The concept of borders has always fascinated me. The tendency to create a separate space for people, places and things based on perceived differences of what they are is so characteristic of being human. It can start as early as childhood – the peas can’t touch the carrots. A “keep out sign” must be boldly displayed on the bedroom door. And heaven help us should the Rose Art crayons somehow get mixed in with the Crayola. But as we get older, and our minds expand, the border c

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Western mainstream news media a bit selfish. Shocking, I know. When it comes to accurate and thorough accounts of world news, Western mainstream media doesn’t quite put its best foot forward. Video footage over visual news stories is generic, and often unsourced. The perspectives put forth by your Fox News, CNN, or even ABC, could very well be affected by which companies advertise with those groups. And chances are, if the story doe

This fall, I had the opportunity to carry out some research looking at the representations of Latinx people in independent versus mainstream news. After conducting multiple interviews, disseminating a survey, and carrying out a thorough content analysis of website homepages from both platforms, my co-researcher and I realized something key: While it was not the intent of mainstream news to portray Latinx people solely as criminals or immigrants, it was the still the way that

After reading many of the early critiques of blogging, I noticed one fairly common theme: the idea of the “pajama charge,” or a group of people writing out of their basements while sporting nothing but underwear and a t-shirt. This critique on web content is a tale as old as time. For those who grew up in the internet age, it is strongly engrained in our psyche to take everything we read on the internet extremely loosely. After all, anyone can edit Wikipedia, right? And anyon