Over the weekend John Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a rally to help “Restore Sanity and/or Fear” a counter to Glen Beck’s “restoring honor” rally. Many public figures such as Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow and Kareem Abdul-Jabar not only attended the rally, but were also involved in the rally. The use of public figures helped spread the message to a vast amount of people, where as an average individual could’ve gathered a rally but not nearly as large. “The rally generated extensive buzz on the Internet, with more than 226,000 people on a Facebook page created for the event saying they would attend.” The rally’s intention was to make Americans turn there back on hate and work together to make the world a better place.
According to a Times article, the idea behind the rally was to provide a counterweight to all the shouting and flying insults of these polarized times. There were political undertones, too, pushing back against conservatives ahead of Tuesday's election. Slogans urged people to "relax." But also: "Righties, don't stomp on my head," references to a Republican rally in Kentucky at which a liberal activist was pulled to the ground and stepped on. And, "I wouldn't care if the president was Muslim."
In recent years, the weekend before Election Day has traditionally been a time for learning the names of candidates, figuring out the locations of nearby polling places and figuring out which foreign country to vow to move to if the other guys win. This year nearly 200,000 people came out to support a cause and to show their support for the midterm election.
The use of these political icons was not to chastise the media, but to point out their flaws. A more powerful individual will allow for a wider audience rather than someone like myself trying to gather a rally. Stewart and I could’ve given the same speech but more people would have reached out and listened to Stewart rather than some average Joe people are not familiar with.
Stewart told the crowd “ this was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses a the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and we have nothing to fear. They are, and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies, but unfortunately one of our mail tools in delineating the two broke.” We need to stick together, through the hard times and the good times. Everyone has their problems, but fingers should not be pointed unless we are certain. “There are terrorist and racists and Stalinist and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned.”
Hopefully the audience pulled away with a stronger message. The media polarizes Americans and makes them choose sides. All part of a democracy, yes? But as members of the same nation we need to unify together, not find flaws that push people away from each other.
I like the topic a lot but could you please include how many people actually attended the event and what in your opinion the impact was on this past election season?
ReplyDeleteI like the choice of topic, but I feel as though the connection between your blog and the lesson this links to from class is a bit hazy. It kind of seems more of a review and summarization of the rally more than anything else. That being said, what you did write gave me a lot of information about the rally, and in a reader friendly way.
ReplyDeleteYour topic is interesting and your blog has a lot of good information on the event/rally that was held. Although, I would have liked to see more on the media's role at promoting this polarization you mentioned; some examples of journalists specifically doing this in their reporting or perhaps certain coverage styles taken by news outlets that lead to the separation and tension amongst the nation.
ReplyDeleteYour group members make some very astute comments here, and I think you should definitely take them into account. First, any time that you are quoting something, or citing "a Times article" you absolutely need to make clear which article you are citing, hopefully by linking to it, or alternatively telling the reader exactly how they can find it. You also will want to make the original piece to this post more prominent - maybe you can focus on how the rally criticized the news media, and find a way to connect that to specific issues we have discussed in class? That is just one way you might do this, but it is the case that too much of the post just recounts what happened at the rally. That would also allow you to say a bit more about the role of the media here, which should be a main component of the piece. Once again, nice use of a visual.
ReplyDeleteYou do a very good job of summarizing the rally and providing the descriptions of it however I fail to see any relation or analysis on how it is related to any media issue. I mean obviously media played a big role in generating huge number of people to the rally but how? What is the difference perhaps if such a rally were to be organized 10 years ago versus now? Perhaps you can look and explore this further.
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