Muckraking and the governement

Hello there! So for this weeks blog post I'm going over activist journalism and muckraking. In other words, when a journalist or media source uses a story to directly or indirectly influence people on a situation and as a result (sometimes) policy is set forth to correct the situation. More often than not these policies fail to be presented because it's not an issue to the public officials or that the people themselves are not aware. The American attention span on some issues are short term and because of that many of those in office to not find it worth while to actually go ahead and correct the issue itself or even to a point it's like opening up a can of worms and will be more trouble than it is worth that is...unless it provides upward movement for the individual's career who might implement the policy.


With the inequality becoming ever more of an issue as time goes by it would seem that there is a great need for activism journalism and muckraking to come back into prominence. Yes, I truly understand that it is of the utmost importance for a journalist to be objective but in these cases I find that it is more important for those who tell the story of the down trot to take a side clearly and firmly.

This article done by the Huffpost speaks upon the ever growing issue of homelessness which seems to be increasing as time goes by.  As the numbers stated in this article claim 22,000 homeless children in New York is an amazing number of homeless I fear that this number is probably conservative at best and the numbers are much higher. Still, this only touches on the homeless children and not the adults which I can assume is equal if not higher than that of this number shown. For a country which speaks on the importance and duty we have to this countries children - the fact that there are this many in New York ALONE is a scary truth that this country does not in fact give a damn about homeless and especially as it claims to follow Christian morals and principles. Would you know say that this is a corner stone to the religion?


Flint Michigan's water situation is a perfect example as to why muckraking needs to come back into the playing field ASAP! The fact is this issue has been going on for years now and more often than not unless you're near those who are dealing with this you only really ever hear about it in random situations that is ...if you're not one to seek out information about these sort of problems. It seems that there are no officials really being held accountable for this and there seems to be very little going on in the way to improve it either. You'll hear about those artists and athletes who are donating money to the problem but let's be honest, most of that money doesn't go completely to the problem to which the money is donated.



I think this cartoon of the situation is actually pretty spot on. It is brought to you by an article which was written by The Mercury News. That's mercury...both on the page and in the water ;) and honestly I could go into so many more issues here in terms of public issues which need to be brought to the attention of those in power but more importantly there needs to be a DEMAND for action and not simply words. If they are unable to do anything about it then we as citizens need to hold them accountable until someone does something about it!

I will leave this blog post short and sweet for the sake of time but I wanted to leave this last picture up so you get what kind of issue this is...and really think about it, would you drink this water?!