Recently at the University of Missouri students protested because of racial comments that they encountered on campus. The protests led to the resignation of the President of the University.
I am a journalism student and in almost every one of my classes we talked about what happened at the University of Missouri. I had heard about the issue and read an article explaining why the students decided to protest. But in class that is not what we talked about. We discussed the fact that the student protesters did not want a student reporter to take pictures of them and document the protest. We also talked about the professor of communications who said that they needed “muscle” to get rid of the journalist. We discussed how ridiculous it was that a professor of communications did not know the first amendment.
Although I think that it is concerning that students and professors of a university did not know the first amendment, I think it is more concerning that people focused on that instead of the real issue. The issue that racial comments still happen on college campuses, that students felt the need to protest because they felt uncomfortable in a place where they came to learn.
It made me think about the effect that media has on how we receive out news. How media tends to sensationalize the lesser issues, avoiding or passing over the more important issues that we should be talking about.
We have to learn how to sift through news in order to find the original story and fully understand what is happening. With the Missouri story many people hear of the issue because of the professor and the lack of understanding concerning the first amendment, they would have to go back to understand why the protests were even happening.
This showed me the importance of being educated news consumers and how important it is to focus on the issues that truly matter.
Read about the protest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/us/university-of-missouri-protests.htm…