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The Daily Wildcat

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The Daily Wildcat

The Daily Wildcat

 

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    Same party, different colored ties

    Monday, Arizona Daily Wildcat columnist David Francis wrote about the “”social engineering”” that the new Democrat-controlled Congress would bring as if the Republicans had never tried to create their own brand new world. Excuse me? I’m registered Democrat, but I have enough independent thought in my head to look at the candidates and not their tie color. Both parties have wallowed in the mud enough that you can’t tell if they are red or blue. It looks more balanced and less paranoid to indicate that. I just have to point out to Francis that the formerly Republican-controlled Congress tinkered with moral engineering in their efforts to ban gay marriage in a constitutional amendment and their success in passing the useless Palm Sunday Compromise – the Terri Schiavo Act – which applied to one person and failed to do anything besides violate the separation of church and state.

    Francis, your article would have had a lot more credibility if you had pointed out the shortfalls of the Republican party as well and laid off the tired, hot-button “”Marxist”” insult. The Ronald Reagan quote is a great one, but the government can meddle in more than just our wallets.

    Samantha Garder
    creative writing freshman

    Professors should be more understanding at semester’s end

    I think that during these last couple of stressful weeks of school, teachers should be giving us more time to study for finals. To add to the madness, they are giving us basically no time at all to study as well as packing on more work in the last two weeks than they did all semester. I believe that we should have time to sit down and have a chance to soak in the material and have the chance to get a decent grade in each class that we try so hard in all semester. It is so stressful right now, and I believe that every student feels this way.

    Andrew Gogol
    undeclared freshman

    Concussions extremely serious

    As an individual who played football in high school, I watched with dismay as the two ASU guys hit Willie Tuitama, front and back, to a point that he almost couldn’t get up.

    There’s no harsher word in the medical vocabulary than concussion. Willie has been diagnosed as having had two of them.

    I think it’s very sad that a $750,000-a-year boy wonder who’s never had a head coaching position before the UA has to stoop to playing an injured ball player with the possibility of ruining the athlete for life.

    Or, yet again, there may come a time when Willie won’t get up at all.

    Michael J. Beisch
    Tucson community member

    Mainstream news is unfair, unbalanced

    I am writing in response to Friday’s well-written but misinformed letter to the editor regarding Fox News (“”Fox news fair, balanced””). While it might be true that the majority of Americans think the media is liberal, this is only a widely believed stereotype – not fact. The mainstream news media marginalizes the viewpoints of minority groups and those opposed to the status quo. First consider what we do not see when we tune into a national news program. When was the last time we saw Fox News report on the fact that women are making 75 percent of what men get for the same job? How about a story on the savage education inequalities in urban, mostly non-white neighborhoods? Can we even imagine a story casting a positive light on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lifestyles?

    The fact is that the news media, especially Fox News, is overwhelming white, male and conservative. On Brit Hume’s “”Special Report,”” there are five conservative guests for every one progressive. Only about 7 percent of guests are women and 11 percent are people of color. And before anyone can argue that Fox News is a shining beacon of the conservative voice among a sea of left-wing news, the trend is not much different for other networks. At CBS, 76 percent of guests are Republican, while the number is 73 percent at ABC. At PBS, there is a two-to-one Republican-to-Democrat bias with 18 percent of sources female and 15 percent non-white. These figures should be alarming to the educated viewer, if not appalling.

    The ideology of the “”liberal news media”” is only a myth spoon-fed to Americans by corporate and conservative bases. I strongly encourage everyone to take advantage of their college experience and learn some media literacy. We owe it to ourselves as responsible citizens of this democracy to think critically about the news around us.

    Charlene Estrada
    geosciences sophomore

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