Every network has their own way of reporting news. For example, Fox News reports in a strictly conservative manner while MSNBC is very liberal. The same spreads to newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts in terms of what they choose to report and not to report. I especially noticed this after watching an Al Jazeera report and a CNN report on President Obama's birth control policy.
President Obama's policy states that religion employers must offer free contraception to female employees. Representatives of the Catholic church are against the policy because the initial version of it would have forced them to pay for the contraception. After a decent amount of backlash, the president revised the policy with the government taking on the expenses.
I compared both the Al Jazeera and CNN reports and found them to have some similarities while being largely different. In the Al Jazeera report, I found that they spent more time talking about the problems with the initial policy rather than talk about the revision. In fact, the revision wasn't mentioned until the last forty-five seconds of the report. They also spent a lot of time interviewing Republicans asking them about their views on policy. Though, the interviews seemed out of place with the rest of the report with one person saying that he doesn't support the policy because he's Christian. Another person said that she doesn't agree with abortions but I don't see exactly what that has to do with revision. Bias? I wouldn't doubt it.
CNN's report stuck more to the revision and why the policy was being changed. Instead of interviewing someone at CPAC, they interviewed the president of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue, who still opposed the bill but gave reasons as to why he doesn't support it. They also noted that with the revision, many religious groups support it, since they don't have to pay for it. Bias? Hard to say. I feel that they stayed a little more in the grey area.
From what I say, it seems as though Al Jazeera's reporting is more biased towards conservatives as they didn't represent anyone who supported the original policy or the revision. Since I'm not conservative, they definitely won't get me to watch anymore of their coverage.
In today's society, people have been influenced the media in many ways. While the media can credited for various accomplishments, like spreading awareness for illnesses, the media also can be blamed for how people view themselves in society.
Many movies and television shows use the motto "Sex sells" to reach the audience. These images distort the human mind making some think that they should look like the actors on-screen. But none of what's shown is real. Most men don't have massive biceps and most women are not tall, thin as a rail, and blonde; it creates a false image.
The same can be said for a character on a show that smokes and drinks. While it might not be the greatest influence on a person's mind, it can make someone believe that it's a social norm (whether the person is a kid or an adult). It's the same concept as a kid going through middle or high school. I can't say that I haven't been influenced by the media in some way. I'm a big guy so looking at other images of men I end up believing that I need to look something that to be at least somewhat impressive to the general public. It may be one the reasons why I've been working out and watching my calorie intake. I feel I would be happier if I looked like some of the guys in the media but even I realize that these portrayals aren't real.
If I had the choice to emulate what we see in the media in real life, I would reject it. If we all looked and acted like the people we see in the media, then there wouldn't be any unique people left. I thought about it over the weekend and really, no one is any better than anyone else. No one is perfect so how can anything portrayed in movies, television shows, and magazines be perfect? We're all equal in that we all have some flaws, but it's those flaws that make us who we are. Is anything in the media real? Of course. Not everything is fake but as a society we need to look past what's fake and not accept it as the truth.
I've recently been watching a lot of James Rolfe's online series, "The Angry Video Game Nerd," and it got me thinking about how many poorly designed games are out there. These games are on all game devices and it's rather pathetic that so many exist.
Just looking at this game makes me want to thrust forks into my eyes.
The video features foul language and is not appropriate for children.
(video: Angry Video Game Nerd, Lester the Unlikely review)
Many of these games are cheap cash-ins using famous cartoon characters or comic book heroes to promote and sell the games to children. Since the majority of the market lies with casual gamers, developers and publishers design poor quality titles just to make a quick buck. This is commonly the case with movie tie-ins. I had a bad experience with a movie-based game and it will forever haunt me till the day I die. That game was Atlantis: The Lost Empire for the GameBoy Advance.
When I was a kid, I felt that just about every video game I played was at least decent. I never experienced bad game design until this piece of crap hit retail shelves. I wanted a new game and since I liked the movie it was based on (key word: "based") so I convinced my mom to buy me the game. We were at Walmart when I got it so the moment my mom purchased it, I went to the front of the store, tore off the packaging, and shoved the game in my GBA. I only ever made it up to the fourth level but every single level was horrible. The second level was the worst thing I ever played. You're given about three minutes to go through the entire level to rescue the crew. The problem is that there's no way to know where any of these idiots are. Then to top that, the screen's flashing, steam's killing you, and before you know it you're almost out of time. I hated the game so much that two weeks later I took it to EB Games (now GameStop) to trade it in. The guy at the counter told me that my game was worth six cents; we paid $29.99 for the game and I was being offered next to nothing in return. I took some time to think about it but I quickly realized that no one in their right mind would pay me anything more six cents for that piece of crap. I accepted the offer, and I probably lost the money they gave me.
Screw this stage and screw this game!
Most movie tie-ins suck but there was an even larger turd that came out last year titled Duke Nukem Forever. I was not willing to buy the game but I did download the demo. What I downloaded was a bland, broken mess of a game. The jokes were stupid and the character models looked like crap. The controls felt loose and unstable so overall, it sucked. Gearbox should be ashamed for promoting, let alone releasing, such a broken game. But what can you expect from a game that was in development for ten years?
This game should have been delayed indefinitely.
There are so many awful games that it almost makes me ashamed to call myself a gamer. It was the large amount of low quality titles that caused the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, along with the over-saturation of consoles, and that same event could occur again. People play video games to be immersed in another world, to have an innovative experience, and to have fun, not to be ripped off.
There will always be bad games but the amount of them needs to lower. Developers need to spend more time making their games functional and for that to happen publishers need to give them that time. Sonic the Hedgehog '06 was a mess because of time constraints but if Sega would have been given the time they needed, I have no doubt that the title would have done much better. These games can make or break a company's reputation and can hurt the console it was developed for. This leads to studio closings which lead to layoffs in the industry. Take note: consumers would much rather play a quality title over a rushed, unoriginal, broken piece of crap.
