I understand that making a living and selling a story is at the top of every journalist's list. I understand that what the public wants to read is not always what the public needs or deserves to read. We buy the magazine with the topic "Jolie, pregnant again!" on the cover before we buy The New York Times. I understand that this will probably never change. I think that Americans are so caught up with the idea of entertainment, that the important stuff seems to dwindle to the bottom of the stack. However, I believe that reporters should hold their morals a little bit higher. There needs to be a higher standard for what is put on the cover. The public deserves more and reporters should bite the money bullet and do what is morally right. Ask themselves the question "Does the public really need to know this?" before reporting on it. Reporters will sit out front of the home of a British, American Idol's home and bully her about whether she will make a CD before sitting out front an important government worker's home bullying him/her about the actions that are being made on the Obama health care plan. Privacy is hardly ever respected and reporters will put a picture of Brittany Spears' vagina on the cover of a magazine and no one will sue, but when a 14 year old downloads a song because he/she doesn't have the money to buy it... all hell breaks loose. Our priorities are mixed up. At the beginning of Chapter 14, the book describes Nellie Bly and her efforts to expose different businesses, organizations, etc. She was respected and honored. People trusted her and realized the difference she was making in society... what happened to that kind of reporting? "We need to see people not as readers, non-readers, endangered readers, not as customers to be wooed or an audience to be entertained, but as a public, citizens capable of action." --Davis "Buzz" Merritt, Wichita Eagle, 1995. This quote from the book says exactly what the public wants journalists to understand and take action on. This leads one to question how the public will handle and react to the truth. We have already seen how people can blame movies, music, and other forms of entertainment as the cause of epic murders and mass killings. Chapter 15 talks about how people are blaming entertainment as a cause of unspeakable behavior. If the media begins to show the honest truth, the deaths, the lying, the killing... What will the public begin to think of the government and even man-kind. Will we have more copy cat killers like the Virginia Tech student who thought of the Columbine killers as idols? Will there be more suicides like the Rutgers student? If we put all of the unsightly information out there, what will be the effects of it? Maybe people will become more giving. If the pictures of poverty from the U.S. and world wide are constantly shoved in our faces, will the Peace Core volunteers increase? We wouldn't be able to change the channel like all of us do when the adopt a poor, starving kid from Africa commercial comes on. It could be beneficial to mankind to show more of mankind.

Now They Tell Us Nothing

Michael Massing speaks about the war in Iraq and how Americans were pretty much excluded from all information on why or who we were fighting. Journalists were black-mailed out of asking the questions that would put our government at stake with the public opinion. Before reading this book, I had absolutely zero knowledge on the war and why we were/are there. Something about WMDs and oil...? I don't know. I hate to admit that. However, I think that the same goes for most Americans and it's not really our fault. We aren't told anything. Even now, after Bush has left office, Americans don't seem to want to hear about the gory details, so reporters don't report it. In my opinion, I could read up on the news and pay attention to every bit of over-seas information that is given to me, but I still would be out of the loop. For those years after 9/11, Americans were kept in the dark about everything. I feel like I will never really know the truth or be able to follow or understand what happened. This book enlightened me, though. Everything in the book was new information to me. I asked my "hard-core" republican friend to read the book and he scoffed. He said that he didn't want to read a liberal, biased opinion on the war. When I described the book, he said it sounded like another hippie that wanted to rant about something they knew nothing about. Based on that experience, I started to realize that that mentality is true for most Americans which makes us seem ignorant and ill informed. Americans are so loyal to our government that they can't see wrong. They can't see that they have been deceived and that our soldiers have died for no reason or that our soldiers have killed for no reason. We (Americans) don't want to see the images of the bodies, therefor we don't think that anyone is dying. At major universities, professors are discouraged from speaking about their opinion of the war. Going against the government is like admitting our defeat, admitting that we were wrong, and admitting that we killed for no reason. I think that we had reason to protect our country after 9/11, but I don't think that that is what Bush set out to do. It's even hard for me to admit that. I look forward to being in my 80's and reading what the high school history text books will say about the war in Iraq.