Taking Action in The Media
Natly Denise, BBA | September 22 | 1:45-2:45 pm
Topic: Conceptual | Knowledge Level: Advanced
The legacy news media reports primarily on the most attention-grabbing subjects of our current day. The legacy media is defined as veteran newspaper and television news outlets that have pre-dated their establishment before the information age (social mobilization of information). Alison Dagnes, a professor of political science at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, described some of the ways sensationalism is used: “Amplifying language, trying to use very big words that are exacerbating. Something that invokes ... a whole lot of emotion.” This can be anything ranging from celebrities, Hollywood, politics, foreign affairs, and more. The problem with awareness for sexual exploitation or human trafficking is that the subject matters only become headlines within a local city’s news media. With this, even some of the most egregious crimes in this section of sexual criminal activity essentially gets little to no airtime within the news-cycle, or even on social media. The intent of Natly’s presentation is to illustrate how, no matter what the legacy news media presents, in trend, human trafficking and modern-day slavery grows, and goes unnoticed. This is a compounding problem that, if ignored, will grow exponentially than ever before. Now in our information age, we have the incredible ability to notify our local communities of said dark horrors, as well as encompassing an element of education. The onus is on us as local residents to our native jurisdictions to make human trafficking detectable and accounted for. This also entails local action, once illustrated criminal data points trend. Cleaning up our own communities and ridding of human exploitation starts with us. Natly will demonstrate effective ways to quickly research and deploy local criminal headlines (of sexual exploitative nature), perform root-cause analysis on what local criminal justice systems should advocate for, and deploy this information to your local communities for taking civic action to combat human trafficking.
Presentation Objectives:
· Demonstrate how to sift through the media headlines to identify local sexual exploitation, or human trafficking reporting
· Identify the faults in the criminal justice system that could forecast ease on the criminal or detect faults on any further criminal justice downstream processes that present opportunities of reform
· Offer ideas that would mobilize this information within your communities to garner local civic action for change