Bourdieu - Courtney Sparling

I think that this reading is really interesting and found a handful of key quotes that really stood out to me, that I would like to focus my blog on today.

"There is no way out of the game of culture..."

 Culture is all around each and every one of us that lives on this earth. There is really no way of escaping it, but to play the game. Bourdieu says only then can one objectify the true nature of the game. He also talks about how the games are established in a way that discourages objectifying the truth. 

"Our news anchors, our talk show hosts, and our sports announcers have turned into two-but spiritual guides, representatives of middle-class morality."

Who are we getting our information from? Are they reliable people? Or do they mostly inject us with ideas, statistics, and opinions that make us think that we think we are truly informed. The news outlets especially today, are labeled as either liberal, conservative, etc. and have their own political opinions that skew the real, raw stories. If we look at Fox, for example, we might get a different story of the same story if we were to read it in The New York Times. These reporters act as representatives of the middle-class beliefs, but are we all middle-class in America?

"...Human interest stories create a political vacuum. They depoliticize and reduce what goes on in the world to the level of anecdote and scandal."

The news, a lot of the time, avoids the real issues and sugar-coats the "headlines" and "top stories," but leave out the real meat to the issues. Today in CMC 200 class, we watched a video from ABC news that had experts sitting around a table talking about the first 2012 presidential debate. The whole class noticed that they all stated who they thought had one the debate, but no one even brought up any key moments in the debate, nor any of the issues. They just talked about how Obama let Romney win, or how Romney beat Obama because he has the real answers. Yet none of the news people brought up an of the answers or mentioned how that played in to the bigger picture of politics. It was treated as a sporting event and they were the spectators, and now we are to be spectators along with them, without trying to challenge what it is they are presenting to us.