Prof. Rojecki

The lecture “The Tea Party and the Politics if Insecurity” given my professor Rojecki. In the lecture he covers topics that include globalization, the Tea Party movement, and the negligence of the American youth to keep up with what is going on in the world, especially with our government.

In the beginning of the lecture he starts out by asking the class what their worries are for after graduating which was answered by the majority by the job market. This lead into the fact that people, especially the youth, are not interested in what is going on. The most news that is being read by the youth sadly is what happened to Justin Bieber today and not what is actually important. This makes me think of the topic we talked about in class about the cultural gatekeepers because that is what people are used to seeing now instead of the real life situations. The students said they do not follow politics and the news because it is stressful and gives them anxiety. This leads into professor Rojecki’s research, over 2/3 of the Americans feel pessimistic about the future of our country. This has a lot to do with globalization, mostly losing jobs to China. His example was the Apple products, which the job of making the products were outsourced to china which is making out economy weaker.  

Another point that was made is most people get their information from someone else instead of getting it from the source. When this happens people put their own twist on things because of their beliefs and how they understood what they heard. I am guilty of this also because I get most of my information from my father who does keep up to date with the current affairs. One news network that does this is FOX, which has had a ratings boost of 50 percent over the last ten years, compared to others like CNN which stayed about the same. What is happening when you do this is framing and salience, making one piece of information more meaningful to the audience. This relates to the exercise we did in class about the rat biting the baby. Depending on whom you asked or what news paper you read you got a totally different story. In the issue of the housing crisis, the Tea Party thought it was the peoples fault that were not able to pay back the “ninja” loans that they were given by the banks. Others think it was the banks fault. So depending who you ask, some parts of the story will be more salient to make you think how they think or how they want you to think.