When the term ‘safe space’ is looked up on a search engine, either of two things happen in the report. The first is that the articles are either against safe space, a few going as far as expressing hostility towards those involved with the issue. The second is that articles will join ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’ together and mention them only in passing. It is often more about an event that occurred and issue safe spaces is never fully addressed. What kind of journalism is being used by news companies like FOX and Huffington Post when writing about safe spaces that ends in leaving information out? How biased are their reports, whether on TV or a written article? In this essay, I’d like to write about the types of journalism used in …show more content…
The size of these spaces can be from a small lounge to the entire campus. The definition of where or what a safe space is depends on the school. The first thing about the news articles covering safe spaces is their bias. Articles found in FOX, for example, tend to have a conservative bias in their reporting for this issue. In the video clip “Gutfeld: Safe Spaces Make Life More Dangerous”, hosts discuss the event that happened in UC Berkeley, where a conservative’s speech was cancelled due to students protesting. The hosts take one side and do not explore any other views. The video itself is informal and hostile towards the students. It is clear what the hosts’ view is on the event. As for the other side, articles on from websites that are more liberal range from supporting students to being against their request for safe spaces. Slate, for example, has an article written by Catherine Piner called “Michigan State Opens a Women-Only Study Space to Men After a Title IX Complaint” where she writes about a women-only safe space that was disbanded when a conservative professor sued and made it gender neutral. The author’s tone in this news article was almost sympathetic towards the students that lost their safe space. Other articles like a blogpost on Huffington Post wrote a satire about trigger warnings. This article, called “A Generic Trigger Warning for …show more content…
A few articles did not give much information. The amount of coverage depends on the author and not on the political view so I’ll be observing what the authors left out. The FOX News video clip left out some information about why the students’ intentions for protesting in front of a conservative’s speech. The interview done in the clip was from one, seemingly at random, person within the protest march. Their role in organizing the protest was undisclosed. There are multiple ways this could have been interpreted. The protesters could have been there with individual intentions. It cannot be trusted that the person interviewed was the representative of the protesters. In fact, the interview was almost unrelated to the issue spoken of besides the fact that the interviewee was involved in the protest. Their use of the interview clip does not work as evidence against ‘safe spaces making life dangerous’ as their title claims. As for the liberal articles, the story from Slate has a similar problem. Piner’s article on MSU covered the main points and gave some context. The only flaw in the coverage would be the lack of diverse opinions. The only interviews in the story are with students who created a petition to get the women-only lounge back. There weren’t any voices from the opposed side. Moshman’s article is an opinionated piece addressed to any students who agree to safe spaces and trigger warnings. It doesn’t offer
First they explain how students have recently started expecting that their professors publish trigger warnings, alerts that students expect with anything that may cause distress, in the name of protecting students who may be reminded of trauma by being exposed to certain topics. While proving the fallacies in the concept of trigger warnings, Lukianoff and Haidt quote Harvard professor, Jeannie Suk 's essay about teaching rape law when students are determined to have protection from unpleasant ideas and demand trigger warnings. She says it is like trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he 'll become distressed at the sight of blood (48).” This shows how the students’ desire for protection cause difficulties in teaching for
They should start discussions about rape and sexist cases because it’s going on in today’s society and for people to know it’s okay to talk about it if it ever happened to them. Colleges need to prepare students for the real word so they need to have real life discussions in class for the students that are growing up and entering the workforce. College campuses are going through the mircoagression theory and professors fear to talk about trigger warnings in class when both students and professors should have freedom of speech in classrooms. “One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings,” Roff wrote, “is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history.” (49). Professors try to avoid teaching material that will upset sensitive students, but instead they should start warning students about the materials they are going to teach and set boundaries so students can know what they are about to learn to prevent teachers from getting in trouble or risk getting fired from their
Teachers become afraid to challenges students values and beliefs, also creating a repressive area for debates. The article “On Trigger Warnings” by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) states that “the presumption that need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual”. Demanding trigger warnings make comfort more of a priority than learning. Faculty may feel like they need to warn students about the course material because some students might find it disconcerting, but the voluntary use of trigger warnings on syllabus could be counterproductive. Just because some material may cause one person to have trauma does not mean everyone will and by putting a trigger warning on the syllabus might cause others to expect something upsetting. This could cause students to not read assignments or it might provoke a response from students they otherwise would not have had. Trigger warnings also signal an expected response and discourage the reading experience and even eliminate spontaneity. Trigger warnings make students into victims and makes both teachers and students fearful to ask questions because it might make someone uncomfortable. The goal is to educate and challenge students, make students question things and debate on things that they normally do not think about. AAUP also says that “the call for trigger warnings comes
In Roxane Gay 's op-ed, "The Seduction of Safety, on Campus and Beyond", she states, "Rather than use trigger warnings, I try to provide students with the context they will need to engage productively in complicated discussions", and this is exactly what I am talking about. People who understand that freedom of speech does not have to be taken away in order to stop "triggering" people. Communication is key and freedom of speech is our given right that allows us to communicate our thoughts and feelings. When I searched, "safe spaces in universities" on google, all I could find was article after article of people criticizing safe spaces and giving reasons why they should not happen on college campuses. The most used reason, was a reason that Shulevitz used as well, that safe spaces create ignorance in the growing teenager and become problematic. While this may be true, I feel I should of found more articles like Gay 's, emphasizing with victims and understanding the need for safety sometimes, but without ignorance. The world is scary, hurtful, and breaks you as you grow older. Safe spaces are needed for comfort, they can bring peace, and give someone a person who understands. It 's wrong to put college students behind a door and shut them in so they are not "triggered" by someone 's opinion, but it 's also wrong to not acknowledge that sometimes, people just need to take a break from all the speech in the world and re-cope themselves to
