9.9.2021

 In today's class, we discussed in detail the problems behind rationalizing biased information as "News" by comparing outlets such as the Guardian with Fox to legitimize the idea that Fox has turned into an opinionated editorial. In our team, we looked at a Guardian article about the Taliban banning unacceptable bans and slogans. As I looked at the wording, I could not see extreme language involved, and there were plenty of opinions and facts from different organizations. However, seeing as the Guardian is more liberal than Fox, the context itself and the underlying message was slightly on an anti-Taliban perspective. The quotes used in the article were from the World Bank, the former Afghan President, and a EU spokesperson. However, there were less number of quotes from Taliban officials. Personally, as I didn't see any slander from the writer themselves, I thought that this article was acceptable. Looking at Fox news, we looked at an article about Afghanistan missing from the NYT front page. Just by looking at the title, we sensed Fox's ability to nitpick at every detail, besides, what audience notices a correlation between Biden's politics and the number of political cases on the front page? When I looked at the New York Times, there was live coverage on the flights from Kabul, so it's not like they have been incentively obscuring information about the democratic president. 

What was most surprising about the Fox article was the overwhelming conservative comments in the comments section. Reading them made me understand the scale of Fox's right-sided audience. With that in mind, we went to talk about the voting system, and more specifically the unfairness of the "winner-takes-all" system in certain countries. I had watched a video on Vox about this once where the electoral vote can sometimes show opposite tendencies with the popular vote. Moreover, allowing only one winner is unfair to the majority who didn't vote for them otherwise. Another problem about elections are their low voter percentage, resulting in an unfairer outcome. In Japan, since young people have the tendency to not vote, the outcomes are based on the opinions of the elderly, which may be more outdated. If there was a chance, I would like to vote, but looking at the elderly candidate, I don't feel as much of a motivation to sympathize with their political ideas. 

Hearing another idea about repeating the elctins until one party gets above 50% felt innovative and fair, as it prevents a party from concentrating power. However, this system needs numerous elections, which is not time-efficient, costs money, and for large populated countries, can be difficult to maintain. Moreover, the low voter percentage won't change, so in that case, we need to be able to persuade the people to engage in elections. Since New Zealand's population ranking is roughly in 120, I thought that this system was suitable. In that way, perhaps countries with smaller populations can adopt this system, and it would overall be more just than other systems. In the end though, for these reforms to happen, we need to acknowledge the problems of our current policies, and so having today's opportunity to be educated about them was impactful.