Popular Media Sources

For this weeks blog post, the class all searched for examples of our topics in popular media sources. As sociologists, we analyzed the way certain media sources portray different social issues. You can see throughout the different forms of media the different impacts they have on viewers. In a lot of the social topics, we were given the contrast of videos and articles being used. I found these two sources to give information in their own way which in turn causes different audiences and emotions to be effected. Videos tended to have more of an emotional connection to them, especially the video we watched on the foster care system. This form of media is often used to show more of the personable side of stories. Articles on the other hand are how people get all of the data across to the public and giving more facts. While some articles were able to find a happy-medium to the stories presented, a lot of the time they are missing crucial parts to reasons behind the story, the data, or the emotion. They also tend to be one-sided stories that don't take into account the opposing sides' perspective. For a sociology major, we can often see these pieces that are missing but for an average person, a lot of the time, they don't get all of the information. 
We have always been told, "don't believe everything you read on the internet," and this can be applied to all other forms of media. While we would like to think that we are getting accurate data from the news and online, we have to be cautious and look at more than one source for our information. This is how sociologists research because we know that there are always more than just one perspective on social issues.