IT’S OVER

Enough already with last years presidential election, it’s a year now, can’t we just deal with the fact that George Bush is our president. I have no reason to lie, I didn’t vote for him, and I actually didn’t like him , but the real reason why I didn’t like him was because of his father and the horrible job I felt he did in his years as president.
Even though I didn’t vote for him, I have come to the realization that Bush is our president and there is nothing I can do about it, and for that fact there really is nothing anyone can do about it. He own the election in terms of the votes as they were recorded and therefore he is our president.
The reason I am writing this blog about this topic is because of the release of the unofficial recount done by a consortium of media outlets. The New York Times did an extensive report on the recount in it’s Monday, Nov. 12th edition. The Times had a total of four stories and six graphs depicting the different ways that the votes could have been counted. I felt that all they needed to do was print their first paragraph which was their lead and read, “A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last years presidential election reveals the George W. Bush would have won even if the United State Supreme Court had allowed the state wide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.” I felt that this one sentence told the whole story, and there was no need to go into the different ways the votes could have been counted and the results if they had been counted in those different ways, all that matters is that the group of people recounting the votes agree with the final outcome.
Don’t get me wrong I would love to know if we have the right president or not, but as far as I am concerned we have our president and it is George W. Bush, and if that turned out to be wrong we are not going to change presidents right now and were not going to say in three years when Bush is done with his first term that since we screwed up four years ago, were now going to give Gore his chance to be president. Its also not like we are going to have a re-vote either,

IT’S OVER, IT’S DONE, LET’S GET ON WITH IT!!!!

I don’t understand why there are so many different ways that we can count the votes, as far as I am concerned their should be one way to count the votes, and the way I feel is that is our whole problem, we have to many ways of voting and ways of counting those votes. Everyone in United States should vote in the same manner, whether it be written, manual or computerized and the way we count the votes should all be the same, that way the chance for something to go wrong is reduced considerably.

Related Information:

The Hartford Courant article about the recount of the Florida results LINK

CNN’s coverage of the Florida recount LINK

An in-depth coverage from the St. Petersburg Times, include multiple graphs. LINK

Journalism vs. Government

The responsibility of the media is to inform the American public of what it deems the people should know. In times of war however that responsibility can be thwarted by the government. The American people want to know about every move that the government makes in regards to the war against terrorism, but if government has its way they will block as much as possible for what it say’s is “the protection of the American people.” A report on MediaChannel.org spells out for us the importance of having accurate information about what our government is doing in our names.
In an editorial written by a group, including myself, for a journalism class I am taking at Central Connecticut State University we reported that Gen. Colin Powell told press that, "The press coverage of Desert Storm was unprecedented. Of the 2,500 scheduled journalists overall, 1,400 crowded the theater of operations at the peak. Compare this figure with 27 reporters going ashore with the first wave at Normandy on D-Day." For all the complaints, said Powell, the Gulf correspondents had much more freedom than their predecessors, and advocates the press pool strategy. "Of the 1,350 print stories submitted by pool reporters, one was changed to protect intelligence procedures." However what General Powell didn’t mention was that during World War II, the limited number of wartime correspondents was due to the relative expense of sending a correspondent out from the States to cover the war. Limited information out of Europe was not a military or political decision to limit access to the media representatives.
The right to free press is granted to the American people in the first amendment, with one acceptation during times of war the media can not report the numbers, location or sailing dates of American troops.
American people want and deserve to know what is the government is doing to protect their freedom, and they deserve to know what their friends and relatives are doing overseas in Afghanistan.

Links related to this topic:

A list of multiple articles and editorials written about media censorship in the US and Britain. Link

An article written on the call to TV networks to resist U.S. Government pressure to censor coverage. Link

A commentary, written by Phillip Knightly who is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Link

The report of an investigation by Alexandre Levy and Francois Bugingo, about the objectivity of the American Press in times of war. Link

‘The War on Journalism’ an article written by Paul McMasters, the First Amendment Ombudsman for the First Amendment Center. Link

I figured that my first real blog should probably reflect my thoughts regarding the horrible events of Sept. 11. First of all let me just say that my thoughts, prayers and condolences go out to all of the people involved and the victims both directly and indirectly affected by everything that happened. I think that the media did a good job in all of their reporting, but of course they had their problems. The first thing that I was totally upset by was the Hartford Courants special edition that they published at noon on the eleventh. I think it was very good that they did the special edition, but what bothered me the most was the major headline, AMERICA UNDER ATTACK. I beleive this could have had an affect like the War of the Worlds, there probably were people who hadn't heard of what happened and when they see that headline blaring from a roadside machine it could envoke panic in someone. One thing that I liked alot was the use of photographs on a lot of the news website. I found my self returning to the MSNBC web site daily to see the new pictures that had been published. I think this gave me a real understanding of what it felt like being in the middle of a disaster.
I know that we are all still dealing with what happened and it still produces a ton of news, but it is time that some of the local news stations return to their normal broadcast (for lack of a better word) rules/regulations. I find many of the local TV stations (especially NBC 30) still reporting for 25 minutes on the attacks and the rebuilding which is important, but there are many people who would like to know about what is going on locally. For example, yesterday there was an accidental shooting in Shelton, CT, and I found the news spent no more than two minutes on the shooting. This morning I was watching one of the cable news stations and in the ticker was the headline of former Pres. Clinton having his bar revoked. I thought this was a pretty large story and none of the stations I spent a few minutes on had anything more about this story.
Well, I must be going, I hope you enjoyed a few of my thoughts related to the attacks on the United States.

This is a test blog to make sure I know what I am doing.