Bellwork 2

Name: _________________________________ Date: ____________

Bell 2

BILL MOYERS
1. Who sets the news agenda?


2. What does news "agenda" mean?



3. What does “marginalized” mean in terms of the news and the discussion?



4.What does the Bill Moyers episode point out about journalists? What do journalists do?




JON STEWART
5. What was the “Moment of Zen” segment about?



NY Times: Drugs Won the War
“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done. Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

6 What were the three consequences?





7.. Why does our society outlaw drugs? Who profits from drugs being illegal? Why are drug dealers allowed to sell drugs in “bad” neighborhoods?





NY Times: Too Poor to Make the News
When we look at the effects of the recession on a group generally omitted from all the vivid narratives of downward mobility — the already poor, the estimated 20 percent to 30 percent of the population who struggle to get by in the best of times. This demographic, the working poor, have already been living in an economic depression of their own. From their point of view “the economy,” as a shared condition, is a fiction.

8. What does it mean the economy, as a shared condition, is a fiction?




9. Why have the working poor disappeared from the news?




10. Who are the “nouveau poor” and why are they annoying?