introduction

Last week, the creator of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange was arrested in London after Ecuador withdrew their asylum agreement. After this event, Daniel Ellsberg, a fellow whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers, speaks out on this matter. Ellsberg is quoted saying that "Without whistleblowers, we would not have a democracy". He then goes on to talk about how "it is not a good day for the American press or for American Democracy." he also says that he was the "first journalistic source" to be indicted and now that Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted he will not be the last. Later on, in the interview, he is asked about what he would today in a digital era and he would still have given the papers to the New York Times in the hopes that they would print the documents in length. But with how print media is now I would not wait and I would give it to WikiLeaks or put it on the internet myself. Ellsberg is quoted saying that "Without whistle...

During the presentations about awareness, mediasphere, theories, and policy. One topic really stood out to me, and that was during the mediasphere presentation talking about whistleblowers.  Before the presentation, I knew very little about whistleblowers and the only one that I knew about was Edward Snowden. I always thought people who were considered whistleblowers were people who broke the law and were criminals in the eyes of the government. I never thought about how they might be helping the public with letting us know about some of the things our government is doing without us knowing.  The definition of a whistleblower is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public. This definition really opened my eyes because I always thought that a whistleblower just exposes information about an organization just to hurt or damage an organization. But in reali...

Agenda setting describes a very powerful influence of the media and the ability to tell us what issues are important. In 1922, the newspaper columnist Walter Lippman felt concerned about the media and the power media had to present images to the public. This goes as far back as 1922 and we still see if today in our current society. In 1968 a research was done and they found two elements, awareness and information. The information that they gathered from the research was that McCombs and Shaw’s presidential campaign was mainly focused was to attempt to assess the relationship between what voters in one community said were important issues and the actual content of the media messages used during the campaign. Agenda-setting is the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media. Most research of agenda-setting have underlining of two basic assumptions: 1.) The press and media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it. 2.) media concentration o...

An 8th grader named Sonia Bokhari joined Social Media for the first time when she turned 13, she then discovered that her mom and sister have been posting about her for her entire life. Her sister would comment on their mother's most recent picture on Facebook or the most recent post on Twitter. Sonia was always curious about what her sister and mom were laughing at, who commented, and who liked their most recent post. Although she was curious she didn't really have much of an interest in Social Media. Once Sonia turned 13 she got the green light from her parents to join Facebook and Twitter. After she created her account the first thing that she did was to see her mother's profile or account. That when she realized that she has always been on Social Media. While this is her first time creating an account for herself and being allowed to have social media. Her mother has posted countless photos and stories online for everyone to see. When she saw these photos her moth...

Amazon has taken the world by storm, to say the least. Amazon was created on July 5, 1994, in Seattle, Washington and since its first release, it has changed drastically. At first, the websites primary use was to sell books now they are selling over millions and millions of different products ranging from phone cases to food. The website looked very disorganized and the navigation bar at the top of the website was very crowded by 2001. In 2017 Amazon was the number #1 most viewed retail site on the internet reaching 197 million people. The second most view retail website was Walmart reaching almost 127 million people. In the early 2000 Amazon was making 600 million dollars per quarter but that changed drastically once the website had an outage where they lost $120,000 every minute. Also in the early 2000s, they started to move away from only selling books to selling more products. This change forced them to move the very crowded, disorganized navigation bar to the side. In 20...

After watching the video in class about how the supreme court works was very helpful. The supreme court originally had 6 chief justices but over time the number of Chief Justices increased to 10 which is what we have today. The supreme court receives about 10,000 petitions a year and they choose which cases they want to go forward with. Majority of the supreme court cases that we see are appeals from lower courts and these cases come from the federal level courts. They won't just take cases that are appeals but they will take cases from the lower federal court that cannot agree on how to interpret the law involved. they accept a wide variety of cases every year. By taking a case that involves an issue that has led to differing opinions in lower courts.