Take Charge Assignment

1. To tell the truth, I am a little nervous about searching out my own topic to argue about. It's hard enough to find the right articles and references, but now I first have to come up with a topic....so I decided (for now) to think about the differences between reality TV and reality.
2. Reality TV does not give a good representation of reality. The people that they choose for the shows are considered to be "average" people. Except for the part where they were chosen very carefully to best fit the need of emotion for the show. These "average" people are placed in strange environments that don't reflect real life. Then we watch on TV what their "normal" lives are supposed to be like. It just does not reflect real life problems in the same way that most people experience them. The producers of reality TV series admit to saying that they reinact scenes or add in sound effects and the like ot make it more dramatic. The contestants themselves admit to having acted more emotional on the show than they usually would have. So why do we keep seeing these shows on TV? The producers would say because that is what we, as the audience, want to see, but that is not necessarily the case. I read an article that gave statistics about how many people think that there are too many reality TV shows aired. People want to see more news on TV, not a fake representation of what life is like.

Which Media Do You Trust?

1) I thought this was an interesting article. It was giving statistics about people trusting the media or gov't. Then the author turned around and said that these numbers couldn't be trusted. I thought that was pretty cool. I wasn't expecting that.
2) This article is testing the credibility of the media but at the same time it is saying that articles and authors need to be analyzed individually. A person cannot say that they do not trust blogs because some are written by very knowledgable people in the area they are discussing.
When the author first gives the statistics about people who trust the media, he counter argues himself by giving evidence of the unreliability of the source of the poll. This is how he then forms his argument into saying that people should not generalize but look at individual articles. The author uses quotes from David Schlesinger and Gary Kebbel as evidence in his argument. What they have said supports the author's claim, if those two sources themselves are reliable.
People can still fall into trusting untrue material even if they judge the information individually. A blogger can give the appearance that they are knowledgable on a subject and truely they may not be therefore giving false information.