Trigger warnings” are warnings that the following content contains strong writing or images which could upset people who have dealt with painful experiences. As of recently trigger warnings have spread from blogs to college classes. Angus Johnston, a history professor at the City University of New York, said that trigger warnings can be a part of "sound pedagogy," noting that students encountering potentially triggering material are "coming to it as whole people with a wide range of experiences, and that the journey we 're going on together may at times be painful. This rhetorical analysis is on an editorial found online on March 31, 2014. The LA Times is a paid daily newspaper located in Los Angeles, California. This editorial’s audience is
The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, is an article published by the Atlantic Journal about the negative effects trigger warnings and microaggressions have on students in college. Trigger warnings are disclaimers about any potential emotional response from a class or its material. (44) Microaggressions are words or actions that have no sinister intentions, but people take as such. (44) Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (47) As the leader of the foundation, Greg Lukianoff has witnessed and fought many legal occasions of trigger warnings and microaggressions resulting in the masking of freedom of speech. Coauthor Jonathan Haidt is a professor at New
Although trigger warnings sound like a harmless idea to many, there is an extreme controversy about whether or not they should be used in college lectures. Many college professors have conflicting views about trigger warnings; some agree on using them while others are against it. This debate topic is particularly intriguing in Kate Manne’s article in the New York Times titled, “Why I Use Trigger
The news media rejects the fact that they are biased. They claim that they are the “middle of the road,” and are neutral on the stories that they cover. Publishers also claim that they are the watchdog for the political system, and they make sure that the system is free of any corruption, or wrongdoing. Th...
In October of 2011, the media could no longer ignore the thousands of protesters camping in Zuccotti Park calling themselves Occupy Wall Street with their battle cry of “We are the 99 percent” (Gitlin 50). The social movement began to bring awareness on economic inequality in which 99 percent of the wealth was controlled by one percent of the population. The name Occupy Wall Street began because the protestors were occupying the space outside of Wall Street through setting up tents and refusing to leave the location (Gitlin 26). As more and more protestors flocked to the camps, the movement broadened its goals to include a wide variety of issues including agriculture, housing and student loans. Described as lacking any clear-cut goals for the movement by the media, news pundits bickered over the credibility of the movement and if these protestors would create the next social revolution in the United States (DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun 491). The coverage of the movement varied from newspaper to newspaper, but the framing of coverage continued to show a disorganized, but large movement that showed no signs of stopping. As Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, the public became aware of sexual assaults occurring within the Occupy Wall Street camps. As a result of this information, media began covering these assaults as part of their Occupy Wall Street coverage.
In “Reporting the News” by George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, and Robert L. Lineberry, the main idea is how the media determines what to air, where to get said stories that will air, how the media presents the news, and the medias effect on the general public. “Reporting The News” is a very strong and detailed article. The authors’ purpose is to inform the readers of what goes on in the news media. This can be inferred by the authors’ tone. The authors’ overall tone is critical of the topics that are covered. The tone can be determined by the authors’ strong use of transitions, specific examples, and phrases or words that indicate analysis. To summarize, first, the authors’ indicate that the media chooses its stories that will air
Through manipulation and lies, media manages to modify objective news into biased news in order to convince the public of what the media wants them to believe. The article, “How the Media Twist the News”, by Sheila Gribben Liaugminas discusses the major influence that news has on readers based on their choice of stories and words. “How the Media Twists the News” has borrowed from multiple other texts such as the books like Public Opinion and Liberty and News, news magazine writers such as Ruderman, and news networks like CBS through Bias, A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and CNN to make her arguments valid and prove that the news is biased and that it does influence readers significantly because of it.
It is not uncommon to hear people complaining about what they hear on the news. Everyone knows it and the media themselves knows it as well. Some of the most renowned journalists have even covered the the media’s issues in detail. Biased news outlets have flooded everyday news. We find that journalism’s greatest problems lie in the media’s inability for unbiased reporting, the tendency to use the ignorance of their audience to create a story, and their struggles to maintain relevance.
As mentioned earlier, most safe spaces are mainly located on college campuses, the article by Katrina Trinko, states that people think that college should be a place where students, regardless if they are liberal, conservative, libertarian, or green, do encounter other perspectives. One of the main arguments against safe spaces is that if people are going to college to achieve a higher level education, you should be able to have enough faith in yourself to argue your reasonings (Trinko). Some colleges do not support safe spaces because they want their students to speak out for what they believe in without fear of censorship (Trinko). According to the article by Howard Schweber, colleges that do not support safe spaces want their college to be a free society, where people are open to listening and permitting ideas. People feel that offering safe spaces would shelter students and not expose them to real world situations.
"Journalism Ethics Online Journalism Ethics Gatekeeping." Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen. Web. 05 Dec. 2010. .
In trying to attract new audiences, news media have begun to transition from reporting to becoming a form of entertainment. With the meteoric rise of social media’s role as a news source, the fight for an increase of diversity in the media, and the ever-growing desire of immediate content, the future of responsible journalism is more important than ever. Ask yourself, why do I think the way I do? Where do my political views originate? How do I prove them? Most likely, it is due to the biased portrayal of issues in the media and the politicization that accompanies what we consume. Now, compare your views to your preferred news reporting entity. More than likely, they are the same.