MTV's 16 and Pregnant: http://www.examiner.com/sex-relationships-in-tampa-bay/16-pregnant-reality-documentary-or-shortcut-to-fame
Here is a trailer from the latest season of Teen Mom...which follows the same girls from the last season of 16 and Pregnant.
"What the hell" I said out loud "Whats up with all the baby momma shows?" "I know for real! I'm 22 and NOT pregnant...where's my show MTV?" replied Casey in a frustrated tone.
After I finished laughing at her outburst, I thought about it. What is the obsession with Teen Pregnancy? And why are there so many shows about it on TV? Not just on MTV, but everywhere. Lifetime movies like "The Pregnancy Pact" and ABC Families "Secret Life of The American Teenager" are all shows about Teen Pregnancy targeted at young high school age girls. Isn't this the audience we are trying to prevent from getting pregnant? Is bombarding these girls with TV shows about teen pregnancy sending a mixed message?
I would not say the shows are necessarily glamorizing teen pregnancy, as can be seen in this clip from the latest season of Teen Mom.
I am sure that there are plenty of girls who watch these teen pregnancy shows and it makes them more cautions about getting pregnant which is a positive aspect of the show. At the same time I think there are many girls who watch these shows and think that if they get pregnant they are going to get this kind of attention. Not only from the media but from the rest of the people in their lives as well. This type of thinking is being breed into the minds of our generation with all of these reality TV shows. If you do something enough you will get on TV.
The Cast of MTV's Jersey Shore: http://justjared.buzznet.com/2009/12/09/jersey-shore-sparks-controversy/
I think that TV channels that target young teen audiences have to be careful about what messages they are sending to all teens. Teens do not think clearly, I know, I spent the the entire year I was 15 grounded for doing stupid stuff. After reading the fourth chapter of Censored 2011which talks about positive news stories not highlighted in the everyday news, I think that MTV and other networks that are popular with teens should spend more time creating programs that will inspire teens to do good things for themselves and other people.
Also maybe these teen mommy shows should have a warning similar to the one that they show at the beginning of every Jack Ass show...
Jack Ass WARNING :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jackass-title.jpg
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Badge. Photo: www.ice.gov
Facts from 2011 Censored Text 1. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are holding thousands of immigrants in unlisted unmarked subfield offices and deporting them in secret court hearings. 2. Ice has created a network of secret jails across the country for holding individual immigrants in transit. 3. These unmarked offices often lack basic amenities such as showers, beds, drinking water, soap, even attorneys and legal information. 4. Immigrants can be transferred away from their attorneys at any point, and are often “lost” from their attorneys and families for weeks at a time. 5. ICE agents often impersonate civilians – Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspectors, insurance agents, and religious workers to arrest Immigrants that are under suspicion even though they have no criminal history. 6. Anyone entering the immigration courts in Eloy Arizona must submit a request in writing two weeks in advance their name, date of birth, Social Security number, home address, and the hearing they wish to attend. 7. Anyone with a felony or misdemeanor conviction in the last five years can be prohibited to attend hearings for security reasons. 8. The majority of these jails are under the control of local and state governments that are subcontracted with ICE.
Is this really a censored story?
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement has several fully operating facilities in which illegal immigrants are held before their deportation hearings. These ICE detention centers, are government regulated and are run much like prisons. Here is a video that gives an example of what one of these detention centers is like and how it is run.
These are the immigrant detention centers that we hear about in the media. They are government run. While searching for articles about the network of secret underground jails that are run by state and local police but subcontracted by ICE, I mostly found articles about how ICE is working on reconstructing their official detention centers and the way in which illegal immigrants are captured, processed, and deported.
This is an example of an article from the Washington Post that talks about how ICE is working on fixing all of the negative associations people have with them by improving their detention centers and the way in which they function.
