Photo by Oleksandr Kovalenko, from the Visual Culture Research Center Because I do not understand the current state of Russia, I was very grateful we had the opportunity to talk with Sergey Parkhomenko and Vasyl Cherepanyn. What stood out to me the most in our discussion was when Parkhomenko told us that being a journalist in Russia is a choice. It is not a profession you would make money off…
Photo by Graeme Jennings, from Washington Exami On February 11, 2019, The Chicago Maroon published a breaking news update on an armed robbery at the University of Chicago. While there was no problem with the report itself, there was an immediate controversy over the featured image, that of a suspect led by a police man. Many readers thought this suspect looked like a potential minor, and believed that the photo of…
Photo from Medium On March 4th, 2019, President of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, issued the “news”: “Federal Action Regarding Free Expression on Campus.” Rather than viewing this email as “news,” I saw it as an declaration of Zimmer’s affirmative stance that the US government should not meddle with free expression on campus, and that he is justified to propose this stance. First, let’s get several details straight:…
Photo from Russia Beyond After reading “New Beginning or Dead End” by Ardaky Ostrovsky, one important question came to my mind: can freedom of expression in media coexist with socialism? In the context of the Soviet Union, it seemed that no matter how hard Gorbachev sought to reign in the people following the continuation of perestroika in the 1980s, the unfavorable consequences of this political reform were not amendable and…
Photo from The Atlantic In 1923, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky published his idealistic paper “The Newspaper and its Readers,” pinpointing the direction the Soviet newspaper should take to most effectively convey the beliefs of the party. Trotsky essentially considers the press as “a means of propaganda” (120) and a “weapon of enlightenment” (122). Outright, Trotsky takes Soviet news to be biased under the influence of political ideologies. Despite the fact…
Photo from NYTimes In late January, the “confrontation” between a Catholic high school boy, Nick Sandmann, and a 64-year old Native American, Nathan Phillips, became viral on social media. First off, the racial and discriminatory controversy was sparked by a video instagram post by Kaya Taitano, who is a student at the University of the District of Columbia. The content of the video featured Phillips singing in his native language…
Photos by Sarah Liu I would say I am an ignorant person when it comes to news. I joined this class both to apply my interest in media as a theory and to widen my understanding of current media and news as a practice. Because I am not politically involved, I didn’t really care which news channels I downloaded from the Apple Store. I followed along the “5 Apps to…
Photo by Lynne Sladky On January 27, 2019, the Washington Post published a “Politics” article titled, “Trump advisors lied over and over again, Mueller says. The question is, why?” written by Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky. The first three lines of the article struck me: They lied to the public for months before Donald Trump was elected — and then repeatedly after he took office. They lied to…
