This past semester I had to enroll myself in some kind of English/humanities elective to fill credit requirements, and I ended up taking a journalism class to do so. Even though I find analyzing politics and media to be a soul-sucking activity, the class is relatively easy so whatever.
Since this year was an election year, you could only imagine the field day our professor was having in our class talking about the campaigning, polling, and other political bullshit. After the election ended, we've been analyzing the post-election coverage of different things, mostly the presidential race, but we've also looked at some of the ballot initiatives like gay marriage and marijuana legalization.
Now when considering the more typical media sources, I find that most political issues in general are equally represented on either a right vs. left, this vs. that point of view. Obviously there's room for debate and interpretation of the issues, but for the most part this is how the "mainstream" news media tends to frame their stories.
In my journalism class, when we started examining the recent legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, and what this meant for the drug war, basically everyone was against the current U.S. drug policy (as to be expected on college campuses). Even though I agree with this position, I was curious as to what kind of arguments supporters of the drug war were making in the wake of the election.
What I found? One article in a small Chicago newspaper (War-on-Drugs-a-success - Chicago Sun-Times)
This was the only thing I could find that considered our current policy a success. Other than that, everything else was either suggesting the drug war was a failure, or just supporting the notion outright. I looked at CNN, MSNBC, huffingtonpost, forbes, latimes, reuters, and even fox news.
Hell fucking Pat Robertson agrees: Pat Robertson: Pot should be legal like alcohol | Fox News
So why am I talking about this? Several reasons: Over the past several years our society's view of marijuana has been changing rather quickly, and the fact that the media now seems more open to serious political discussion is good news for those who want to legalize. Also it seems rather unusual to me that there isn't more outrage from those opposed on this issue, considering the fact that two states just legalized the plant for adult recreational use. Lastly, the Feds have made it clear they're still going to pursue marijuana users as violators of federal law, but with what appears like more sympathy from the media on this issue, a change in drug policy seems all the more likely. If there's enough majority support, I can't really imagine the government continuing its campaign on what really is such a trivial issue in the grand scheme of things.
All of my reasoning above kind of relies on the fact that no one in the media is supporting the current war on drugs. Is there any reliable or respected news medium that's presenting this point of view? Do any of you still oppose legalization?
tl;dr - Media now starting to recognize drug war as a failure, seemingly no one is still in support of current policies.
Since this year was an election year, you could only imagine the field day our professor was having in our class talking about the campaigning, polling, and other political bullshit. After the election ended, we've been analyzing the post-election coverage of different things, mostly the presidential race, but we've also looked at some of the ballot initiatives like gay marriage and marijuana legalization.
Now when considering the more typical media sources, I find that most political issues in general are equally represented on either a right vs. left, this vs. that point of view. Obviously there's room for debate and interpretation of the issues, but for the most part this is how the "mainstream" news media tends to frame their stories.
In my journalism class, when we started examining the recent legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington, and what this meant for the drug war, basically everyone was against the current U.S. drug policy (as to be expected on college campuses). Even though I agree with this position, I was curious as to what kind of arguments supporters of the drug war were making in the wake of the election.
What I found? One article in a small Chicago newspaper (War-on-Drugs-a-success - Chicago Sun-Times)
This was the only thing I could find that considered our current policy a success. Other than that, everything else was either suggesting the drug war was a failure, or just supporting the notion outright. I looked at CNN, MSNBC, huffingtonpost, forbes, latimes, reuters, and even fox news.
Hell fucking Pat Robertson agrees: Pat Robertson: Pot should be legal like alcohol | Fox News
So why am I talking about this? Several reasons: Over the past several years our society's view of marijuana has been changing rather quickly, and the fact that the media now seems more open to serious political discussion is good news for those who want to legalize. Also it seems rather unusual to me that there isn't more outrage from those opposed on this issue, considering the fact that two states just legalized the plant for adult recreational use. Lastly, the Feds have made it clear they're still going to pursue marijuana users as violators of federal law, but with what appears like more sympathy from the media on this issue, a change in drug policy seems all the more likely. If there's enough majority support, I can't really imagine the government continuing its campaign on what really is such a trivial issue in the grand scheme of things.
All of my reasoning above kind of relies on the fact that no one in the media is supporting the current war on drugs. Is there any reliable or respected news medium that's presenting this point of view? Do any of you still oppose legalization?
tl;dr - Media now starting to recognize drug war as a failure, seemingly no one is still in support of current policies.
