I Read Some Marx (And I Liked It)

Recently my boyfriend and his brother made a comedy video for a seminar they were teaching on Marx. The video was designed to engage the kids in the topic-- not to disseminate the ideas of Karl Marx. The video, entitled "I Read Some Marx (And I Liked It)" has generated some response from a number of political bloggers across the globe.

The reactions are varied (typing in the name of the video in Google will bring up the blogs), from socialists celebrating the video, to neo-cons essentially hailing it as the problem with global politics today. Most of them, however, miss the point...this is a joke. You only have to watch the first 10 seconds of the video to realize that these guys are not serious.

So my question is this: should political journalism be this reactionary?

It seems that if this video can elicit this reaction (or overreaction, if you will), how would these bloggers handle real news? Are they simply looking for evidence to support their own agendas? If so, how do two guys singing to Katy Perry do so?

It seems that journalism is moving more towards narrowcasting (especially in the age of independent bloggers), but does that mean that we need to hyper-analyze every video that comes on YouTube, in case it might be the signal of the end of the world? Or should we take a deep breath and try not to take things so seriously? Where do journalists fit in this picture? Should we look at every news source we can, even comedy? I think so. Should we have this visceral a reaction to comedy? Maybe. But we also need to remember the source.

The journalism surrounding this video just seems very irresponsible, as well as trivial. Blog about something that really matters, please. I don't think that the silly antics of two guys in a dorm room are going to drastically influence global politics. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Pokemon shirt is all part of the Communist plan to brainwash the youth of the world. Who knows.

Hold Your Tongue

Last semester, my Facebook page got a major facelift. When I began working for the Daily Tar Heel, I had to remove all evidence that I had ever had an opinion on anything, lest it compromise my integrity as a journalist.

Rationally, I knew why I had to do that. I knew that if people read my stories, then looked on my Facebook page and saw that I had supported Obama in the 2008 election, they might make certain assumptions. But as I cancelled group memberships, and changed my political affiliations, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.

Did I really have to hide who I am to be a good journalist?

This question nagged at me the whole semester. I could not justify hiding my opinions. And in the age of the Internet, I'm not sure that I have to.

Within the ever expanding blogosphere, more and more journalists are maintaining personal blogs. Blogs that investigate, report and yes, even analyze breaking news and continuing stories.

The danger with political blogging, however, seems to be the risk of the proverbial soap box. Some bloggers seem to use their power to broadcast their opinions to the world to rant about what they think is wrong with government, without providing enough detail to support their claims. Bloggers can also really hurt the impact of their stories if they undermine them with sarcasm, even if they are making valid points (see Michelle Malkin's live feed from the 2010 SOTU).

But are bloggers like Malkin, or members of Daily Kos, the future of political journalism? Or is the new model for political blogging going to follow the centerist, "unbiased" (if there can be such a thing) Talking Points Memo?

With newspaper circulation declining, it seems that some papers have turned to blogs to help boost their Web site views. But some papers are not doing a very good job at blogging, it would seem.

Take the News and Observer. Their blogs WakeWatch and Under the Dome seem to be more of their old formulaic stories, just placed under the header "blogs." It seems that posts are more updates than actual analysis. So why are they called blogs?

As we move forward in rethinking journalism, we must remember to rethink. What good is a new format if it's the same writing style, the same stories?

Perhaps we need all kinds of blogs, the same way we need different news stations, radio stations and papers. We need the variety of opinions, the wide number of stories and versions of stories to find the truth.

Blogs are quite possibly a large part of the future of political communication. Perhaps if candidates and representatives maintained blogs (or their staff did), their constituents would better understand how they were being represented. There is danger in this, however, in that citizens would have to be discerning in what they believed. Citizens would probably have a greater responsibility to fact check on their own, rather than just relying the source at face value.

As journalists, we need to make a decision: are we ready to have opinions? Or do we keep writing straight news stories? Do we keep what we think to ourselves? Or follow the old rules?

A Sip of Tea, anyone?

In the past two years we have seen a lot of political "change." President Obama launched the first successful multimedia campaign, sending text alerts to voters, getting donations online, and using Facebook to build a legitimate party base. Obama started a "grassroots" movement among voters who wanted something different in Washington.

