***Main & Minor Posts***

For 5% of your assignment grade, students will write one main post chosen from a list of discussion topics and at least four minor posts to comment on other students’ comments. Your main post should contain your position or ideas that are supported by facts, evidence, support, or explanation on how you arrived at your conclusion. Feel free to be truthful and honest while being respectful to others who may disagree with your opinions. 

You should if at all possible to try to site your sources so feel free to copy web addresses and other sources for your information.

Please write your name in hangul and indicate your student ID number next to your name to receive full credit for this assignment.

1. Where do you get the majority of your news? Why? What is the bias of the reporting from that news? Who owns the news broadcasting company and does the broadcasting company’s bias toward news match the political position of the owner(s)?  What is the political position of the news broadcasting company you watch or listen to?  Watch one piece of news from multiple sources and answer the following questions: Were the news reporting all the same? What were the differences?  Which information was the same? What did you conclude from the multiple sources of the same news? Why?

2. Many international especially the American news flows through one medium; what is it?  What is their political position?  How are their news reporting of someone from the same political party?  Was it fair or biased? If so, how?  How are their news reporting of the opposing political positons? Was it fair or biased?  Find one particular news source and answer the following questions: Was the news evidence based or emotional based? Did it contain all the facts or was it speculation?

3. Listen to a podcast of the following persons and choose to write about any of the topics discussed on the show. Mark Levin, The Ben Shapiro Show, Rush Limbaugh.  Find a topic they discuss in the podcast and find the same news in the mainstream media such as CNN and FOX news in the U.S. Were there any information omitted? Where? Why do you think so?  What is the political position of the CNN news? FOX news?  What kind of conclusion can you draw from what you have observed?

4. Watch Tucker Carlson show and he discusses many hotly debated topics such as the immigration policies of the U.S., the threat of freedom of speech on college campuses, transgenderism, North Korean nuclear threat, and so on.  What is the position of Tucker Carlson? Was his reasoning logical? Why or why not? Did he give good evidence to support his claims?  How did his guests do on defending their position?  Would you like to be a guest on the Tucker Carlson show? Why or why not?

5. Watch CNN news and FOX news on President Trump.  Are there any differences? If so, what are they?  Is there a running theme you can notice from either of these broadcasting agencies about President Trump? For example, are they all negative or positive and are the reasons justified with evidence? Is the news you see in Korea about President Trump reflective of the CNN or FOX news?  Why do you think so?

6. In the recent news about United Air incident involving an Asian man being dragged out of the seat of the air plane, what information was told by the Korean news? Compare and contrast that with the news told by the American news. Did everyone report the same news? Why or why not? Which information was added or omitted. Was this an act of racism by United Air? Why do you think so?  What is racism? Provide evidence of racism. 

7. Do a small experiment on multiple internet search engines including the world's largest search engine; google. Who owns google.com? What are his/her beliefs?  Who did they recently vote for in the presidential elections? Does that have any impact on the search results?  Search for the same topic of interest on all the search engines and share your results here.  What did you observe that was striking? How the does search results match that of the owner's of the search engine?

8. Who owns www.facebook.com? What are his/her beliefs? Who did he/she vote for in the recent presidential elections? Facebook is trying to filter news being fed into the newsfeed.  What options are they looking to implement to sort out true news from fake news?  Do you see any areas of trouble of implementing such filtering device for what is "real news"?  Who ultimately controls the information that we're given?  After finding this out, would you continue to use facebook? For which functions or reasons would you continue to use facebook? 


9. If you have any ideas other than what's listed above, please come see me to discuss it.

Good luck! I'm looking forward to reading your findings!