Sgt. Satchel's Lonely Hearts Club Blog

Yellow Journalism and Democracy Mama Mia, here we go again with historical connections to what we learn in class Why does fake news exist? I have briefly dabbled into the topic of fake news in previous posts, but today seems like the perfect time to do a deeper dive as we talked about yellow journalism in class on Wednesday. More specifically, what happens when a news organization is willing to compromise its integrity, truth, and loyalty to the people in order to sell papers or today, ads. This year's J+C freshman class has had it drilled into our minds from day one that a journalist's first loyalty is always to the people, and for good reason. The original era of yellow journalism was born from a natural and capitalist desire of corporations to make money, and from the public's desire to be entertained. In class my classmates and I learned about yellow journalism in the context of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, not Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner. But woul...

A Shameful Display of Journalism On September 16th local news site WHAS11 published  an article  titled "Man injured in Jennings County hit-and-run; police searching for vehicle" that utterly fails to adhere to some of the most basic principles that constitute quality journalism. The article certainly is not an outlier among countless other similar stories, but it represents a long trend of local news organizations giving up potential shots at being recognized as esteemed institutions in exchange for lackluster and meaningless reporting that, nonetheless, gathers ad revenue. There are many yardsticks and elements of journalism that this article does not even attempt to meet. This article would certainly be a dent in the reputation of any organization really striving to be seen as a good news source. To start off, this article is not newsworthy. To be deemed newsworthy, an article must be about an event that will have a "lasting effect on a lot of people". One hi...

Technological Advancement: Then versus Now In my last response to what we discussed in class I took our learning about the present day and connected it to the past. In this one I plan to do quite the opposite. Today we discussed the advance of printing technology, particularly the invention and popularization of the printing press. This great leap forward provided lots of information previously reserved for the elite to a huge amount of the populous. Recently, we experienced a similar change in how information is distributed leading to an explosion in the amount of information readily available to a wide segment of the populous. But this new phenomenon called the internet has also exponentially increased the amount of something quite the opposite, disinformation, or "fake news". This new great leap is an innovation, but should it be a welcome one?  In class, we talked about how the metal printing press allowed for a vast increase in the availability of information for eve...

Response to "Trump: America's Last President?" by Lily Wobbe The U.S. will not be a fascist dictatorship anytime in the foreseeable future, good job, go team! I agree with this premise expressed in  "Trump: America's Last President?"  on Lily Wobbe's blog  "Fakes vs Facts" , but I must respectfully disagree on some key points made in the post. Let's start off by stating that I do not believe Trump will be America's last president. I don't understand how someone could think that. However, it seems to me that Trumpism and its rhetoric is a clear sign of the decline of western democracy, whether a symptom or a cause.  Lily states that "(Trump) is not "destroying democracy" like some people argue", but I would have to say he, slowly but surely, absolutely is. Trump's reckless and callous disregard for the fine balance of institutions that keep our nation running is dangerous to democracy at the very least...

A Response to "Consumption of Mass Communication" Earlier today I had the pleasure of reading " Consumption of Mass Communication " on Isabella Bonilla's blog  "Belladora: Critique This" . Isabella makes some good points I agree with in the post. She points out that "The refusal to have exposure to opposing views creates ignorance within our reality" , and I couldn't agree more. Through out the post, she has a point that I agree with and she certainly doesn't mince her well chosen words. Isabella does make one point that I disagree with. In the final paragraph of her post she says that "(The psychological filter) can be changed at simple will, and pushed curiosity of the mind." I do not believe that the psychological filter can be easily removed, on the contrary I think that it takes extreme persistence and a changed state of mind.  I will be the first to admit, I have a psychological filter. Perhaps mine isn't as...

A Tale of Today          Often when learning something I like to see connections in it to history. It helps me to understand applicable topics much better than I otherwise would as it allows me to see reasons for certain actions, and ultimately to see their consequences. Putting a curriculum in context can show people's actions to be what they are. Ican often apply history in our journalism class as, after all, both subjects are just different attempts at covering all meaningful human endeavors.  In our last journalism class we discussed, among other things, conglomerations and monopolies. We talked about how distribution companies have gotten into the content creation business and how content creation companies have gotten into the distribution business. Netflix now makes its own shows, for example. They have the data of what everyone wants, and can make content accordingly. This seems like they are just filling a niche and appears benevolent, but...

Blurring Lines   Recently in our journalism class, we have been discussing binary models, ways to classify different forms of mass communication. What I found interesting was in the binary model classifying these methods as elitist or populist. This separates the types of communication into those that give the people what they need, that often being information, and what the people want, usually entertainment based. In class we talked about how sometimes that distinction can be fuzzy, for example Sesame Street being a show that entertains but simultaneously provides children with beneficial lessons. This made me think about an entirely different way that the line between elitist and populist communication has been blurred within the journalistic field, and that is cable news. Whenever I turn on my T.V. in a vain attempt to figure out what happened over the course of the day, locally, nationally or across the world, I find that there seem to be no real sources that provide obje...