Dissection 1

As technology continues to develop and advance, we are exposed to greater impacts on everyday life. This holds true especially for advances in media technology. The media is a universal aspect of life on a day to day basis. A time when it really becomes prevalent is in regards to government and political information. The Internet has become an important tool for people around the world to not only gain political knowledge, but to engage themselves in the political process itself. Some scholars suggest that this may "revitalize democratic society, enabling citizens to command the political and economic resources needed to become effectively self-governing" (Winner, 2003,p. 167). I use this reference to express just how times have changed because of this social networking medium. The idea that the Internet may create a shift in how certain people view democracy is not a new one. The revolutions of the newspaper, radio, and television each raised the same questions. Certain media sites share news from a conservative perspective while others are more liberal, and this is an ongoing debate in society, is there such a thing being able to learn about a situation, without having your views challenged, or have reassurance that you are right in how you see our current situation. My point being, it is difficult to find different issues than those in previous posts have discussed, because other than a few controversies different media outlets, report on what they feel is important, making it hard to establish what really is a problem or important.

Multiple media sites such as; CNN, NY magazine, Whitehouse.gov, bbc, MSNBC, FOX and CBS to name a few outlets have covered heightened controversial issues such as the enforcement on immigration (Travel ban), retracting the Affordable Care Act, interrogation techniques, border patrol, building and funding of a wall, to name a few. When we read the news, it feels like literally the only thing ever being spoken about are the horrible things happening in this world. But when it comes to politics, why do media outlets pick and choose what to speak about. Take CNN and ABC, at one point, prior to FOX news surpassing other media reporters in ratings, had the biggest audiences, however, according to business insider, they also were also not the most trusted in America. Conservative leaning outlets seem to be the least trusted, yet liberal outlets also, ranked lower than Wall Street journal and NY times. Once a media outlet establishes who their audience is, they can then adjust what content they will focus on because that is how you keep people coming back for more, how you can relate to them.

Pal discusses criteria related to that of implementation and how certain indicators can be used to determine whether a policy can actually be successful, depending on administration standards, and provided that these new policies are free of conflict, no external constraints, valid theory and any miscommunication between the parties of interest, to include the developers of said policy and the citizens. Depending on the majority of which political party controls the house, policies may lean more in favor of their best interests, while still benefitting the nation as a whole, just not as much perhaps. Let us use California as an example, a blue state, has been at the forefront of refuting a lot of policies/ executive orders being passed by our current administration. Here we see a gap between state and federal governments, not being able to work together, which in turn I feel questions pal in a way that how can a policy ever be "successful" if there is such dissonance within the different levels of government.

Dissection 2

The new presidential administration has been in the news for a variety of different policies and proposed laws over the past 50 days or so. The news media has focused on two big issues during the last couple weeks. The first issue that has received around-the-clock coverage over the last month has been immigration. The topic of immigration has been a wide-ranging issue because of the increased number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants as well as the affect of the president's executive order travel ban. One of the reasons that this issue has received so much attention is due to the fact that there seems to be no agreement upon the objectives of this administration's policies. The is a sharp contrast in what is being told to the public and what is actually being implemented. This is why the president's executive order was stopped by the courts. There was not a clear alignment in the thinking of the administration and the language of the executive order. There has also been a lot of discussion about the increase in military spending and how it will affect other aspects of the president's first budget.

The president stated this past week that he intends to increase military spending by $54 billion and in the process there will be severe cuts to "education, the environment, science, and poverty" (Shear & Steinhauer, 2017). The cuts in federal programs will also look to benefit retirees as well as defense spending. This has received a fair amount of media attention as well because of how large our military budget is compared to many of the other areas of federal spending. These issues do deserve a there share of media attention but there are other policy issues that deserve much more attention. There has been little mention of how what investments will be made to the nation's crumbling infrastructure. It also seems that the issue of health care slips in and out of media coverage as well. I think the media has focused on military spending and immigration for a few reasons. The increase in military spending comes at the expense of many other federal programs that people rely on. The president has also said that "We have to start winning wars again" and that when he was young "We never lost a war" (Cesca, 2017). This has many in the media speculating whether or not the country is preparing for armed conflict in the near future. Immigration has received a large amount of media coverage because it is an issue that touches close to home for many people. Many people are related to or have friends or acquaintances that are in the country illegally. Whether people agree on the topic of immigration, nearly everyone is affected by it in some fashion or another. The coverage of these issues is definitely covered different based on the network reporting the story. Fox News will report these issues in a way that is supportive of the president. MSNBC will largely report the negative effects of these policies. CNN does a better job of reporting reporting the facts without bias but they still lean slightly left in their reporting. Many of the problems that have arisen from these policies is in how they have been presented to the public. There is a clear difference in the way policies are explained by the administration and how they are being implemented. The policies lack many of the elements for successful implementation as listed in the Pal text. The policies lack proper design and there appears to be a lack of communication in the creation of these policies.