Media Law & Literacy

In October of this year a women named Swati Runi Goyal boarded an American Airlines Flight and not long after boarding a crew member told Goyal to get her things and follow him to the front of the plane. Goyal was told by the crew member that she need to either change her shirt or she would get kicked off of the plan. The shirt that she was wearing said "Hail Satan", Goyal is not a Satan Worshipper and the shirt is meant to be an ironic shirt to advocate for separation of church and state and for religious freedom. The crew member of the American Airlines flight told Goyal that "Our crew has found your shirt to be offensive". American Airlines websites states that passengers are required to "dress appropriately" and avoid "offensive clothing", although it does not state what items are offensive, so it leaves it up to the crew to decide. The crew members would not let Goyal keep her shirt displayed, they delayed takeoff and brought a customer se

Confirmation Bias is the tendency of giving more weight to things that align with your own views. Even when your views are challenged and the side going against you has more evidence and you only find a small amount of evidence to support your side, you would still go with the side that aligns with your own views. So let's consider what a debate over gun control would be like with confirmation bias. One person, Amy supports gun control and only researches articles that go along with her beliefs of their being limitations on gun ownership. Another person, Adam opposes gun control and he finds sources that support his beliefs. When they both see shooting on the news they interpret it to go along with their beliefs even if they are looking at the same exact articles and watching the same news. Click here  to find out more about Conformation Bias.

Mainstream media is media outlets such as newspapers, news stations, and other news sources that most people know of and believe to be "reliable". Mainstream media are the most popular news stations and outlets that normally adults rely on getting their news from. Although, mainstream media has become very distrustful recently as these companies have political views that align with a side, even though they are meant to be unbiased. "Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults in the current survey say their trust in the news media has decreased in the past decade. Just 4 percent say their trust has increased, while 26 percent indicate their trust has not changed." Recently, on June 22, 2017, CNN got in trouble for reporting fake news, it is unknown if the reporters just didn't have their facts straight or if they were purposefully releasing fake news. Although, CNN retracted the story and forced the three reports who published it to leave the network.  Read more abou

I have been apart of social media for a long time, even though I have a lot of social media I rarely ever post on any of them. When I first started on social media I posted photos all the time, since then I have rebranded and deleted all of the photos I previously had. None of them were bad but I was young and did not know that a bunch of filters over a photo of my face didn't look good. I think that not really posting can be both good and bad. It is good because I can't risk anything bad being released because I am upset or sad because I do not post normally anyway so social media is not a coping mechanism. Although I end up not using important sites such as Linkedin as much as I should so I am not networking as much as the average person on social media does. When I googled myself the first thing to pop up was my LinkedIn but unfortunately since I do not post a lot all that was on my LinkedIn is my resume. Following that is an old Pinterest page I used maybe 3 times and

Snapchat became a very huge social media outlet for teens and young adults as it was a way to communicate with images and messages that would disappear. Unlike Instagram or Facebook that also appeared during this age of technology, parents would not be able to track what their kids were doing except with snapchat stories. Snapchat was created by students that went to Stanford, it had a slow start, but after rebranding it became a huge hit will school kids. People were able to send photos and texts and they would go away once they were opened. It also tells you if someone takes a screenshot of your messages or snaps. So a lot of people really early on after the rebrand used Snapchat because it was so different to everything else out there. Because it became so huge with kids I feel that it strays away from the curve that we learned about. As many adults do not use snapchat, really only teens and young adults use it. So I am sure in the realm of teenagers and young adults it follo