Documentary Night

For the first time in a while I feel like I've managed to get caught up with all of my school related reading. It's really nice to feel like you're ahead of the game, instead of continually behind. I have a few more sections of USA Today to read tonight and then I need to review the AP Stylebook and then I'm done for the night. That is a really nice feeling.

It was muggy outside the majority of the day, which made walking to and from class uncomfortable. I'm glad I had long sleeves though because it seemed like every single one of my classes was freezing.

After class I came back to my dorm and did some cleaning. The sink in the bathroom was getting pretty gross honestly.

Tomorrow I'm planning to Volunteer at a sort of local Elementary school. They're having a "Curriculum Carnival", so that should be interesting. Tomorrow afternoon I have to make a call and confirm that I can get a ride there and back.

This evening though was really interesting. I went to the 'premiere' of a documentary that was produced by a couple professor's from MSU. The name of the documentary is "Arabs, Jews, and The News". The website for the film can be found here: http://www.arabsjewsnews.org/ . After they played the documentary they had a panel with several of the 'commentators'. It was really interesting to listen to.

Something that really interested me about what was said, was the commentary on the media and the way that they have looked at issues currently taking place in the middle east. I do think that the media often gets hung up on portraying situations in particular ways and failing in many ways to be truly objective. What I mean when I say that is they fail to take an issue and look at it from new perspectives.

For example one of the men on the panel was Nolan Finley from The Detroit News. He talked about covering the rallies that took place in Dearborn. He felt that it was very important to cover the fact that there were people there who supported Hezbollah and equated Jews with the Nazi's. Now, perhaps it is a fact that that was taking place as the photographs confirm, but if reports from several people who were there are true those who were doing so were the minority. In fact, it has been said that those who were holding these signs were asked to discard them by others at the event. This could easily have been the focus of an article, rather than merely the fact that those individuals were there.

Sometimes it's about looking for the less obvious angle...