Ideal "Take Charge" Assignment

1. Without objective basis, I believe the “Take Charge” assignment sounds ominously difficult and laborious. However, research is crucial to my major—and most majors—so I believe it will be helpful to introduce me to research on the college level. I also do not like the group aspect of the project because I like to work independently to insure quality and completeness of works. Again, this project will be helpful because most major also require correspondence with peers.

2. Ideally, the “Take Charge” assignment would rely heavily on media scenarios in history. Most attempts to look at present media issues lack objectivity and sufficient resources. To illustrate, one could look at the media surrounding the September 11th travesty. After September 11th, no one had an objective view of the event. Americans have just recently started to think objectively about the attacks. Also, historic media issues would offer many more objective resources than present issues. Given the vast plethora of historical issues, one could research something specific, such as Marie Antoinette’s degradation by the French media prior to the French Revolution. Or, one could research something broad, such as the “Red Scare” media bias in the United States. Many historic issues have been filtered by time towards an objective description. Pure commentary on current issues is exceedingly difficult because the objective view has not yet been filtered out from the subjective ideal. I believe it would helpful if we were to look at certain historic media issues and derive our own opinion from the sea of existing commentary.