My Opinion Column

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After Edina High school changed their time to 8:30, 92% of the student’s parents favored the new schedule. Out of a survey of 30 students at Buffalo High School, only one of them said they got nine hours of sleep occasionally. 30% of these students said they receive only six hours of sleep, 33% said they receive seven hours, and another 30% said they received 8 hours of sleep. Every one of these students are still missing more than an hour of sleep than their bodies are supposed to. What is stopping District 877 from pushing BHS’s starting time to an hour later? Nothing. The school board has control of this, and they could make the decision right now if they wished. Imagine the car accidents that could be prevented, and the way over 1,000 students can improve their health and performance, such as grades, GPA and SAT scores, just because of that extra hour of sleep. Surveys conducted  by National Sleep Foundation show that 60% of high school students report extreme daytime sleepiness, and 25% fall asleep in class at least once a week.

My Sleep Story Idea

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My topic is loosely based on sleep. Why we need it, how much we need, why we won”t get enough, and how we can get enough sleep. I think it will be fairly easy to localize, because I’d say a majority of students are deprived of sleep whether the cause is themselves or something else. I might need to narrow my story down, but I think I can take a more broad approach for now and then focus in on a more specific topic. I have some interesting people to interview – Health teachers, students who have had an extreme lack of sleep and one who has stayed up for more than 24 hours and has slept through an entire day. I also have a cousin who is currently researching sleep at a facility in Denver, and I have found more than enough articles online that give statistics and biases. I’m also considering interviewing a college student, to see if their sleep habits have improved or not since they can choose their classes.

I’ve learned some pretty weird things, such as that sleep can help prevent things as simple as a cold to cancer, and that it can help weight loss and improve memory. The obvious reasons are health for the body and brain. Even though most people know sleep benefits these, I plan on covering them too.

I would like this to be somewhat of a persuasive story, because I think that school starts too early. I’m not sure how much I would incorporate a persuasion into it, but I would feel a little incomplete if I left my opinion out of it.

Deception In Journailism

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Many interviews, and even articles, have been made famous and controversial because of supposed deception. Even the lawsuit I covered, General Westmoreland vs. CBS, included deception. Gen. Westmoreland claimed that the interviewers had decieved him into releasing that information, but they didn’t get in trouble for it.

So would Westmoreland have still released the information if he wasn’t “decieved”? My guess is no, and then nobody would have known about Westmoreland lying to his superiors. So, in a way, deception in journalism has a certain justice.

I think that deception has a special place in journalism. It can either be definitely appropriate to get the truth, or overly excessive. The situation defines the morality of deception.

So when is it okay, and when is it not? In shows like To Catch a Predator, its used to ‘make things better’, and I’m not here to argue, but what draws the line between using deception to ‘make things better’ and when is it excessive and unnecessary?

The reason people use deception in the first place is to get someone to reveal more truth. If the reporters interviewing General Westmoreland had actually told him that they were interviewing him to get him to reveal that he’d lied to his superiors then chances are he wouldn’t have told them that.

I would be lying to myself if I said I don’t think Photoshop has a place in journalism. In fact, I would probably be too excessive with that if I had the power. The pictures in any publication would be half as bad as it is now if the pictures weren’t edited at all. I’m not saying every picture you have in your newspaper or magazine or whatever you publish, you can completely change the picture to whatever you want. Things like these need boundaries.

If you edit a picture you’re planning on publishing, you need to be cautious. The main idea needs to stay the same. Its okay if someone takes the pole out from behind he head of a gunshot victim, but if they put Ronald McDonald holding a gun smiling next to the gunshot victim, it’s completely different.

This is somewhat off topic, but I nee a moment to mention Fox News in a post about deception. They drive me nuts. I’m not saying that my news source isn’t biased (Comedy Central), but they don’t declare themselves as a major news network. They (Daily Show and Colbert Report) don’t have egomaniacal pundits telling people that a new ‘regime’ is going to install death panels that will euthanize everyone. I’m done venting. That is all.

My First Blog Post

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The most prominent and universal thing I learned from these cases is that anyone, including journalists, will catch you for almost anything you’ve done. People may get away with a few mistakes, but almost every scandal and secret has been quickly caught and written about profusely. As much as people think the media keeps things from them, it also tells them a great deal.

My group covered the Westmoreland v. CBS case, in which reporters for CBS discovered that Westmoreland lied to his superiors about how many Viet Cong they had opposed, purposely underestimating, so he could convince them to send more troops.

As for legal limitations placed on the media, I think they couldn’t get much better. I know that there may be some flaws, and maybe even some corruption, but it’s a lot better here than many other places. Other countries have regimes that falsely suspect journalists of spying or even worse, arrest them for discovering or at least attempting to discover something they ‘weren’t supposed’ to discover. Without these liberties that our country has for journalists, unstable (and unwanted) power would be a lot easier to sustain.

The limitations that the government gives the media are just, for the most part. Actions like Libel and Malice are illegal and that’s when the media corporation can get in trouble. In Westmoreland vs. CBS, General Westmoreland was accused in a then-recent CBS documentary (The Uncounted Enemy) of deliberate conspiracy against his superiors. Westmoreland sued CBS for libel, saying he was tricked into the interview in which he revealed that he did actually lie to his superiors.

CBS got testimonies from the CIA proving Westmoreland did in fact lie, and soon after Westmoreland withdrew the case, but still lost millions of dollars. Although CBS essentially “won” the case, they also lost millions of dollars too.