Media Consumption Journal

• Jeremy Gordon, “Is Everything Wrestling?” (1825 words)

The comparisons made between the fake wrestling seen on TV and the reality TV shows people indulge in, are quite striking. As Gordon points out, fans of WWE are often looked down upon by outsiders. But the outsiders are the same one's elbow deep into Kim Kardashian’s life and the whirlwind of politics we think we’re ever so educated on. We are all like the fans of WWE, believing something that we know isn’t fully true. Until we accept that, we will follow the same theatrics.

• Alex Kantrowitz, "How the 2016 Election Blew Up in Facebook's Face" (3443 words)

This article gives a sort of “deeper dive” into all of the problems Facebook has, and more importantly, created for themselves. Before adding the “share button” to it’s website after the 2012 election, the site was pretty one-dimensional. But by doing so, users were able to repost seemingly whatever they wanted without having to use much brain power (fast forward 8 years later shit hasn’t changed). What’s most interesting about the addition of the share button is how quickly it affected politics.  (Not finished)

• Taylor Branch, “The Shame of College Sports” (The Atlantic, 14615 words)

Opening up the article, several key points are made about the NCAA and the paying, or not paying, of athletes. Both sides are taken in different variations, but the astronomical numbers are shown really put into perspective how rough these D1 athletes have it. Sure they live nice lives at college, but when schools are making millions upon millions a year, and league conferences are reaching billion-dollar TV deals, it becomes clear that these athletes deserve a slice of the pie. The article then goes back to when the NCAA kind of first got started, and many of the same ethics were in place despite issues. The issues at that time were players football/rugby players dying from playing, but nonetheless it's all similar. I found it interesting that the “start” of the NCAA actually came from President Roosevelt, who was just simply trying to get other schools involved in making the game safer, poor guy. If only he knew the association he had a hand in creating turned into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut that doesn’t pay its workers, something tells me he wouldn’t be too happy about it.

What I found even more interesting was that players were allowed to be paid, until some freshmen complained they got paid less than the upperclassmen and subsequently screwed over generations to come. This led to a “Sanity Code” that made all colleges pay its students through tuition costs, similar to what is seen today where athletes are given “full rides”.

Other rules that are present today still such as tv contracts. Just as scholarships, they started in a different format. Simply put, the NCAA TV revenue was broken up and given to thousands of other schools, even the ones without programs. Soon enough, large programs such as Texas put their foot down and demanded they receive all the revenue they generated and not share it with any other schools. Yes, this is NCAA Football in the 1970s, not political divide in the 2000s. Anyways, the larger schools then threatened the NCAA to sign hundred million dollar TV contracts with companies such as NBC. 

I found all of this quite interesting because even with today's media and accesibility you don't hear much of anything similar to this.

TV contracts that is. Considering the NCAA wasn’t what it is now, it was quite a blow financially for them to lose out on TV revenue. But thankfully for them, they still had control of the 2nd largest sport, College Basketball, and its annual March Madness tournament, which covered their losses.