The Washington Post
May 20, 2008 Tuesday
Regional Edition
Caring for Immigration Detainees
BYLINE: Julie L. Myers
SECTION: EDITORIAL COPY; Pg. A13
LENGTH: 871 words
Recent media reports, including a May 11-14 Post series, have presented a misleading view of the medical care provided to detainees at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities. Readers deserve to hear from both sides.
ICE was formed in March 2003 with a broad mission that includes immigration and customs enforcement and management of the detention and removal processes for apprehended aliens. ICE did not create the detention or detainee health-care systems but, in fact, inherited the procedures of the former Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS). Over the past 2 1/2years, ICE has examined these decades-old practices and is making substantial improvements.
As the number of people in ICE custody has risen, demand for health care and medical services has also grown significantly. Unfortunately, many reports neglected to mention ICE's efforts to improve care at detention facilities. Some, including recent New York Times reports, focused on stories that predate these efforts.
DIHS provides medical care for routine as well as life-threatening conditions, including kidney disease, high-risk pregnancy, HIV-AIDS, hypertension and diabetes. Each detainee ismedically screened upon arrival. Last year, preexisting chronic conditions were diagnosed and initially treated in 34 percent of detainees. In many cases, this marks the first time that detainees, who often do not have medical insurance, learn of their own conditions. ICEdetention standards call for physical exams, sick-call visits and prescription drugs as ordered by medical providers.
The Post series focused on deaths known to have occurred at ICEdetention facilities. To be clear: Any death that occurs in detention is regrettable. ICE spent nearly $100 million last year for detainee health care, double the funding of just five years ago. Our efforts are producing results.
While the number of people in ICEdetention has increased more than 30 percent since 2004, the first full year for which statistics under the agency are available, the mortality rate has declined every year. In 2004, the mortality rate for ICE detainees was 10.8 per 100,000. In 2007, it was 3.5 per 100,000. The number of deaths in detention has decreased, from 29 in 2004 to seven in 2007.
ICE detainees have access to mental health care provided by qualified professionals, and staff working with detainees receive ongoing training in suicide risk and prevention techniques. Psychologists and social workers have managed a daily population of more than 1,350 seriously mentally ill detainees without a single suicide being committed in the past 15 months.
ICE has increased oversight and accountability at all its detention facilities. Progress includes establishing an independent body to review detention inspections; implementing national detention standards that are comparable to or surpass industry standards in their commitment to detainee health and comfort; retaining full-time quality assurance professionals to assess compliance with those standards; and contracting independent corrections and detention experts to audit ICE facilities. Moreover, ICEdetention facilities are open to those outside the agency: We routinely conduct tours for members of Congress, representatives from nongovernmental organizations and the media.
Working with the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Health Affairs, ICE is also improving operations at DIHS, which, as the designated medical authority for ICE, is responsible for detainee health care. Since DIHS came under ICE's authority last October, a number of improvements have been implemented, and others are underway, including: selecting a new DIHS director, streamlining the hiring process to address staff shortages and moving to an enhanced electronic medical records system. We are reviewing ways to improve the treatment-authorization process. All of these steps will help enhance the quality of care and DIHS responsiveness to detainee needs. As we continue working to strengthen the detainee medical health system, we will seek recommendations from our own DHS inspector general, nongovernmental organizations and Congress, among others.
A May 14 Post article and headline said that detainees are "drugged" without medical reason, implying that involuntary sedation for deportation is routine practice. Last June, ICE enacted a policy requiring a court order before any involuntary sedation could take place, except in emergency circumstances where the detainee actively poses a threat to himself or another. In January that policy was strengthened to prohibit involuntary sedation for the purpose of facilitating a removal without a court order -- no exceptions.
Readers should know that ICE does not tolerate malfeasance or malpractice. Instances of improper behavior will be immediately and vigorously investigated; if necessary, appropriate disciplinary action will be taken.
The detention of individuals in immigration removal proceedings understandably raises strong opinions and concerns among Americans. Your readers deserve a balanced view.
