The Fiscal Times is a blog focused on the economic and fiscal issues in the U.S. We chose this blog because their goal is to promote awareness of all things monetary involving the U.S. government. A LLC funded by Peter G. Peterson, they utilize a very credible set of reporters who have worked for various prestigious publications such as The Washington Post, New York Times and The Chicago Tribune. A small amount of contributing authors post on the blog and they all tend to be qualified in the subjects discussed. It includes a research center where you can access opinions, academic papers, surveys and charts. The “5 Questions” interview section is particularly interesting. We find the cartoon section very amusing as well.
I'm not sure if I am reading the right blog or not. I read the article about Bernake and the Federal Reserve's plan to buy $600 million of Treasury securities. The author of this article uses pathos in the sense that he initially talks about the Fed's plan as if they were trying to reassure the American people that the economy is going to get better. The author also uses pathos after that by explaining the current state of our economy. They set it up as if to say that nothing has really worked well so far so that this might be a plan, to give people a beacon of hope. Logos also appears in the article. The authors an expert who says that it might not be a good idea for the Fed to inact their plan at the moment since that could lead to asset bubbles (which is what caused the downfall to begin with and I will leave it at that before it gets political)and wait for the new Congress to be instated.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot to post a link, google gave me this http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/
ReplyDeleteRegardless, the first thing I noticed about this blog was the vast amount of information on it. I was a bit intimidated by how much stuff is flying at my face when you first enter the blog. I get the feeling from looking at a few different blogs that the age group for this blog is much older and more mature than the previous blogs have been. Most of the blogs are very well constructed and use terms that the writers expect their audience to know. I can't see how someone with no economic experience could get involved with this blog. That is why I was probably a little turned off from this blog with my limited economics experience. Overall, I think this blog is very informative and useful if you understand the terms and concepts the authors are writing about.
I'm so sorry for forgetting the link.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thefiscaltimes.com/
When first looking at the site, I felt like this would be instantly appealing to older folks. The header is big, and everything is easy to find. It has a feel of a newspaper. I like the area on the right-hand side of the site with the most read, emailed, and commented posts. The most read stories happened to be related to the BP Oil Spill. There also is a section featured on all their pages called "At-a-glance" which features tidbits of intriguing information.
ReplyDeleteI read up on the About Us page, and they claim to be Independent. What I also thought was really interesting is that they had a set of news principles such as: "to present fair and accurate information", "not rush to publish information without regard to accuracy, bias, or other distortions", "to name sources of infomation", endorsing political candidates, and so forth.
I read the post entitled, "GOP Victory May End Government Economic Intervention". It was answering the question to why Americans voted for the GOP candidates and why the rejected the democrats. It did not delve into politics so much. It was analizing the situation from an econmoic viewpoint. It concluded that Americans do not like when government gets involved into the economy.
On the "Capital Exchange" blog in a post entitled "A Speech for Obama to Ponder", the author describes Obama's next move after the Nov. 2nd mid-term elections. The author uses the logos of the past President Clinton to suggest what Obama could do in the comming months. The author explains that in the comming months President Obama could either lay down his guard and go with the flow of the newly elected congress, or stick to his guns and re-explain to the american people what his views are and how he is going to carry out his plan for the remainder of his presidency. He uses the example of President Clinton after the mid-term elections in the mid 90's and how he was able to tell the people that he will stick to the plan and do what he thinks in nessasary while also meeting the new wants of the newly elected congress.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first opened the page for "The Fiscal Times" I realized that it was set up exactly like a newpaper website. The first site that came to mind was The New York Times and after I looked at the lay-out for The New York Times and compared the two, they had pretty much the same lay-out. So my natural reaction to the Fiscal Times was this site was credible and it was strictly business. I read the article about the GOP wins in the Senate and Congress since it just happened. The article basically explained how the government will probably change the way it has been handling the economic crisis so far. The GOP, unlike the Democrats, believe that the economic policy should lean toward laissez-faire with little government intervention. This is rather shocking. When President Obama entered office he implemented bailouts to help keep the country out of depression, which basically the country is used to government help during economic troubles. I mean that is what happened during The Great Depression. But now the GOP probably will change the policies. This topic was very important and the way it was presented was great. It showed the way that the blog was designed was for the people to know that it was strictly business. Overall, the blog was layed out in a manner that made the information accessible for the reader and helped the reader get a general understanding of the information.
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ReplyDeleteFrom what I read in this blog I found it to be surprisingly rather neutral in its articles. For example I read GOP Victory May End Government Economic Intervention and at first after reading the title I thought that it would then go on to lean either to the left or to the right but I am happy to say that I was wrong the author was able to explain both theories on the economy without showing whether he truly favored one or the other. I found this very refreshing since most other blogs that we have studied as well as most blogs in general always have a strong bias to whatever their blog is focused on and they ignore the other sides argument.
