Blog Group 4

For our blog we chose www.huffingtonpost.com.

It is a mock blog formatted similar to a newspaper and founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti. The blog offers information and news on politics, entertainment, media, business, the economy and much more. "The Huffington Post" is designed to elicit strong feelings and purposefully meant to embrace the humor in politics, think John Stewart's favorite political blog. The blog receives over a million comments each month and is one of the more famous blogs. It leaves the fear of government up to its reader's minds and focuses more in simply the information, with a little bit of a humorous twist. Enjoy!

Group #3

http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/

For our blog of choice, we decided on “It’s Getting Hot in Here,” a blog known to be “the voice of a growing movement.” As you can infer from the title, the blog is an effort to stop global warming around the world. The posts are written by the youth leaders of the global movement for saving the environment and consist of articles/their opinions on the steps we need to take to save our Earth. Though originally created by a small group of leaders, “It’s Getting Hot in Here” has grown into a global online community, including 300 writers from all over the world. Since the blog is a worldwide movement, can we assume that the posts are more legitimate and unbiased? Or do we still see people using fear of what may happen to the world in the future to promote their own wishes and personal stance on a topic?

Group #2: Fear in the Political Arena

We chose to look at Michelle Malkin's blog, which can be found at http://michellemalkin.com.

Michelle Malkin paints herself to be the normal every day woman. In the ‘about’ section of her blog, she says she is a mother and a wife before anything else, and then adds little fun facts about herself to endear and ingratiate herself with the reader in order to gain their trust. Her blog does a good job of using fear tactics by outlining an event, using biting, humourous commentary and in turn, making the reader feel that politics is corrupt and we need to be weary of it all. It questions issues and everyday events with sly, witty comments to make us question our trust in the government. While at first glance, it looks like she is encouraging the audience to think for themselves, we feel that her underlying message is to get us to trust her because she’s pointing it all out to us by establishing her authority in the matter and voicing concerns. She is really just trying to sway us to her side by undermining the side she is criticizing. What do you think?

Blog Project Group #1

We have determined that we will be using the blog "Pirate's Cove". "Pirate's Cove" is a very conservative blog that exhibits a good amount of bias towards political movements (an example would be calling Rahm Emanuel a "Thugocrat"), military movents, food industry processes, and environmental issues. This blog is a good example of how bias can be used in writing in order to try and persuade or intimidate people into believing what they want them to believe. An example of using fear to persuade can be seen even in the first post on the blog. The author writes about how Rahm Emanuel has no real chance at running in the election but the government may be corrupt enough to swing the election in his favor. This is a good example of fear-mongering because it brings into question if the government is corrupt and really does not care about the general populous.