In Class Questions

My attitude in the beginning of the class towards the media coverage of government was a little nicer than it is now. I always thought that the mainstream media offered up a lot of good information and it was very entertaining in its presentation. I originally thought this was a good thing, however, now that I’ve taken this course, I see it much more as a way of television and the corporate, money-driven powers-that-be to feed information to the public in a way that is hard to dissect and fact-check in any sort of an easy manner.

I am mainly coming down harsh on cable television. TV news such as PBS, the BBC, and CSPAN are great examples of news stations that offer objective material without all the glittery embellishments needed to bring in ratings and dilute the real points.

I’ve learnt from this course to always research your sources. It’s not enough to just read about a particular subject, you have to understand where and who the material on the subject is coming from. Once you understand the sources and the medium in which the reporting is being delivered, you can make much better sense out of what you’re reading.

I don’t know what I would have liked to learn that I didn’t. That’s a tough question considering if I knew what it was, I probably wouldn’t need to learn it. Maybe it would have been nice to look at the way journalists covered the 2000 and 2004 elections. Hindsight is always 20/20 and you have to learn from your mistakes. I think the media has been trying a lot harder this election to look at both sides considering the crappy job they did during the middle of the Bush Administration and it would have given us an interesting insight had we looked into some of the journalism of our recent past.