The writer is assistant secretary of homeland security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
LOAD-DATE: May 20, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
DISTRIBUTION: Maryland
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2008 The Washington Post
All Rights Reserved
This article is mainly talking about the ICE detention centers that are officially run by ICE itself. There is a whole network of other detention centers that contract with ICE, but are generally run by ex-ICE employees who are now working for a state or local government. These are the centers that need to be fixed, and are the ones that are getting away with the inhumane treatment of detained immigrants. This article from the New York Times talks about how the US government has neglected to change anything in the detention system yet.
The Obama administration has refused to make legally enforceable rules for immigration detention, rejecting a federal court petition by former detainees and their advocates and embracing a Bush-era inspection system that relies in part on private contractors.
The decision, contained in a six-page letter received by the plaintiffs this week, disappointed and angered immigration advocacy organizations around the country. They pointed to a stream of newly available documents that underscore the government's failure to enforce minimum standards it set in 2000, including those concerning detainees' access to basic health care, telephones and lawyers, even as the number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the immigration detention system, a conglomeration of county jails, federal centers and privately run prisons, concluded ''that rule-making would be laborious, time-consuming and less flexible'' than the review process now in place, Jane Holl Lute, the agency's deputy secretary, said in the letter.
The department maintained that current inspections by the government, and a shift in 2008 to ''performance-based standards'' monitored by private contractors, ''provide adequately for both quality control and accountability.''
The administration's letter met a 30-day deadline set by Judge Denny Chin of Federal District Court in Manhattan. Judge Chin ruled last month that the agency's failure to respond to the plaintiffs' petition for two and a half years was unreasonable.
The government's decision ''disregards the plight of the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees,'' said Paromita Shah, associate director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the plaintiffs, which contends that the lack of enforceable rules is at the heart of persistent problems ofmistreatment and medical neglect. ''The department has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost dozens of lives.''
The plaintiffs had expected better from the Obama administration, said Dan Kesselbrenner, the project's director.
But Matt Chandler, a spokesman for Homeland Security who served in the Obama campaign, put a different face on the rejection of rule-making.
''The rule-making process can take months, if not years,'' he said in an e-mailed statement, ''and the administration believes that reforming our immigration detention system needs to happen much faster than that.'' A special adviser on detention to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, ''is engaged in a top-to-bottom review'' of the detention system, he said, and will release her recommendations soon.
In a telephone interview, the adviser, Dora Schriro, said Immigration and Customs Enforcement had made changes in recent years ''in an effort toward continuous improvement.''
''What's appreciably different about this administration is the recognition that detention and alternatives to detention are disciplines, and can and will be carried out under the most professional of standards,'' Dr. Schriro said.
But standards without teeth are doomed to fail, said lawyers for two other national immigration law organizations, one in Los Angeles and another in Chicago, echoing the plaintiffs' disappointment with the rejection of enforceable rules.
Both groups recently won the release of thousands of pages of detention inspection documents that had been kept secret. They said the documents showed that the government had routinely violated its own minimum monitoring standards and ignored findings of deficiencies for years.
The ''performance-based'' standards the Obama administration has now embraced have no penalties and are not significantly different from what failed in the past, said Karen Tumlin, a lawyer with the National Immigration Law Center in California. On Tuesday, the center issued what it called ''the first nationwide comprehensive report'' on violations of detention standards, based onrecords from 2004 and 2005 obtained through Freedom of Information litigation.
Dozens of more recent inspection documents, some from this year, show a similar pattern, said Chuck Roth, the director of litigation for the Chicago group, Heartland Alliance's National Immigration Justice Center. Many were posted by the government itself on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Web site after the center won a three-year federal court battle to force their release.
''The groups that ICE commonly contracts with are staffed by former ICE employees and former corrections officers who have a vested interest in pleasing ICE,'' Mr. Roth said, ''so we haven't seen them take the useful watchdog role.''
