Iran's "blogfather" was punished for blogging

I read this article on CNN this afternoon and found it very shocking.

In summary, a Canadian-Iranian person who was nicknamed Iran's "blogfather" was arrested and sentenced for almost 20 years in prison because the Iranian government found him "making propaganda against the government."

This reminds me of a news I read in high school. It was about a Harvard graduate, a highly educated woman from the Middle East who got assassinated by her government because the government claimed that she promoted revolutionary ideas and thus disgraced the Islamic system. Of course, from the government-owned newspaper they claimed that she was simply unlucky to be hit by a car.

This also reminds me of my experience in China a few years ago. I went to China with a group of Purdue students. I had no problem accessing Facebook when i first arrived in Beijing. But one day, when I wanted to see my Facebook page, I found out that the site was completely blocked. When I went back to Taiwan a week after, I realized that Facebook was shut down in China because the Chinese government found someone criticizing the government and uploading pictures that the government did not want its people to see.

Perhaps because I was born and raised in a country where people have the absolute freedom of speech, I found these kind of news astonishing and ridiculous. For many of us, the freedom of speech is the basic human right, and we all take it for granted. However, only when we read news like these could we realize that things may work very differently at other corners of the world.

I'm not here to judge which kind of government system is better than the other, I just suddenly realized that we should be thankful for things we have. If the U.S. government was like the Iranian government, I guess all my classmates and I would be in prison already.

Allowing Comments, Good or Bad?

Because of the advanced technology, we have embraced online newspapers and online news sites for many years. Many benefits come with the launch of online news sites; one of them is the immediate response from readers. However, not everyone - or every newspaper- is happy and open to see that happen.

Why? I first did not understand why someone did not want to hear from their readers. Then I listened very carefully in my class discussion today, and came to understand their difficulties and concerns about readers' comments.

When thinking about online comments, I cannot ignore the fact that a good number of them are emotional and aggressive comments which attack the authors or publishers for no reason or simply for fun. The most outrageous comments I've ever seen are mostly on Youtube. A simple news coverage on Youtube could result in people giving abusive speeches and insulting one another in comments. Because of these uncontrollable reasons and people, I understand why some newspapers or news sites do not allow comments on their news articles.

The Exponent is one of those who do not allow readers' comments on their websites. It may seem just fine when nothing serious happens. But what about when an incident occurred last Friday that the "Sex Position of the Week" provoked a massive anger of Purdue students? According to many of the Exponent writers, they published the sex position on Friday and received angry emails from readers right afterward, but since the newspaper didn't run in weekends, they had to wait till Monday to file an apology.

I could imagine that things could get worse if they had allowed readers' comments on their website. One of the possible consequences is that the sudden huge flow of comments might crash the website or cause online traffic. However, not allowing comments on their websites didn't mean that people would just shut up. Instead, people commented on their blogs and on Facebook like they did over the past weekend. From the way I see this incident, not allowing reader's comments did not protect writers from receiving angry comments. Instead, they limited themselves from responding immediately to the offended readers.

I'm not an expert on this issue. I just think it might help if the Exponent could establish a place in which Purdue faculty and students could express their opinions and exchange thoughts. Because, after all, if you do not let them talk on your website, people will always find ways to express them.

C-SPAN: Retirement and Health Care Issues Video

Today when I was choosing which C-SPAN video to write about, I was going to choose some videos that are more related to my ethnicity. However, I ended up choosing this video, Retirement and Health Care Issues, to write about. Why? It's not specific to any ethnicity, and I have not even started working yet, which makes the issue of retirement seem too far away for me to concern. Well, what really interests me is not the content of the video, but how this video was produced as well as how its elements were presented.

To begin with, I chose this video because it's a call-in video. None of the C-SPAN videos that I watched before contains this element. I found that the call-in period of this video very interesting because anchors and people in the show never know what will happen and what those call-in people will say. For example, the first call-in audience in this portion that I embed was forced to hang up because his dog was barking and made his questions hard to hear. Maybe some people will say watching this is completely wasting their time because we could hardly hear what the person was saying. However, in the setting in which everyone addresses his or her opinion so expressively and clear, a call-in portion in which a dog was barking in the background makes the video more humanized, and it further demonstrates that it's live.

Also, as I watched this video, I noticed that the editor made this video more comprehensive by adding a lot of visual aids. Take the portion that I embed in here for instance. While the anchor and Lawrence Hunter taking the second phone call, Hunter found that he was not able to explain why the audience's brother received the money from the State government, but he suggested that people who had the same questions could go to their website and look for answers. When he mentioned the website, we saw a video shot of the real website in which the pictures were still moving.

Compared to other C-SPAN videos that I watched before, the content of this video may not seem so interesting to me, but the format and the call-in element more than enough make up for it. I learned a lot from this video, mostly about the call-in portion and the visual aids. If I'm editing a video in the future, I will definitely consider what I learn today from this C-SPAN video.

TBD.COM-A New Site to Get the News You Want

A newly launched news-site was introduced in my class: TBD.COM

Unlike the Washington Post, TBD features only local news in the D.C. area. One thing I like about the site is that you can type in your zip code and get the local news that's near your home. I think I would be fascinated by this if I lived in the D.C. area.

However, I don't live in the D.C area. So why would I care about what happens in there over what happens in Indiana? Maybe I'll be interested in the scandal of Adrian Fenty, but what about the local news that won't ever affect my life?

Maybe I exaggerate the importance of the national news and the unimportance of the local news, but my point is, living in the days that there's so many stories going on everywhere, but we only have limited time to consume the news, I would pay more attention to stories that happen near where i live or my hometown rather than in D.C., and I believe I'm not the only one feeling this way.

Yet again, TBD.COM is fairly new and it's something that we have never seen before. It's too early to say if it will become a big hit or turn out to be nothing. We'll see!