Introduction To My Blog

Welcome to my blog about the intersection of mass media and politics! Mass media play an extremely crucial role in politics and the public's understanding of politics, and likewise mass media are impacted by the happenings of politics. Here, we will analyze instances of this connection as they play out in the real world, and relate these instances to broader concepts of mass media and its role in politics. Thank you for stopping by and I look forward to writing here weekly!

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Biden's First Press Conference

After over two months of waiting, the media finally got its chance to have a formal press conference with President Biden. The lack of a press conference turned into a mini-scandal of sorts, especially on right wing media outlets, but also mainstream media as well. As a result, you might expect that the DC press corps would come armed with a wide range of questions that produce valuable, insightful answers from the new President about the many problems facing the country. But the press conference was a boring, barely newsworthy affair that's most reported on answer involved the horserace politics of an election four years away. The new President simply was somehow not asked about the pandemic that has dominated the news cycle for the last year. Instead, the majority of the questions centered on the surge of people arriving at the border from Central America. Immigration and border stories are important, and the problem isn't that he should not have been asked about that. But s...

Reporting on the Police

Almost a year after George Floyd's death sparked worldwide protests, the man who kneeled on his neck was ultimately convicted of murder and is facing decades in prison. This traumatic cultural moment has raised an important question for young journalists - how do you report on police activity? The question has been raised in light of the initial press release from Minneapolis Police shortly after George Floyd's death. In a statement, the police said Floyd "appeared to be suffering medical distress" and was subsequently transported via ambulance to a hospital where he died "a short time later". At no point in the release was it made clear that Derek Chauvin had placed his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes while he gasped for air and told the officers that he could not breathe. This vague, misleading and wholly incorrect initial statement questions the whole premise of reporting solely on what police "said". If not for the video, that ...

The Washington Post's Costly Correction

In January, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell story that former President Trump had urged an investigator to "find the fraud" in Georgia in an effort to alter his loss to President Biden in the state. They ran this juicy quote in their headline and stuck it in their lead, only to have to issue an embarrassingly long correction two months later that they had misquoted the former President in their story after an audio tape was released. There are a few points that need to be made in light of this correction. Immediately after it was ran, everybody jumped all over the Post, and they deserve criticism of course. However, before we get into the original mistake, it is important to remember that the criticism needs to be in fact of the original error, and not of the large correction itself. We should be glad that one of the nation's largest newspapers would correct a major aspect of a bombshell story in the first place. A much worse alternative would be if our mainstrea...

Mass Media and Politics

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