Media Journal Writing
Part 1: Media Journal
Day 1: Monday, 23 October
Time: 8.00-8.30 am
Media: Magazine, AARP Magazine
Total time: 30 minutes
Day 2: Wednesday, 24 October
Time: 12.20-1.00 pm
Media: Television, CNN
Duration: 40 minutes
Day 3: Tuesday, 25 October
Time: 5.00-5.45 pm
Media: Newspaper, Newsday
Duration: 45 minutes
Total time for each medium
Television: 40 minutes
Newspaper: 45 minutes
Magazine: 30 minutes
Total usage for all media combined: 40+45+30=115 minutes (1hr 55 minutes)
Part 2: Essay
In my media logging exercise, I have mainly interacted with three types of mass media, the CNN television, the American Association of Retired People (AARP) magazine, and the Newsday Newspaper, for 115 minutes. During this interaction, I have learned the following issues. First, in the CNN, the story that touched me was on the stress faced by pregnant immigrants in America. This story showed that pregnant immigrants experience high blood pressure and stress which adversely affect their health and unborn babies. From this interaction, I learned that the cases of anxiety and depression are prevalent health complications among the immigrants and are linked with factors such as employment status, social instability or pre-existing health conditions (Howard, 2018 October 24). This feature also indicated that most of the pregnant immigrant women risk their lives and those of the babies since they do not attend health facilities for fear of having their immigration status exposed.
Secondly, my interaction with AARP Bulletin Magazine also taught me a few issues concerning the US midterm elections and what they mean for Age Discrimination Law. This magazine reported that 61% of older workforce experience age discrimination (Terrell, 2018). As such, the older workers have been relying on Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) to fight the workplace biases. However, the court rulings have weakened some of the elements in the ADEA, and therefore voters expect that after the midterm elections, the Congress will be able to strengthen the ADEA to ensure that the older workers are not discriminated. Other issues related to the midterm elections learned from the interaction with this magazine include the impact the election winners will have on Medicare’s future, social security and high prescription drug prices.
Thirdly, while interacting with Newsday newspaper, I came across an article on leadership. My desire to become an effective leader one day made me spend a better part of my time reading this article by Masson-Draffen, entitled, “Survey finds leadership is key to workers achievement.” Some of the important lessons about leadership that I learned in this article are: (1) leadership is about creating a conducive environment to influence others to achieve goals, (2) leadership is about getting the best of people, (3) effective leadership is characterized by self-direction, good communication, and people skills, clear performance objectives, and individual accountability, and (4) leaders lead by example and work harder than anybody else (Mason-Draffen, 2018, October 24).
The majority of the media that I have interacted with are owned by individuals. For instance, the AARP Magazine is owned by Ethel Percy Andrus (a retired educator from California) and Leonard Davis. The Newsday newspaper is owned by Charles Dolan and his son Patrick. The CNN is owned by Turner Broadcasting System, a division of AT&T’s Warner Media.
Based on my interaction with the above media, I was not surprised by my media consumption habits. I usually like issues related to politics, leadership and society, and business. Therefore, as seen in my media log, most of my interactions were related to these areas, for example, US politics, leadership and social issues such as older workers discrimination in the workplace, the relationship between leadership and work achievement, and problems facing pregnant immigrants in the US.
References
Howard, J. (2018, October 24). The stress pregnant immigrants face in America. CNN, Retrieved October 24, 2018, from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/23/health/pregnant-immigrant-women-every-mother-counts/index.html.
Mason-Draffen, C. (2018, October 24). Survey finds leadership is key to worker’s achievements. Newsday, Retrieved October 25, 2018, from https://www.newsday.com/business/leadership-top-workplaces-long-island-1.22428655.
Terrell, K. (2018, October). What the Midterm Elections Mean for Age Discrimination Law. Retrieved October 23, 2018, from https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-2018/age-discrimination-midterm-elections.html#quest1.