I Disagreed With Zirin On A Lot, But Am Glad I Went

I don’t remember ever hearing about Zirin prior to the event, but immediately after I saw him, I recognized him. I saw a clip of him on the Tucker Carlson show. So it was cool to see him in person. I am really glad that I went to the David Zirin event. Even though I disagreed with most of what he said, I did get a lot out of it. Much of what he talked about was Colin Kaepernick and the NFL protests. 

I personally disagree with the NFL anthem kneeling protests. I think the players have every right to kneel and should be allowed to play if they kneel. I also disagree with the way in which President Trump approached the issue. So while I support their right to kneel, I disagree with their decision to do so. To me, it’s like naked protests. I support people’s right to do that sort of thing, but I usually don’t agree with the decision to do so and would never join in with them. 

This is my position on the issue for several reasons. The first is that I think our country is very divided. A lot of groups in this country feel marginalized and have very valid grievances with their experiences here. While we are a very imperfect country, I wish that we could all rally around the symbols like the flag and anthem that represent what we are striving towards as a nation. While some of us are white, black, asian, latino, indian, conservative, liberal, male, female, gay, straight, transgender, etc. we are all Americans. The flag and the anthem represents the ideal that we as Americans are constantly striving towards. We have our flaws now and our history is filled with even more flaws, but we are the country that is always working towards bettering ourselves. These symbols also represent American greatness and unity that we all are a part of regardless of our individual identities. I think overindulging in the many valid grievances that we may have is not productive. It just brings out our anger and frustrations with the system. It makes us scapegoat other groups and give ourselves excuses to fail. The feeling of unity and solidarity we could have as a country is something that gives me chills. It’s a great feeling. The feeling that I am an American. It reminds of pep rallies in high school and middle school. There was always a group of naysayers – people that were quick to point out everything that was wrong with school and how stupid is was that we would have these school pride days. On that issue, I was always a glass half-full kind of guy. I loved expressing my pride in the school just as I love expressing my pride in my country. 

The second point I want to make is that I don’t believe the protests have been successful in accomplishing its goal. As I understand it, the goal of the anthem protests was to raise awareness about police brutality towards African Americans. It’s a very valid issue, but unfortunately, I don’t think the protests have accomplished their stated goal. All they have really done is get a segment of the population – mostly conservatives – to hate the NFL and ignore their messaging. The dialogue about this issue is mostly semantics. In all my journalism classes, people are blaming this on the media’s framing of the issue. Trump does this a lot when the media focuses on his controversial remarks instead of his accomplishments in office. Whenever someone does something outlandish to raise awareness for an issue, it’s simply human nature to focus on the crazy thing they are doing instead of the goal behind their action. I think the anthem protests would have been a lot more effective at accomplishing its initial goal if the players knelt for the anthem on occasion instead of doing it all the time. 

Throughout the event, I think Zirin expressed a a different perspective of why Trump came out against the protests and why Trump has been successful in politics in general. He kept calling Trump a fascist and suggesting that Trump was the villain making the situation worse. But it’s important to understand that while African Americans like Colin Kaepernick feel marginalized, so do conservatives. Everywhere conservatives go, they see politics - liberal politics. Liberals own the culture, they own Hollywood, the media, academia, sports, etc. Everywhere conservatives look, they see actors and actresses making speeches in condemnation of them. All these liberal elite social justice warriors are running around waiting for them to make a mistake, so they can call them out as racist, sexist, etc. These liberal elites use this terminology to put down conservatives and others making honest makes, in order to build themselves up as champions of justice. It’s very self-serving and makes conservatives furious. This is also why conservatives love it when the left does it to themselves. They are loving the Harvey Weinstein scandal, because for once the left is getting a taste of their own medicine. Trump came out against the protest because he knows his supporters are infuriated by them. He knows that if he becomes their defender – the one to move conservatism from defense to offense – he will likely get their support.

Conservatives are always and defense and Trump was trying to push them to offense. Unfortunately (and this is true with many of the things Trump does), he did it the wrong way. Obama’s response was much better. He went way over the top when he called from the NFL protesters to get fired. Trump has the right to say that, but just because he has the right to say it, doesn’t mean he should. Especially as president, he should never have suggested that they get fired. I hate it when people get fired or punished in any way for doing something controversial. As long as they are not breaking the law or harming people in any way, I think their employer should stand up for them – unfortunately, that rarely seems to happen these day. Whenever there’s outrage, employers distance themselves as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, I think that the Zirin talk was beneficial. I disagreed with most of what he said, but still appreciated the event. He was extremely knowledgeable and provided a lot of great insights and contexts to the politics of sports. As someone who knows nothing about sports, I learned a lot from that event.

My Thoughts On China, New Media, And Everything Discussed In The HuffPost Article

It was interesting to read this article knowing your critiques of the Huffington Post. In class, you said that the Huffington Post was once a very promising example of the future of independent media. It was performing very well, until it was sold to AOL and became owned by a corporation.

I will be honest, I personally, haven’t noticed much of a change to the HuffPost, aside from UI changes, since it switched ownership. That being said, I have not studied this site thoroughly, so it’s hard for me to say for sure. I was also a lot younger when the acquisition occurred and I was not nearly as interested in politics or media as I am now. 

It seems to still does things differently from most mainstream media outlets. For example, when Donald Trump first ran for president, the Huffington Post decided to put Trump coverage in their entertainment section. I thought that was hilarious, but also a bad decision. That decision may have cost them some money, because it might have lessened traffic to the site. So that decision probably wasn’t driven by the corporate powers at play, but I could imagine that other decisions may have been driven at the corporate level and how that could be a problem as well. 

