Standing Ovation: News Post

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

News Post

The transformation in media technology has also altered government communications strategy. “The biggest White House press frustration is that nothing can drive a news cycle anymore,” Mark McKinnon, the media adviser, said. “In the old days, you could say, ‘We’d like October to be about the environment.’” Today, a vicious news cycle swallows most white house strategies. When the Berlin Wall went up, in 1961, President Kennedy was on vacation. “For six days, no one pressed him hard for a reaction,” Beschloss said. “If that happened now, President Obama would have three seconds.” While Obama was on vacation over Christmas in Hawaii, for three days he failed to respond to the foiled terrorist plot to blow up an American airliner. In his absence, Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, made a disastrous appearance in which she claimed that “the system worked.” Both she and Obama were savagely criticized.

Overall this passage is basically saying that with the new technological advancements in media we, United States citizens, demand immediate response and new. After Pres Obama had someone fill in for his place for a speech, during a very serious and largely televised event, and was criticized for the fact it wasn’t him responding. Auletta shows how this new attitude has changed, from previous attitudes, by using a similar situation with a different outcome as an example. In 1961 Pres Kennedy failed to make appearance about the Berlin Wall and no crap was thrown his way. She tries to show that because of the way media is beginning to set up it has changed our attitude about immediate news.

The two biggest words that stuck out to me were “savagely criticized” because savage is a pretty strong word. Some other words are “vicious” and “swallows” when she talks about this new news cycle. The use of these words shows the severity of how we need instant news.

Basically this passage discusses how the new media has affected to the way the government has to deal with media. To the overall article it shows how we have had an attitude shift due to this new media (due to technology.)

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Welcome

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Standing Ovation”! The title of this blog refers to the audience of active readers we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. I hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it!