blog 10

I read an article about President Obama’s budget cuts and I found that the article seemed to work in his favor. They didn’t note anything bad about his cuts and that it is the rich of the country that are causing all of the problems. The article didn’t read like something from Truthout.org or blatantly say that something was wrong, but its word choice such as when it stated that republicans “Lambasted” the president. I found that the Aljazeera website was more liberal. This makes sense because the “conservative” Bush administration began the invasion on the Middle East and spoke out against any network that sympathized with the terrorist. The author of the article made it seem that republicans were at fault for the debt that the U.S is currently in.

I found that the BBC has a much less bias view on the news and that may be because they have no ads and no political party to answer to. The difference between Aljazeera and networks in the US is that Aljazeera has answered to political parties in the Middle East. American Networks are often owned by someone with some sort of political ideology.

Freedom to burn things...unfortuanately

I happen to agree with Mr. Eisenberg. I understand that we as citizens of the United States value and need to express our freedom by saying certain things however burning the Koran is taking it too far. The idea of freedom of speech is just that, speaking and writing (under the freedom of the press) however once you destroy an item that many in the world and U.S. find sacred you have taken it too far.

How are we supposed to portray to the world that we are a free nation where any one’s ideas can hold ground if we dismiss anything that is different? By giving the pastor in Florida the attention he wanted we are sending a message to the world that says “if you have an idea different than ours, we’ll burn it.” This is exactly how the people of Afghanistan who are not on either side will view it. This stunt will only create more problems for our troops and give Al Qaeda another tool for recruiting. Our free speech and right to protest must be done carefully and respectfully. It is one thing to protest something that you don’t find agreeable but it is another to destroy something that someone else finds sacred.

If the pastor even wrote an article saying that anyone who isn’t Christian is going to hell he would have caused less of a fuss than he did because there are thousands of people writing the same thing on different blogs. However a burning of something sends a clear message and regardless of how his actions are protected under the first amendment, they are not something that should be copied and only spread a message of hate from the Christian, United States to the rest of the world.