HW 19: How Important are Blogs to the Media?

My chosen section of the piece, Web of Influence written by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell in Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein is about how the blogosphere influences what the media covers. They address how if the blogosphere wasn’t around the media often wouldn’t cover the stories that people are actually interested in. Consider for example in 2004 a writer for WomensWallStreet.com posted online her account of suspicious activity by Syrian passengers on board an airplane she was on and her absolute terror in not knowing whether or not they were a risk to her safety. Even more important 2 million people read her blog and soon thereafter media outlets like NPR, MSNBC, Time, and the New York Times picked up the story and prompted a national debate about the racial profiling that airlines were doing post 9/11. In short whether they like it or not personal opinion and commentary are important things for the media to consider and blogs will have a compelling effect on what the media covers.
http://Womenswallstreet.com

HW 18: The Diet and Fashion Industry are to Blame for Your Anorexia

I chose Understanding Anorexia: A Thin Excuse by Naomi Hooke in the Blog, Feministing as my least favorite Blog of the week. This post was basically saying that you can’t blame the fashion industry and their anorexic models for the prevalence of anorexia. She states, “To believe that the fashion industry causes eating disorders is to completely misunderstand this most complex of illnesses” and then later, “The vast majority of eating disorder patients have numerous other difficulties, including low self-esteem or confidence, lack of self-care, and social difficulties” (Hooke 1). Basically what she is arguing here is that the media and fashion industry have nothing to do with her disease. Although it is commonly understood here in America and according to Terry Poulton who wrote No Fat Chicks, “Nearly 30,000 women stated, in the largest such survey to date, that they’d rather lose weight than achieve any other goal-despite the fact that only 25 percent were overweight and another 25 percent were actually underweight” (Poulton 13). In a country where the diet industry is raking in $50 billion plus a year trying to make us all, thin or not, diet you just can’t ignore their influence. In fact Poulton points out, “Most Americans alive today have no memory of a time when thinness was not a national obsession, and thus regard the artificial as normal (Poulton 13). Hooke is saying that her disease can be blamed on her low self-esteem and confidence, but what she is forgetting to do is to look at why her self-esteem is so low. It is the job of the media and the diet industry together to make her feel bad about herself so that she will spend all of her time and money at trying for an unattainable goal.
www.feministing.com

HW 3: Who Critiques Who?

In discussions of Blog How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture by, David Kline and Dan Burstein one controversial issue has been blogs and their effect on media and politics. On the one hand some people say that nobody reads blogs and therefore they have no effect. On the other hand Kline and Burstein among others argue that bloggers are transforming the political arena and are giving everyone a voice. In my opinion it used to be the media’s job to critique society, especially politics and the government. They haven’t been able to do their job successfully for a long time now. Most will claim to be non partisan (Fox News) but everyone knows they are conservative. There are complaints that bloggers will criticize the media for how they do their job and the media responds by saying that they should give it a try and see how easy it is. That isn’t the bloggers job though, just like it used to be the media’s job to critique the government, now it is the bloggers job to critique the media!