Thursday, September 13, 2007

Take Charge Assignment

For my take charge assignment, I would really like to study the negative effects of Title IX interpretations on male students. Title IX of the education amendments was written with the best intentions. All the authors of this law wanted was for young men and women to have the same opportunity to get an education. The law is very short, and simply states: "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance."Today, this simple law has been twisted by feminist lawmakers and women's-rights lobbyists to discriminate against men.
I would like for the class to analyze the opinions of people who are for and against the modern interpretations of Title IX. Obviously, I think that they are, in general, sexist and wrong (especially when dealing with college athletics), but I would like to hear what other people in the class have to say about it. This will also give me the chance to hear more differing opinions about this topic, rather than the ones I choose to pay attention to.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

In response to "Which Media Do You Trust?"

this post is in response to the following article: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/05/live_from_londonwhich_media_do_1.html

Before you continue reading this post, you should know: you are currently reading the least important and least trusted of the media. This little statistic is courtesy of a company known as GlobeScan, who surveyed 10, 000 people all over the world by asking their opinions on different types of media. Now, only 9% of those people thought that internet blogs were the most important news source. I'm serious. Read the article. 91% of the sample thinks that either tv news, newspapers, and the radio (all of which are businesses) are more important than the internet. Now, I can't say I disagree with the 75% of the people who distrust the content of internet, because I only really half-trust the internet as well, but I totally disagree with what these people think is important. While not all of the information you come across on the internet is necessarily accurate, the opinions on the internet are real. you don't get that anywhere else. Probably the only other form of the media included in this survey where you really hear any opinions is talk radio. The problem with talk radio is that its hosts are getting paid to have conservative extremist viewpoints. they are getting paid by the radio syndicates to support the republican party and the conservative agenda, because that is what sells. their opinions aren't real like the opinions on the internet. The people on the internet are posting their opinions for the sole purpose of getting their opinions out there. While not all facts on the internet can be trusted, because of the lack of control and editing, you can learn just as much from internet blogs as any other media.

now, to answer the question given to me:

This article says first that people should not distrust the media, or anything as a whole. The author of this article says that distrust should not be blanketed over the media or any form of the media; each specific source should be judged individually. The author did not really supply any specific concrete examples of how some news sources are trustworthy and some are not. Rather, he appealed to the logic of the reader. He quoted the opinions of people's responses to this survey. They generally said that the media should be judged on a case-by-case basis. I very much agree with the opinion of the author, but his article needed to include concrete examples to prove his point. In his argument, he did not answer the question, "why?", and that made his argument weak.