Take Charge Assignment

I think i would like to focus the take charge thing by looking at how the media responds to tragedies and accidents, like the Minnesota bridge collapse, columbia space ship explosion, mine collapses, and college violence. i would mainly like to focus on how the media takes a retroactive approach the the problems exposed by such accidents. so instead of looking to see if all tunnels are safe from collapsing, they feel they must cover and put attention on all bridge inspections, but when the next tunnel collapses it'll be 0ut of the blue. i just find it interesting on how something bad will happen and the media will focus on it for a long time into the future, like recent mine collapses have become a hot topic for news coverage recently. overall, i want to see the medias response to disasters and what they put public spotlight on and what trends are like between accidents covered and how "popular" the problem is.

Which Media Do You Trust?

1. I basically understood this article and thought nothing from it was very shocking. trust in things varies between high numbers in things like national TV and low in things like blogs. The statistics presented seem to go along w/ how much i trust media like i wouldn't say i 100% trust certain things but my level of trust would be in the percentages presented in the article. i also thought it was fun to point out that the writer spent a lot of time discussing blogs and defending them. i think it's possibly because he sees himself somewhat as a blogger (i dunno if he's a full fledge blogger or if this is considered a kind of newspaper group)

2. Overall, I feel that Mr. Glaser presents a sound argument that is introduced with an concept, then statistical evidence is presented to elaborate on the idea and then discussion and analysis ensues of the presented evidence. Because Mr. Glasers argument is based heavily on easily accepted statistics I feel that his basis for argument is sound and then I can, and want to, listen to his opinion on the topic. The evidence used by Mr. Glaser is a statistical survey conducted in 10 countries (U.S., U.K., Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Russia, and somewhere else) and i assume that participants are asked if they either trust, don't trust, or have no opinion on a certain form of media. The survey also throws in some comparative questions like how much the person trusts the government to allow a comparison between the media and government so some comparative depth can be added to the statistics.

Mr. Glaser first takes a reporting approach and does not originally present an argumentative statement. Once he outlines the evidence that he presents, Mr. Glaser analyzes it and especialy takes note of the lack of trust in internet blogs and how many people either don't come into contact with them enough or they over-generalize blogging. When it comes to counterarguments I believe that Mr. Glaser took care of them himself by scrutinizing the validity of the statistics like when he says people base their levels of trust on specific case-by-case experiences and maybe not overall. I feel that this argument is very succinctly written and offers effective evidence in the form of statistics and then makes a clear analysis of these statistics and what they reflect about the publics trust of the media.