Part one: You are the news director of a local television station. The city council has just voted to close city parks 3 days a week to save money. Meanwhile, a major celebrity has died. The park story has greater effect on your viewers, but the celebrity death will get bigger ratings? Which do you make your lead story and why?

I would be as misleading as possible in order to gain as many viewers as possible. This is a bending of the ethics that govern journalism. I would make the city parks closing seem like it was my big story. All over the air ways I would claim to have the best coverage and the most accurate reporting and really make everyone believe that it is the big story. I would then proceed to put more coverage and air time on the dead celebrity as that has a bigger news appeal with a much broader audience. Over the course of the news hour I would continue to hint towards the closing of city parks for three days of the week to save on money was the next story. It will of course the be last story we covered as it is very simple but relevant to the community. This all comes down to ratings at this point, issues unless they area about going to war or something of that big nature will continue to get the least amount of air times. The current news media have to compete with online is changing to something of a news oriented variety show that will be borderline educational. More and more people are getting their news from the internet and other sources now more than ever and it is not getting any better so to preserve TV news we will change our formats to appeal to a broader audience, children may be affected by a park being closed but certainly do not want to have to sit through this as it would be boring to them. So in then end it all comes to ratings and a dead celebrity trumps relevant news anytime of the day.

Part two: Explain the effect of relationships among television, movies, and electronic games with culture.

I have seen with my own eyes that television, movies, and electronic games will often times mirror current and even change our culture. I think the best examples of movies mirroring culture is in the horror genre. The horror genre is often overlooked as it is usually excessively violent or sexual in nature. If you watch you can see trends in movies and not always horror either, for example right now we have seen an influx of zombie movies and a dieing off of the boogeyman man slashers. This is deliberate, zombies represent an alien or foreign mass of people and these movies are often made when we have some foreign enemy’s such as the nameless terrorists that hate our freedoms. Zombies have always been a good representation of a faceless enemy. Night of the living dead was made in 1968 during the Vietnam war, this was considered to be the first zombie movie ever and it manages to capture that paranoia of war time enemy. This works in reverse as well if there is only one person who is vilification hen boogeymen slashers. Electronic games have done some very good and bad things for culture. It is because of the excessive violence in early games that a rating system was devised so there would be some way to keep young children from being exposed and bring some control back to the parents over what was considered a harmless toy. There is good as well, Nintendo came out with its Nintendo Wii and with it is a game called Wii sports. It is one of the most influential games to ever be released and not just to the people who already played video games. This game helped people realize that electronic games do not have to be for children and anyone can use them. My grandmother who would never touch an electronic devise more complicated than a cell phones now belongs to a group of church going old ladies that get together every week to play Wii sports. They do this for the exercise it can give and the fun they started to have. This is a good example of breaking a boundaries and getting people together. There have been some downsides to this influx of new gamers. There are very few games with that kind of universal appeal and most games are marketed towards young men and teenagers. This group wants mostly violent sex filled action movies in electronic game format. These violent games have come under fire by many forms of news media coverage. Now that we have a rating system the sky should be the limit with in legal bound I mean. Books movies will for the most part be much more violent and sex filled and they have had to fight there battles with freedom of speech and so will the electronic gaming industry. They can help them selves by expanding their market appeal, and by that I mean they need to get more games for all gamers out there, this would curb this media hype against the industry. So all in all I think that its easy to see the reflection that culture shares with TV, movies, electronic games even if it seems odd at times.