InkTank

Looking Back While Pushing Forward

Nervous stomach. Dry mouth. Sweaty palms. A racing heart.

As I begin to learn a new city away from everyone the ones that I love, I have experienced a vast array of emotions and physical responses, excitement and fear coming to the forefront.

Anticipation for an opportunity to learn journalism in the most powerful city in America. Anxiousness to succeed and struggle at my internship, knowing that there will be ups and downs no matter how much I enjoy working for the Daily Caller.

Frightened as I'm riding the metro at 1 a.m., jogging late at night, realizing that one wrong turn would leave me helpless to find my way home. Knowing that on Tuesday, September 14th, I'm no longer simply a journalism student. I need to grow up and realize my potential. Hello world.

On this day, September 11th, nine years after the World Trade Center attacks, I have found myself reflecting much less on my own fear today as remembering the wave of anxiety that gripped me as a 12-year-old boy. Sitting in my computer class in sixth grade, a pervasive murmur took hold of the room until our teacher turned on the TV. For my developing mind, the image of airplanes colliding with symbols of my country were burned into my memory. The whole classroom was simultaneously confused and terrified by what was being shown.

Well, you know what happens when you assume...

I feel like you would have to be living under a rock to not know the Fort Hood shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was a Muslim. In fact, I am pretty sure I knew Hasan was a Muslim before the final death count. Between twitter feeds, blogs, and hard news articles, Hasan's religion seems to be the only area of focus to determine why a Army Major would do this. Yet one New York Times article, "Obama Offers Sympathy and Urges No 'Jump to Conclusions'" caught my eye as something different. Here's the lede...

The Role of Islam in Popular Media

Reviews: Essay, “Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media,” “Reporting Islam,” and “Muslims and the News Media.”

This post will be a review of the three different works I’ve sampled in the past two weeks. All of them are so interrelated that it makes sense to summarize them together.

“Local Contexts of Islamism in Popular Media”

In this essay, Lila Abu-Lughod talks about the degree to which Egyptian television serials in the past two decades have shaped Egyptian perceptions of Islamism, the piety movement. She notes that Egyptian television serials work differently from other nations. Egyptian serials run day-after-day for a maximum of 30 episodes and then they’re finished. And often these serials run through the nation’s religious authority, al-Azhar. She notes that in the early 90s, there were few depictions of Islam (or Islamism) in television serials.

“All that viewers could see were people for whom religion was taken for granted as part of their identity and that sometimes offered solace in times of personal trouble. Piety was seen only among the elderly” (Abu-Lughod 8).

Iraqi Archbishop found dead: Religious angle, anyone?

News that a kidnapped Iraqi Archbishop was today found dead was covered several different ways in the media, but real exploration of its religious context was hard to come by. Still, some tried.

Three articles, from The Washington Times, The New York Times and CNN.com, serve as good samplings of the coverage. I will talk about the pros and cons of each article, and pull out some references to demonstrate my point.

Bombs and Bikes

Next to the newly released surveillance photos in the Times Square bombing, CNN has a very confusing article about the case, “Photo of Times Square bombing suspect released.”

For someone who does not read the news as much as she should (especially for a journalist), I was honestly unaware that there had been a bombing on Thursday morning at the Armed Forces Recruitment center in Times Square.

The Blast: New York and Chicago Coverage

Online coverage of the Thursday bombing at  the military recruiting station in New York City's Times Square highlights how audience impacts a publication's news coverage.

Simply put: News outlets work for their local audience. Unless all people in the world read a particular publication cover-to-cover, this will probably always be true.