ReplyDeleteWhen first accessing the site, the professional formulated style of the site was the first thing I noticed. The site was constructed such as a newspaper might be, which really added to its credibility as a reliable source. Although, more of their topics were emphasized on our government and economy. The article "Unemployment Benefits: Big Battle Ahead" was the first section I read. It described how Congress is in a debate over whether or not to extend emergency unemployment insurance benefits to two million people. Although a major struggle may arise, Republicans wanting to prioritize spending while Democrats would like to see the benefits reauthorized. The discussion is picking up speed, and we will see their decision of Congress in the upcoming months. Based on some of the articles, I feel as tough this site tries to remain an unbiased site. Trying to provide a reader with as much information for them to decide for themselves. With this in mind, this also helps to build upon the ethos of this site through its straight forward information as well as how it is presented. All in all this is a very interesting site to indulge as a reader on our government and our worlds economy.
ReplyDeleteThe site seems well created. It has many different ares of focus, with links included at the top. As well as many interesting blogs. The one I read was Big Ideas for Cutting Deficit, but They'd Hurt. It talks about how one plan to reduce deficit is to increase taxes, reduce spending, and to reduce Social Security benefits. I believe that it is good to be able to show these ideas to people who care. So this site is pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteThe article I decided to read was actually an interview between members of the fiscal times staff and Alan Blinder. In order to gain credibility for the interview, the members make sure to mention the knowledge Mr. Binder has on the economy as well as his history with the politics related to the economy. Each of the topics is also carefully planned in order to be relevant to anyone reading the article. Instead of picking irrelevant questions, the Fiscal Time's members ask questions about topics which have only become an issue within the last year. Probably the best thing the members did was to let the person giving the interview as much freedom to talk as possible. This disconnects anything bad that might be said during the interview. This is an effective way of giving a quality interview without the risk of anything going wrong.
ReplyDeleteI read an article called, "58 Ways to Cut the Budget". This article presented a series of budget cuts that the government could do that would erase almost $4 trillion from the national debt by 2020. The article was written and posted by the staff at The Fiscal Times and provides some interesting perspectives on how the government should be spending our money. Some suggestions that saved the most money were: Cutting low-performing, out-dated programs ($23 billion), Defense Spending cuts ($100.1 billion, and Federal Resources Discretionary Spending ($100 billion). These suggestions seem like great ideas, but when you think about it, are these changes possible? These suggestions make me think of the saying, 'easier said than done'. Yes you can say you are going to cut defense spending but that is such a broad term that it is hard to figure out what to cut. The staff at The Fiscal Times know that some of these budget cuts are just not possible with the state that the country is in right now with the war and heightened security, so why would they suggest these budget cuts if they knew they could never happen?
ReplyDeleteI originally had a post on how little information this blog actually gave- simply only a photo header and a short blurb were the only information. I just found out a few seconds ago that actually, my browser updated, had a conflict with NoScript... which caused nothing to show up. So if you caught my original post, that's what happened, haha.
ReplyDeleteThis time around, I was pleasantly surprised. I read the article on how measures were being taken to slow down automated trading done by computers. I foudn the article interesting and informative. Even more interesting, I realised the article cited its sources. This is new for a blog we've seen so far, and it really adds to the sites air of neutral professionalism, which they clearly try very hard for.
I also noticed how much their site was set up like a traditional news website. This isn't exactly a good thing to me, as I think that design is, quite frankly, ridiculous, wasteful, and entirely too concerned with 'edgy' headlines, but here I imagine it is rather the point, and, for the target audience, probably works extremely well.
The first thing that I noticed about the blog is that it was very biased. I'm not sure if I went to the right blog or not but the website that i was lead to was thefiscaltimes.com. If so, I found this blog to be very biased. The first things I looked at were the pictures of Obama with titles next to them that were everything but pleasant. "Obama trade pact failure a disappointment", and "How Obama misplayed the debt cards against Republicans" were just a few examples of the obvious dislike for democrats by the makers of this blog. They are using the credibility of their blog to bolster their own political views/agendas. This is so interesting to me because the entire class is based off of rhetoric and this is a great display of the media abusing their power to push their own opinions!
ReplyDeleteJust from the titles of the piece all you see is "missed the mark," "You can't," "hidden agenda," "misplayed," and "a big disappointment." It seems to continue to harp on the negative, regardless of the stance of the issue. While sometimes it is necessary for a person to play devils advocate, to create a blog to show every downside is almost unnecessary. Also, in most the articles there seems to be very little constructive criticism or feedback that could potentially alleviate the problem. It is mainly structured around bashing the negative and helping the problem in almost no way.
ReplyDeleteI thought this website was very well put together making their blog look very credible and professional. I thought this blog was geared more toward the republican party. Many of the articles didn't look very ki ndly on Obama and his presidency. The article i read was kinda random,it was called "Eat a Carrot, Hurt the Economy? Sometimes" It was about how Brazil and the UK adopted the diet of eat more fruits and vegetables and eat less dairy and meat. But once they did this it was a decline in jobs and slowed the economy. But on the other hand countries like Asia are in such high demand for meat it might help them if they adopted this diet. I think this article shows the diversity of this blog. It's global and it's diverse.
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