The documents include eight years of monitoring reports by the American Bar Association, which has been granted access to detention centers and detainees only on condition that its findings, shared with the government, are not made public.
Reports from two bar association visits to the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., in January 2006 and July 2007, illustrate the weaknesses. In 2006, the team noted detainee complaints about medical neglect and threats of physical violence that were reported to guards but ignored.
A year and a half later, a return visit was cut by the center to two hours from six hours, and ''inexplicably, many of the areas that the delegation had requested to visit in advance and needed to see in order to fulfill its mission were locked'' and off limits.
The delegation was unaware that only two months earlier a 52-year-old tailor named Boubacar Bah had died after suffering a skull fracture in the jail and being locked in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours.
''This whole detention system that has been created is a human rights nightmare,'' said Mary Meg McCarthy, executive director of theNational Immigrant Justice Center. ''The past administration created this, and now we need to dismantle it.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
LOAD-DATE: July 29, 2009
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
The media is aware of the way immigrants are being treated in these detention centers. And immigrant groups are pushing for the government to fix the way these centers are being run.
This is an interview with Jacqueline Stevens who wrote "America's Secret Ice Castles" for the Nation magazine. In this interview on Democracy Now! Stevens talks about her investigation of these ICE sponsored detention centers.
1.After studying media for eight weeks in this class, what you learned? Please be specific. During this class I have learned to be more aware of the media around me, and why it is effective at relaying its message to the audience. After being in this class and dissecting different media texts I am looking at all the media around me differently.
2.What is the most important thing you have learned about yourself as a critical reader, a writer, and a thinker in this class so far? I have learned that reading and writing critically is not as hard as everyone around me makes it out to be. I get frustrated with my peers when they complain about having to read a text and then heaven forbid write about it. That is what school is for, and you should be thinking critically about everything you read and writing is a tool you can use to express your thoughts and opinions about something you have read. I have learned that even though I may not be personally interested in a specific text I can still have strong opinions about the information provided and have an interesting conversation with someone about the text. I have also learned that in terms of thinking critically repetition is very useful for me as a learning tool.
3.What’s one think you would do differently this first half of the semester if you were to take this class again? One thing I would do differently if I were to take this class again would be to study the power tools more at the beginning of the semester and memorize them at the beginning of the semester. I feel like knowing them by heart after the first couple weeks of the class would have helped me use them more effectively later on in the class. Even though I know the power tools well at this point in the semester I could not just list them off for you.
4.What’s one thing you would like me to do differently this first half of the semester if you were to take this class again?
If possible it would be nice to spend a little more time talking about the texts that we read, sooner after we are finished reading them. That way it is easier to build on the previous text with a new text and we are not jumping around so much.
5.Please comment on the usefulness of the power tools, our quizzes, the course blog, your personal blog, our films, and our books as learning tools.
Power Tools: I think that the Power Tools are very useful, which is a good thing since they are the foundation of the class. Having all of the concepts and ideas that the class is about laid out in this way is very helpful to me since I am a linear thinking person and like to have everything in one place laid out in a way that makes sense. I think that boiling these concepts about media down into one or two terms is also very helpful and makes it easier to talk about and dissect media.
Quizzes: I think the quizzes are a useful part of the class because they give you an extra reason to really read the texts carefully and think about what the message is. Even if the quizzes are really short they are still useful and a good motivator.
The course blog: I love having the course blog. It is great to have our assignments all laid out and explained in depth on line where they can be accessed at any time. It is very helpful in case I forget to write something down to be able to go to the course blog and figure out what the assignment is. I also like to hear what other people have to say about the text that was assigned because sometimes when I get stuck it helps to generate some ideas or clarify what the text was trying to say. I also like to find out where people stand on a certain issue regarding a text and the blog is a good way to communicate with other class members.