However, in this modern age, can any political movement really be "grassroots" anymore?

According to Princeton University's WordNet Search, grassroots is defined as "of or involving the common people as constituting a fundamental political and economic group."

But what we perceive as grassroots, may in fact just be a new type of PR.

Consider the 2008 Obama campaign. Behind each Facebook group, text message or tweet, there was someone carefully drafting the campaign message. By directly involving voters, the campaign was making it seem as if the movement was starting with the people.

The campaign even went so far as to select the top contributors, those most likely to comment or post on the campaign, and set them up with their own blogs about the campaign and Obama's message. By making the voters the political commentators, it seemed that Obama's support was really a "grassroots" movement, while in fact it was simply a carefully orchestrated use of modern technology.

The PR people probably recognized the number of people they could reach via the internet, and so took the campaign into previously uncharted waters to engage voters that might not have otherwise been reached.

The most recent "grassroots" movement in the news is the Tea Party Movement, a group that largely believes that with recent legislation, the government has overstepped its Constitutional boundaries.

While Tea Party organizers claim the movement to be strictly "grassroots," critics have called the group "Astroturf," driven largely by cable news and the political and financial support of key political figures. The group's Web site, TaxDayTeaParty.com, seems to be creating the same kind of campaign that Obama did in 2008, even down to the text alerts. The site also features recent news and endorsements of candidates for the 2010 elections.

But where did this Web site come from? Did someone create it and pay for the corporate text number out of their basement? Hardly.

The Web site was paid for by Liberty First, a PAC. Liberty First's principles are relatively clear: "Less government, less regulation and lower taxes." The group also does not believe that special interests have a place in politics:

"We support candidates who place liberty (the Constitution) first when casting a vote or making critical political decisions. Not special interests, not populist issues (smoking bans, government healthcare, etc) but LIBERTY FIRST."

The PAC is essentially a Tea Party organization committee, but this hardly seems grassroots. It seems like just another political action group organized by politicians, not a group of citizens. However, once again the interactive multimedia campaign makes it seem like all the political ideology of the Tea Party is coming directly from the people.

So back to the main question: In this modern age can we have a truly "grassroots" movement?

Probably not. But then again, maybe we never did. Maybe now we can just see the wizard behind the curtain pulling the levers and pushing the buttons to make things happen. With modern technology, we can be more civically engaged, but we need to pay attention to where what we read comes from. For example, the Tea Party Web site is not from the mind of Larry Jones in Arkansas, but probably from PR people who know what they're doing. Same with the Liberty First Web site. And the Obama campaign Web site.

Modern media and social networking tools make it easy to make our voices heard, but it still is completely our responsibility to make sure that our voices remain true to our beliefs.

Too Young to Care?

In the seminal John Hughes film The Breakfast Club, one of the characters admits to having a fake ID.

When asked why, he responds, "So I can vote."

Sadly it seems that this enthusiasm for civic involvement is often lost on young voters. It seems that the question of how to get younger voters out to the polls during election season has become a perennial struggle. Are we too busy? Too stressed to care? Or do we just not see how the policies that may or may not be put in place affect us?

It's funny. Students at public universities are often outraged when the state hikes tuition, or implements sweeping changes. But tax policy? Welfare? If we're not paying, why should we care?

A recent poll conducted in North Carolina by the Civitas Institute showed that younger voters were generally less able to correctly identify the governing party.

So not only are we not voting, we're undereducated. While most of the numbers in the poll are up from past years, they still are not pretty. Do we assume that because we don't know who the candidates are, we shouldn't vote?

If this is the case, it certainly points back to the laziness explanation. If it's too difficult to get clear, unbiased information about each person and policy, why should we waste our time?

In national elections, we can't avoid the information. Advertisements are everywhere and the heat of the race seems to have a polarizing effect. But in all honesty, I couldn't name the candidates in last year's gubernatorial election. Of course I remember Bev Perdue-- she's the governor, but the other guy? What was his name?

