We all know the news is corrupt by now so I am not going to go into detail about that, but what I did learn from this week is that they take this to a whole different level of corruption. This week we had to watch The Newsroom Season 3 episode 1 titled Boston. This episode was centered around the Boston Marathon bombings back in 2013. While many of the events in the show were made out just for entertainment purposes it is clear the creator is getting at something deeper than that. Along with that television episode we had to read some articles that also helped me come to this common them of the materials for the week. The honesty and morals do not mean a thing if no one is watching.

Boston the first episode of the third season of the television series The Newsroom is based on the events of the Boston Marathon bombings that occurred on April 15, 2013. This was on a Monday and at the time of this event I was 13 years old and remember hearing about this in school when it happened. Just like the show portrayed all major news stations had no clue what were going on, but wanted to be the first to report something. In the show the station that is the main focus shows how all other news platforms are jumping the gun and trying to be the first to give the public insight on what just happened and who was responsible. This news station already was in trouble for doing so before and had to sit back and let all these other competitor stations try and be the first to report on this big incident. They were trying to almost say win back the trust of the public and to do so they had to report the actual truth. One of the characters in the show was actually talking about how they feel they have an obligation to report the real news while his seemed to be partner was always on Twitter looking for what was the rumor going around. When looking back at the episode it was actually social media that led some members of the team and another news stream to report an individual as a suspect wrongfully. In the end the team does the right thing and waits for the right leads and reports the correct suspect, but this short victory does not last long when they are given illegal information that they could either put out as breaking news or turn in. It was right back to the beginning again virtually.

An article we had to read that ties in with this episode was in the New York Times by Jay Caspian King. Like I stated before social media led to an individual being accused of being a suspect for these bombings, but actually was not. This individual was Sunil Tripathi. In the episode they did quote a Twitter user named Greg Hughes and that quote was “In 2013 all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore”. He then twitted two suspects one of them being Tripathi. Now with many people seeing this information the Reddit community brought it upon themselves to create this propaganda and now everyone believes that the missing Sunil Tripathi is really a suspect in the bombings. The article asks if Reddit should be blamed for this spreading and my answer is no. I think us as a society should be blamed. We need to be better than this. There is way more information to be taken to account than a social media feed and connections before jumping to blame someone for a massacre like this. The actual perpetrator was sentenced to death so what would it have looked like if we tarnished the name of the deceased 22 year old all off what social media led us to believe?

WEEKLY NEWS: https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2020/11/06/trump-biden-election-live-updates/

We all know this election has been very controversial and for my weekly news post I thought it was only fitting we look at the updates and soon to be results.