Kristin's blog

Do you believe everything you hear? Of course you don’t, no one does, but what about when you watch the news? Shouldn’t there be some credibility there? It seems the whole story is rarely heard. It usually has a political spin that sways the viewers to see it the way the media wants. The truth is what you are watching (on your nightly news channel of choice) isn’t exactly a lie, it is a half truth or obscured explanation to fit an agenda or a timeframe. It is about the breaking news and being the first on the scene, but with fast journalism comes false facts and bias. It’s easy to judge a story when you have not done the research to know the cause and effect of a story.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think it is wrong to interchange the word opinion for news. Fox “News” has many opinion-based news shows and they spew their (I will use the term loosely) “facts” at random without much concern for the truth.  I am not a fan of this channel by any means, but to try and gain some perspective I forced myself to watch some clips of Hannity and Beck; it was rough. The nonsense that they speak is laughable and makes the Daily Show’s job easy, but the scary thing about it is Americans are watching this AND agreeing to the hot air.

To be completely honest, I heard rumblings in the news about Mackenzie Phillips and her scandal, but I always changed the station or ignored it because I had no idea who she was or her father. But this week’s sorbate topic asked our views on the subject, so I figured, well I better read up so I can make an informed judgment on this family. 

At first, all you are bombarded with are the headlines that read: INCEST. This is disturbing in itself, but after more in depth reading and video watching, I realized she is stating that she had a decade long sexual affair with her father, who was a singer in group The Mama’s and Papa’s. She said it happened for the first time in a drugged stupor.

The question is, should America send more troops into the Afghanistan War? I don’t see there being a clear answer to this. It is such a complex question. That is why I am glad that President Obama is taking his time and asking numerous people their expert opinions on the topic. It seems that the average American has the same questions as the President:

AIDS was first detected in the early 80’s and since then, 25 million people have died from it; that is the equivalent of the population of Texas. Yesterday, news broke that there has been a medical breakthrough in the AIDS/HIV epidemic. News that gives hope that one day there may be a vaccine to stop this disease. After over 20 years of trials, a new vaccine in Thailand has been produced and has been proven to reduce the risk of HIV infection by 31%. Two old trial vaccines were combined to make this new vaccine. Usually, for a vaccine to be considered a success (like the chicken pox vaccine) it has to be 75% effective. So of course there is much more research needed due to the complexities of this disease, but this is a huge leap in the right direction to finding a cure.