However, presidential candidates are seared into my memory: 2008, Obama and McCain, 2004, Bush and Kerry, 2000, Bush and Gore. But who ran against Easley years ago?

Why is there such a drastic difference? Are we culturally more aware of the big picture rather than the details of state and local politics? Does the media simply cover national politics more?

I have a pretty good idea that the media does give more attention to national news from the content analysis our class just worked on. But is this any excuse?

To become "good" citizens, maybe the burden should be on us. Maybe if we start to seek out information about local happenings (like many hyper-local blogs and community papers are beginning to do), mainstream media will follow.

Whatever the solution, this phenomenon of horribly low voter turnout and under-education in the younger generation must change if we are to have an engaged civic society. It's up to our generation to make change happen.

In 9th grade, I wasn't very good at biology. For this reason, the three extra credit questions that my biology teacher would write on the whiteboard at the beginning of each test were of the utmost importance to me. So when my teacher wrote the question "Who is the mayor of Raleigh?" in green dry-erase-marker on the board at the start of a test I had been particularly dreading, I, along with many of my classmates, let out a long groan. We didn't know.

I did not attend a normal school. In 9th grade, I was actually in middle school still, attending a Montessori school that was a "junior high," meaning that middle school was 7th-9th grades as opposed to 6th-8th like Durham County Public Schools. My class size was 10, and we were some of the most informed and culturally aware people our age. We had to be. We were grilled daily on current events in our Economic/Legal/Political (or ELP, not to be confused with the musical group) seminar. I was reading local, national and international news sources daily but I could not tell you the name of a prominent local official.

This narrative, apart from illustrating my distaste for science, highlights a greater issue in modern media: an outstanding lack in local coverage. Why is it that national news is given greater importance over issues that may affect citizens more directly and immediately?

Now, at 19, I had the distinct opportunity to investigate why I did not know the name of the Raleigh mayor for that crucial extra-credit question. In my journalism class, Citizens and Media, my classmates and I examined the content of six local papers across the state of North Carolina, breaking down the stories into five categories: local political news, state political news, national political news, sports, and other.

We studied 14 issues each of The Winston Salem Journal, The Greensboro News & Record, The Charlotte Observer, The Raleigh News & Observer, The Wilmington-Star News and the Fayetteville Observer. The purpose of the study was to discover just what newspaper readers in North Carolina were reading about in their local papers. We wanted to know how much political coverage and information was available to people at each level of government.

Our findings may surprise some, but my guess is that most newspaper readers will not be shocked. The combined results of all 84 papers showed 27.1% sports stories, more than all political coverage combined (22.3%), with miscellaneous stories (crime, features etc.) making up the majority of the papers (50.6%). Here are the overall numbers by category:

84 newspaper editions total

Local politics/govt stories: 336 (6.4%)

State politics/govt: 272 (5.1%)

National politics/govt: 569 (10.8%)

Sports: 1,432 (27.1%)

Other: 2,674 (50.6%)

Total articles: 5,283


The only real surprise in these numbers is perhaps that state politics and government get less coverage than local, but, let's face it, both numbers are not good. But why are these numbers so low?

Last week, Professor Towns made the assertion that local news is boring. Is that the reason? Is state news just as mundane? But what makes national so much more exciting that there would be such a significant difference in coverage?

Maybe our numbers are skewed by the time we examined papers. We looked at content during a time when the nation was on the edge of its seat watching the Health Care debate. But aren't there issues just as important that affect us as much, if not more, going on in our own state and communities?

Perhaps citizens just aren't excited about what was said at the Town Council meeting, or by their state senator in the legislative building. Are state politics just not as glamorous? Why?

Or is it that we just don't need as much coverage of state and local government in our papers? If the system is the way we want it, why change it?

These are questions that we need to examine. The content analysis was a good start-- it illustrated what many journalists have feared to be true. But now we need to investigate how much we really need state and local coverage in our newspapers, or if we are getting it from somewhere else, like blogs or Web pages.

If we want to be informed citizens come voting day, we need to know what's going on. So yes, we do need state and local news. Now we just need to figure out what's the best way to get it.

Who can we trust?

