Dustyn Macaluso
10/4/15
Soc. of media 330
Media Analysis For chapter one my responsibilities were to cover stories 13-15. Two of these three stories involve health risk and one story pertains to a pro-life argument. The first story I read explained how the nuclear power industry is immune from liability in nuclear accidents. The example used in the article was the 2011 TEPCO Fukushima meltdown. Big corporations commonly go outside the US borders to build their factories or power plants due to two reasons. One much cheaper labor force abroad. Big corporations stand to gain a greater profit if they get close to the same quality of work while paying half the price, sometimes less than what a corporation would pay american workers. Another reason is countries abroad tend to have less strict regulations in certain areas of corporate interest, an example would be the TEPCO. Even though this power plant is host to native Japanese companies, I’m willing to bet General electric has some kind of financial stake invested with Toshiba and Hitachi. Several years after the meltdown there is still radiation present in Fukushima. The Japanese Fisheries research agency conducted a study and found that radiation levels in sea life south of the plant to be 124 times more than the threshold considered safe for human consumption. TEPCO has released inaccurate reports on the actual damage assessed and have released few details to the press to avoid further scrutiny. The real interesting thing about this example is that General Electric owned 5 out of the 6 reactors in the TEPCO plant and 3 of those reactors were built by GE. General Electric is not being held accountable for their role because of their tie to the Obama admin., leaving TEPCO and the other companies to face the media scrutiny. Ever since wireless technology has come out, there hasn’t been much said about the health risks that come with it. I didn’t know that wifi was health hazard until i read this article but apparently there is evidence that ties some forms of brain cancer to phone emissions of RF-EMF’s (Radio frequency electro-magnetic fields). The World Health Organization concluded that RF-EMF’s are a possible human carcinogen. I’ve never even considered that using cell-phones or wireless items could possibly harm us. But how could we? These big corporations do as much as they can to keep negative info out of the media about their product because they want us to keep buying them and using their services. The technology industry is booming at the moment and cell phones are a trending topic in the field. If a major story were to break in corporate media (which would probably never happen) about phones leading to brain cancer, the cell phone industry would probably face some adverse backlash. The last article of my section was “Reporting miscarriages, criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies”. In Kansas they have passed a bill that requires women to report a miscarriage at any stage of the pregnancy. This bill requires all doctors to report miscarriages to the state health department. Some people believe that this an emotional subject and that the law is overstepping a personal boundary but this is all in an effort to preserve the idea that a fetus is a human. This law is unnecessary. What a women decides to do with her body is her business and the law should never impede basic human rights.