o[/youtube]
I wrote a paper for one of my Master’s classes a couple of weeks ago, integrating what I’d absorbed from two textbooks into pages of my actual life. Shortly after I got it back from my professor, a friend and I were discussing this very blog, which led to a discussion of philosophizing in general. He lamented how lately, he’s seen an awfully lot of writing overwrought with words at the expense of actual ideas. This guy is an intellectual himself, a prolific writer and thinker, so his comment gave me pause.
As I’ve read for this particular graduate Communication class, I’ve worried more than once that some in my degree program seem to overstate the obvious. I love taking a fragment of seemingly mundane human interaction, analyzing its details and its place in our lives to parse from it a deeper understanding of our connectedness, yet I can’t shake the underlying fear that many would meet our research with a big, “So what?”
I thought I’d share some thoughts from this particular paper here, and ask for the feedback of the ‘blog’s readership. Based on responses I’ve received to previous pieces and the responses I’ve read here to the writing of others, I believe this audience falls toward the thinking end of the spectrum. There. I’ve laid out a blanket compliment. Be nice when you pick me apart, then, please??
Here goes:
Drama unfolds around us continually, though the mundane events of daily life often blur into methodical sameness …
Enjoy this day celebrating the ancient festival of the resurrection of the seasons, the rebirth of the year, the celebration of the new year, or its newer interpretation as specifically about a particular one of the born-to-a-virgin, talked-to-god(s), performed-miracles, and died-to-rise-again messiah-candidates. All the popular symbols (hatching eggs, bunnies, flowers,…
I was recently provided with a copy of Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sells Wars, Spend Election’s, and Destroy Democracy, by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney. Written in 2005, this book is a great way to get an historical perspective on the state of journalism in America. “How bad have things gotten?” you might ask.
Our media system has become so dysfunctional that it repeatedly shows its willingness to stenographically report the Bush administration’s spin as truth “while rejecting expressions of reality as manifestations of partisanship that must be balanced with more spin.” (Page 4) The authors write that the media is a “lumbering and lazy media” that is ideally suited to the whims of “Karl Rove and the thousands of other paid liars.”
Our media system is so bad that American political discourse has become “meaningless.” There is no better way to exemplify the bankruptcy of the media system than the March 2003 press conference at which George Bush was not challenged by anyone in the Washington press corps with regard to the preemptive war he was about to launch. The members of the press “asked him not a single probing question about the flimsy case that had been made for war, nor its likely costs, nor about anything akin to an exit strategy.”
The authors argue that our elite reporters no longer show passion for truth, but rather passion only for access to those who wield power. Reporters for major media outlets have become …