Forwarding "how social media is changing journalism" and "Against long form journalism"

            When reading the first journalism piece “Against Long Form Journalism” by Bennet, one part in particular caught my eye. She spoke about how editors “trim the fat” off stories or articles to make them fit a specific part. She says they “took all the color out”. This was obviously a frustration for her until she herself became an editor and was on the other end.

            This idea lends me to think of other things that the “fat is trimmed off” in our society. Not only has the media perfected this, but they also use it against celebrities, and people in general to cause drama out of fabrications. They could take a perfectly innocent story and blow it up into some tragic, misleading catastrophe. For instance, the new story that olympian Bruce Jenner is becoming a woman, this is one of the newest fabrications to date. Just because he has grown out his hair and is going through a divorce with his wife, the media has taken these two seemingly unrelateable facts and linked them together. So yes, currently according to the tabloids, Bruce Jenner is becoming a woman. They are taking a sensitive subject for anyone that has gone through divorce and blamed his and his wife’s decision on separating on his decision to want to be a woman. The media really thrives on lies, and the hurt they cause people, just by the rewards in revenue they get for the stories they produce.

            This then leads me to think of the insensitivity the media has for other celebrities going through tough times in their lives. For instance, Patrick Swayze who is now not with us, was constantly photographed until his death in a very rude and public matter. No one should have to go through the devastating truth of knowing they are going to die at a young age, but to have it publicized to the whole country is on another level. People may say that celebrities should know what they are getting into when they reach fame and it is their own fault that their lives are broadcasted on a country wide level. This is where I think we have failed as human beings.

            What happened to our sensitivity? It makes me question how we can treat other human beings that are just the same as us in such a barbaric way. I am sure everyone was bullied in school when they were younger and it is a shame that we can not learn from the pain we were put through at a young age and inflict it on others as we grow older. No one is willing to put themselves in others shoes and think of others before their own greed and that is what makes the media and the people associated with it ugly and immoral.

            I know a lot of campaigns are being put in place to stop bullying at younger ages, but what about bullying that happens as adults? Much can be said about our society on the way we treat others, and from what has gone on I think it says very little about us. Which leads me to my next point about the video “How social media is changing Journalism”. In the video they said that if an idea does not succeed on Facebook then it most likely would not “succeed” later on in real life.

            This goes back to my spiel on bullying, if children, just like “the ideas” spoken about in the video, are bullied and do not think they can succeed in real life because of the consequences of bullying like a lack in confidence and not having friends, then this creates a huge issue. Everything that happens in childhood affects the person you will one day become. Some children do not even make it that far. Bullying is a prevalent issue in our society and children are committing suicide left and right from this issue. Just last month, a 10 year old child from my elementary school hung himself one morning because he did not want to attend school because another kid told him he was going to beat him up. Imagine the fear in a ten year old that would make him commit such a crime to himself.

            As a future educator, this will be one of the things I will have zero tolerance for. I think it is a teacher’s duty to protect his or her students and I plan to meet this head on. I never want my students to feel as if they cannot come to school or be scared to the point where they would injure themselves before they let others injure them. I always think what I would say to my class on the first day of school when I go over the protocol of my classroom, the rules and what not; and bullying has always been at the top. I will try my hardest to protect my students from bullying so that they don’t feel that they will not “succeed” at the hand of someone else’s torment.