Skip to main content

2021/9/8

  Today we discussed what we saw in the documentary "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism". First Mr. Paterson taught us about how politics works in America. There are the democrats and republicans, the left-wing and the right-wing, but he also mentioned that democrats are slightly in the right on a global scale of politics. Media are meant to report both sides of these political parties but Fox News went to to the extreme. They became the business of propaganda under Murdoch. Then in class, we discussed events that might have influenced the documentary during the course of creating it; between 2000-2003. In these few years, there was an election between Al Gore and Bush. This was the only American election that was decided by the supreme court and not the citizens. Gore and Bush had very close votes, and Gore requested a recount since the election was a mess. But since there was a risk that Bush might lose their party declined and eventually the supreme court had to decide for them. Bush won 5-4 and won the election but Americans were not happy about it so Bush started off with a bad reputation. This made Fox News show full support towards Bush and his party and exaggeratively report his actions. 
  I lived in America before but I didn't watch Fox News so it was very interesting to learn about it. I moved back to Japan during the 2016 election and I was in California, a blue state, so I wasn't in touch with these kinds of topics. But with the current situation of Covid-19 and the pandemic, I see lots of clips of Fox News trying to stop mask mandates claiming that it's against the constitution. I also see people citing Fox News to back up their claim. It makes me wonder what they are exposed to every day. It scares me how we can be easily manipulated by the information we are exposed to. This goes both ways because CNN became the Fox News for democrats and watching these channels will narrow perspectives. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

9/30 Reflection

Today Mr. Paterson introduces us to a tool that shows us if our choices of color are color-blind friendly. I never thought of the color choices that deeply. I knew that some combinations of colors are hard to see but just for normal people. When we checked our site, there wasn’t that much to fix but I learned that there are choices that normal people can’t notice.  Today the class was supposed to start the presentations but we were given more time. I hope that we can do a better presentation than the last one. 
Post a Comment
Read more

2021/1/14

    Today, Mr. Paterson told us about an article about paper textbooks and digital textbooks that sparked debate.       When he showed us the news article, I recognized the professor immediately and I was surprised to hear this from him. I've read a few of his books about the Japanese language (since he studies Japanese) and seen him on TV multiple times, and I liked him. I'm all in with digitalizing textbooks since it's much more efficient and most of all it's so much lighter.       Mr. Paterson told us about vertical and horizontal reading. With digital textbooks, students can do horizontal reading. When I read books I note down the words I didn't understand and search them up later. But when I forget which page I got it from, I can't consider the context clues making it harder to understand the word. I like paper books but I find this really inconvenient.            I couldn't really get why he disli...
Post a Comment
Read more

2021/10/12

    Today in class, we were introduced to the world-systems theory. This theory was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Mr. Paterson showed us a graph with Kondratiev waves, when the graph goes up the monopoly of the technology and when it goes down the monopoly ends. This suggests that the world is divided into 3 countries, ①core countries, ②semi-periphery countries, and ③periphery countries. It argues that technology gets passed down through generations; rich countries get to use the new high-tech stuff first and when they are done with it, the poorer countries get to use it, when it's not high-tech anymore. The richer countries don't like it when other countries infringe on their monopoly and they try to come into the "core countries". They don't like sharing so it's very rare for semi-periphery countries to bump up to the core countries. One example was when the US was developing rapidly and becoming a bigger country, Britain, France, and Spain fought in th...
Post a Comment
Read more