Activity report # 2 Bik Singh Tues Thurs 12: 45 – 2: 10 Blood and Gore, Sex and Violence – it seems that’s all America and American’s wants to know about today. My group decided to be the editorial team of a TV newscast, as we felt that would give us a little more creativity to present our work. To prepare for this activity our group decided to work as individuals and decide which five stories would be of utmost importance and hopefully come to some sort of compromise. To the surprise of many of our group members all of us came up with very similar stories, all pertaining to everything that’s wrong with our society as a whole today.
And this would be that perfect time to include that I was the only person in my group that picked the death of Ronald Reagan as a major news story (I mean he was one of most famous presidents and everything).
I also figured out how this whole news thing works, news on TV is there to play to your emotions, it there to make you feel queasy in your stomach, and it at no point is on TV to make you feel and think with your brains, there is no intellectual challenge in today’s TV presentations. Most of the group, and most of the class, picked the same array of topics as their headline news, a major one being the death of the Pope in Vatican City. Another thing I found surprising during the class discussion was that a lot of people paid more attention to stories happening outside of the U.
S. and ignored the problems or accomplishments that we had achieved as a nation, for e. g. the Middle East story of violence seemed to be one everyone’s list, but an accomplishment by NASA, that of a robot landing on Mars, seemed to be ignored by many.
In conclusion, news today is not really news; it’s a haven for blood, sex and violence.