We live in an age of disillusionment.

In a world with sensationalist headlines by an often polarized media, people often have a hard time taking news stories at face value. Yet there still are some news sources that we trust-- why is that?

It seems that people often believe what they hear when it comes from news sources that have been around a long time: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the list goes on. During their long history, they have earned the public's trust.

But people don't just get their news from traditional media anymore. These days, social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, provide up to the minute updates of the latest news. Tonight while watching the Olympics, one analyst even quoted a tweet from 1980 Olympic goalie Jim Craig, who was constantly updating during the USA-Canada hockey game, during his broadcast.

But when everybody can be a news source, how do we establish credibility? How often are we misled by our friends tweets and status updates? What about group messages? Are their certain friends or groups that we trust over others, especially when it comes to political news?

Thus far I have had a fairly positive experience with getting news via social media, however, I usually double check the news I get from tweets and statuses. If people posts links, I usually can judge the credibility of the stories by comparing it to criteria I've learned thus far as a Journalism student.

Although on social media sites, it seems that many users are quick to jump to conclusions and repost without really reading or understanding. It seems that social media can be an incredibly reactionary news sources-- people don't really take the time to make their own judgement, or make sure that the information is valid before passing it along.

So do we trust our friends? I think we need to be careful. As users, we must carefully examine the information we receive before deciding what we believe-- this is true in all cases with news, but we must be especially aware when using social media. If someone posts that classes are cancelled due to weather and she's wrong, do you really want to miss your 9 A.M. exam?

So who do we trust? The sad answer, no one, the operative word being one. In order to get the clearest picture of what is really happening, we must do a little surfing.

By getting multiple view points and reading multiple stories, only then are we fit to make a judgement call-- and promptly post our opinion to our profiles.

The Age of The Internet: Readily Available, Yet Overly Complicated

While the internet may be the "information superhighway," users may still have to take minor detours to find answers to their questions.

This week in Citizens and Media we were asked to use the internet to try and find answers to the following three questions:

1. What did Gov. Beverly Perdue’s last campaign finance report show for cash on hand?
2. How many voters are registered in NC–and what is the breakdown of R, D, and I?
3. Pick a prof–any prof at UNC–and find his/her salary.

For the question number one, I found little to nothing on Gov. Perdue's total campaign expenditures. I searched Google, The Raleigh News and Observer Web site, and NC.gov, and the only article that even hinted at final figures was this one about recent investigations into flights Perdue took during the campaign. However, the numbers in this article were somewhat confusing. You would think for a public figure like a governor, a spread sheet of some kind would be available, especially on a government Web site.

When searching for an answer to the second question, I finally found the answer to my first. Here on the State Board of Elections Web site, Gov. Perdue's expenses are clearly laid out-- if you have the time to wade through the countless links and multi-page PDFs of filings. As an average citizen I did not know where to look for this information initially, but rather stumbled upon it. Wouldn't it be simpler if this data was compiled into one document with ready totals and information?

Continuing my search for the answer to my second question, the number of registered voters in North Carolina and their political affiliations, I remained on the State Board of Elections Web site. This question proved quite simple to answer, as right under the header of the site there are posted voter statistics, including the total number and numbers by party. For a more detailed look at voter statistics, I went on to click the sidebar tab titled "Voter Statistics" and tabbed through the information available there. This data was much more accessible than any of the finance information for Gov. Perdue.

For the final question, I selected well-known economics professor, Ralph Byrns. I began my search on the UNC Web site, using the search bar. No luck. I then turned my attention to Google. Again, no luck. Lastly I tried the UNC system Web site. And once again, no luck. Thinking I must of missed something, I googled "Chancellor Holden Thorp," went to his webpage, clicked on "Departments" found "Accounting," then clicked again on "Facts and Figures," and finally on "Faculty and Staff Data" to finally wind up on this page. And even then I only got general information that was not professor specific.

If this is public information, why is it so difficult to find? Maybe I just don't know where to look, but I consider myself a fairly informed person and it took me at least an hour to answer three questions that at face value do not seem that complicated.

With all this information at our fingertips, why does it feel so out of reach?