Personal blog: At first I wasn’t sure if I was going to like having to keep a personal blog, but I have found it to be fun and entertaining and a good way to make the media and concepts we talk about in class personal. It is always easier for me to understand material when I can work with it and relate it to my personal life, which is what the personal blog helps me do. It is also a good place to express opinions about everything!
Films: I think the films have been very helpful in helping to dissect media, and to learn what to look for and applying our power tools to media.
Books: The books, like the films have also been helpful in learning how to dissect media and understand how the media is affecting us. I like how the texts build on each other and help me as a reader to develop more advanced and refined opinions about the media and its effect on me, and those around me. I also like how we have read some texts with opposing opinions and we were able to compare and contrast the different texts and their different opinions.
This spring I said good bye to the world saving ways of Jack Bauer and 24, as he finally took his last stand against a group of terrorists from I don't remember where and the bureaucrats of the United States government.
While I was wondering what life would be like post-Jack the other half of TV Land was getting un-lost with the series finale of the hit TV show "Lost".
Lost Photo:http://www.blurtit.com/groups/Lost
I never really got into Lost, like I did with 24. The science fiction thing was too much for me to handle at the time. I preferred the shoot em up, steal the SUV style of Jack. Feeling a little lost in TV Land without my favorite show to look forward to every Monday night (which usually come along with a home cooked meal from mom) I took a chance on a new show. I am usually a little apprehensive before getting into a new show. However I am now hooked on The Event.
The Event has it all. Aliens, time warps, Secret Service, CIA Aliens, fire fights, car chases, sleezey politicians and government operatives. It is a combination of Lost and 24 and is addicting. I am not necessarily saying that I think it is a well produced, well written show, but it is just so weird you have to know what is going to happen next. Each of the the four episodes so far has left the viewer saying "WHAT? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING TO HAPPEN?" Okay so maybe not all viewers but certainly me and my roommate.
My Event obsessed Roommate and I. Photo Cred: Dan Dubenetsky
I started to watch The Event a couple days after watching the film "Reed Bad Arabs" in class.
Short introduction to the film "Reel Bad Arabs"
This film, based on the book "Reel Bad Arabs" by Dr. Jack Shaheen discusses how Hollywood and the media can easily vilify and create a negative stereotype about an entire race of people. In the show 24 the villains were generally of a different race, either Arab, Mexican, Russian, or another race that was easy to believe would want to attack the United States. Then Jack Bauer would come in and save the day by defeating the terrorist and everyone would be fine. In this new show The Event the "bad guys" are not even from this planet. They are extra-terrestrial beings that look and act like humans except that they age at a much slower rate then humans. The United States government has locked up the beings that they have found and are now dealing with their anger at being locked away like animals for over sixty years.
I found it interesting that this new show is not using an already established stereotype to create a villain but is using aliens from outer space. Is this the future of television and movies? Are we going to move away from vilifying the people we share this world with and start to build stereotypes about beings who might be out there somewhere in outer space? (insert twilight zone theme song here).
Script: Alex: Sup meg brag units? Do you hate thinking? Making decisions? Jon: School to boring? Kate: what are we going to eat? Casey: What do I wear? Kate: Where am I? Casey: Whats happening? Alex: Then you need FEED (echo in feed) Jon: Know everything in a minute Alex: Even God has FEED Matt: Hey guys, its me God! Feed is the coolest thing around since original sin! I'm God! I would know! Alex: Here are some testimonials! Casey: This is Winona Ryder and life is so much more fun when you buy things. Feed gets me what I want when I want it. No more shoplifting for me! Kate: I’m Paris Hilton and Feed makes my life so great. Feed’s hot, and if you don’t have one you are just so lame. Jon: I’m Michael Vick and my feed is so brag. Get your head in the game with feed. Its sick. Feed is here to stay. You have to get one. Imagine being like left out while your friends all like jam out to their feeds and have like the best time ever. Yea didn’t think you’d like that one. Join the real world, get a FEED (echo out).
