British Journalists Arrested for Phone-hacking

NYT reports that a 3rd British journalist has been arrested for phone-hacking voice mail messages of British celebrities and royalty. All 3 journalists were from the tabloid, "The News of the World," so we could be thinking, ok tabloids, their employees obviously have lower standards and virtually no journalistic integrity. And this is in Europe so we could fall back on our patriotism and say Americans don't rely as heavily on tabloids for their news and our journalists wouldn't sink so low. But as the Times article points out this tabloid is, "one of Britain's most widely circulated newspapers." So people are getting their news from there as opposed to more prestigious publications just like many people get their news from blogs and The Daily Show today.

This provokes us to ask several probing questions: Aside from obviously illegal activities such as these British journalists were caught doing, how low can standards be set for such "news" sources? Some of these like Jon Stewart don't consider themselves "real news" so he can escape from such standards and restrictions and really get to the heart of the matter. But conversely like the British journalists, if these news sources don't have restrictions they could really begin to infringe upon people's privacy. What do you think? Do you think these "news" sources need some standards set?

Bloggers Creating Issues in Education

We read about blogs, bloggers and blog readers for class this week and we discussed the influence most blogs have on the political world. They inform citizens by linking to various news media websites and other blogs and they also have an advocacy function and some (mostly liberal apparently) urge their readers to take some sort of action, - write to their local politician, attend rallies, etc.

A NYT article entitled, "Bloggers Challenge President on Standardized Testing," suggests that a blogger's role extends beyond just informing and advocating already existing issues, but they can actually create issues that the government then needs to address. Education bloggers commented on Obama's speech last week and how he said that there are too many "high-stakes" standardized tests in his school. Meanwhile his Department of Education is producing additional standardized tests that will be administered several times per year as opposed to just once a year.

The bloggers seem to have cornered Obama into addressing an issue that the traditional media outlets didn't think was an issue. Obama and his administration answered the accusations by saying that the additional tests were for assessment and are meant to test how much the students are actually learning, and are not given for grades. This would take pressure off the students for the year-end standardized tests which are graded. It's just interesting how much muscle power bloggers have obtained. Do you know of any other issues that bloggers have created recently?