Blog Post #3

In my opinion I believe the fields that are talked about most represented within the media are political science and economics. The past election plays a major role in the new found popularity with politics and economics. You can't turn on the television or radio to any channel without seeing something being debated in regards to our economy and the shenanigans of Trump being analyzed and broke apart. Even before the past election the academic fields that always seemed to get the most discussion and traction were political science and economics. Media channels tend to focus on what they believe the people want to hear and with the state of the economy as it is and has been for the past 10 or so years, they believe the citizens want to know about the countries economic plans or what government officials plan to do. You see a lot of call upon academics within the political field to discuss their opinions of what needs to happen and analyze the decisions the current political party in power makes.

The fields that are least represented in the media are Sociology, Psychology, and the more personable fields. Topics such as the state of education, development of individuals, poverty, gender issues, or race issues are not what tends to be the primary focus of media content. All of these personal topics have a basis of psychological or sociological aspects although they are talked about in the media, its more of a forced discussion. Coverage on these are brought to the public's attention because of things like protests or individuals standing up and speaking out but they are never the planned topics of media outlets. When these types of topics are mentioned, they are not as thoroughly researched and experts in the fields are not called upon to discuss the topics. This in turn causes discussion and coverage of these issues to come across in a non-intellectual way which brings about more room for opposition and debate.


Comments

  1. UnknownApril 10, 2017 at 1:04 PM

    Good call on the less represented topics, Alesha. I didn't even think about poverty or education. I like what you said about protests bringing a forced discussion via media. Without many of those protests, I concur that the intellectual inquiry of those topics is rather bare-boned.

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