My understanding is that this article was written before the AOL acquisition and then updated just a few months after.

When I first read this article, I was very interested in Huffington’s analysis of China. Many people talk about how China will rule the world in a few decades and how China would likely destroy us if we ever got entangled in a military conflict with them. While all those discussions can paint a dim picture about America’s role in the world, I have always thought that China has a very big weakness. 

China is a very big country with a lot of economic, cultural, ethnic, and historical differences. There was a great article in The Atlantic about this. The government has been able to keep the country together partly because of its oppressive tactics and also partly because it’s been able to grow the economy so quickly. The economic growth has reduced people’s incentive to question the government and the government’s oppressive tactics have been able to limit threats to its power. 

In theory, this can only last so long.

Huffington talked about how the Chinese government recently shut off the internet, mobile phone services, social media, and more in order to prevent people from seeing first hand accounts of the riots in Xinjiang. As she said in the article, the first-hand accounts of the incident that people could post online, would essentially enable people that weren’t physically present to witness the riots. This is why the Chinese government fears “new media.” New media is something that they can’t control, but traditional media – mainstream media, is something that they can control. This is why the Chinese government was inviting mainstream journalists to tour the sites of the riots. 

Ultimately, this was a really great article that made a lot of great points. I think there is definitely still a need for journalists in the world. Having journalists, whether they are mainstream or independent, is crucial because there needs to be a group of people actively serving as the watchdogs of society. That being said, new media and citizen journalism also play an important role. Having both is extremely important.  

Reflections On The Honduras Coup Article

When I first read the article about the Obama administration complicity in the Honduras Coup, I asked myself, “why wasn’t this bigger news.” I had never heard of this until now. Of course, I was not politically aware around the time this came up, but I was still surprised I had never heard about this. Upon further reflection, I began to change my mind a little. The government always fails to admit things publicly that it knows to be true. And in this case, I don’t think I necessarily agree with the characterization that the Obama administration was complicit in the Honduras coup. 

I don’t see any evidence that the Obama administration actively supported the coup. Obviously, they knew it was wrong and unconstitutional and the article makes the case that they did nothing to push back against the coup. But they decided not to acknowledge it publicly in order to avoid international complications. I also think that Obama was fresh into his presidency and had a lot of other foreign policy issues that he was more focused on. I think a similar situation occurred in Egypt when the recent coup over there took place. The government sometimes naturally doesn’t hold itself to the highest moral standards on foreign policy simply because the world is so complex. But don’t get me wrong, the coup and the situation in Honduras was definitely very unfortunate. I just don’t know if I agree with the characterization of the article.

This conversation is interesting considering our recent class discussions about intelligence issues. I have very mixed feelings on the topic. But I have to say, based on what I know (which is indeed limited), I do not have the most favorable view of Wikileaks. Good journalism, in my opinion, is selectively going through sensitive documents and filtering out certain types of information. Wikileaks seems to have a habit of doing a bunch of data dumps of classified information. I don’t like that. 

I think the mainstream media’s criticisms of Wikileaks has been largely valid. Wikileaks is a problematic organization that needs to adjust its tactics. Its not just the public that can access leaked documents on Wikileaks, international adversaries can as well. This is why the public needs journalists to filter out some of the classified information that gets leaked to them. Journalists need to consider the ramifications of publishing classified information before doing so. In organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, journalists do just that. Wikileaks doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for that. 

The Dan Rather Double Whammy

It was interesting that the article was written by Howard Kurtz. I know that he works at Fox News now and knew very little about his work prior to Fox. I did a little more research on him and learned that in addition to working for the Washington Post, he also once worked at CNN and then switched to Fox News in 2013. I guess he had criticized Fox News prior to working there and had written a book about how the Clinton administration was able to spin certain scandals and controversies. He actually has a pretty interesting history.

Based on the publication date of the article (2004), it appears that the article was published around the time that blogging on the web really started to begin. That must have been in the early days of the web and people were asking many of the same questions that people are asking today about blogging. Of course, back then, I am assuming that there were much less blogs and very limited, if any social media. I am also assuming that citizen journalism wasn’t nearly as prevalent back then as it is today. The only social media outlet that may have existed around that time was MySpace, but I’m honestly not sure how influential it would have been at the time. But the blogosphere was likely much less saturated back then than it is today and blogs must have also had a harder time taking off than they do today without social media.

For some reason, the article was a little bit of a harder read for me. Maybe I am just a little off today. But it seemed as though it assumed the reader knew a lot about what had happened. I knew very little and had to do some research about the incident to fill in some of the gaps. This is probably due to the fact that I am reading this article 13 years later – almost exactly. 

It was interesting how the former CEO of CBS said that bloggers have no checks and balances. While there is certainly some truth to that, especially with today’s concerns about fake news, the bloggers were the ones that provided checks and balances against 60 Minutes. 

I read that Dan Rather still says the bloggers never proved the documents were fraudulent. Which was interesting, especially considering that both he and CBS retracted the story at the time. I guess he also attempted to sue CBS for making him a scapegoat in the story.

This situation applies to what we are discussing in class in a lot of different ways. The first is that independent bloggers were able to give the mainstream media a “black eye.” Because bloggers are so independent, they can pick up on things that the mainstream media would generally miss, which makes them very valuable. The second part is that Rather later complained on Bill Maher’s show in 2012, that his corporate bosses were uncomfortable with running the story and it ultimately led to his departure. This brings up the point we’ve been talking about in class about how corporate influence of stories can be bad for the industry.