Real Thoughts with Dylan

The suspension of 5 students at East High School has lead to protests and unrest within the school.

East High Principal Laura Vibelius reported that there was general unrest from disgruntled students last week after five students where suspended for smoking marijuana in the school parking lot on Monday. On Tuesday, students started a food fight in the cafeteria. In addition, three false alarms were sounded on Wednesday.

When asked about the protests, Principal Vibelius commented, “Not so much unrest because of suspensions, but because of summer vacation being so near.” An additional ten students were suspended for a week due to the demonstrations. Vibelius also commented that she sees no continuation of these “incidents” in the future.

In an article I found while scrolling around on Reddit, a Massachusetts library is having to release a statement reminding library members through Facebook that tokens from Chuck-E-Cheese and Bonkers cannot be used to pay their fines and printing costs. The Peabody Institute Library in Danvers reports that this summer they have seen a surge in patrons attempting to pay for their fines using tokens that are meant to be used to play games at Chuck-E-Cheese.

When originally scrolling through Reddit, I thought this was just a post from The Onion, and then I realized that it was from the CBS station in Boston, so that this was an actual news story. The lede simply reads, “Chuck-E-Cheese tokens are for arcade games, not for paying your overdue book fines, one library is reminding its patrons.” When reading this on the Reddit post, I thought that this was just silly and I had to dig deeper into this.

Article Link: http://boston.cbslocal.com/2017/09/01/library-chuck-e-cheese-tokens-danvers/

Today I read an article from The New York Times saying that in addition the millions of fraudulent bank accounts discovered within Wells Fargo, another 1.4 million accounts have been discovered in a recent internal review. The controversy began when an internal review discovered that thousands of Wells Fargo employees opened millions of fraudulent bank accounts without the consumers’ knowledge in order to meet sales goals. This recent review increased the amount of these accounts by almost 70%.

The news value that is used most in this article was impact, as millions of these accounts existed. Personally as someone who banks with Wells Fargo constantly, this is very concerning to me. At many points I have wondered if there are bank accounts in my name that are illegitimate.

Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/business/dealbook/wells-fargo-accounts.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Joey Nicole Volquartsen is a junior theater student at Morningside College, originally from Stanton, Iowa. Her passion for theater began as a little girl. When she was in Kindergarten, she knew that she wanted to become famous. This desire became full-blown in middle school, when she saw a national touring production of the widely popular musical “Wicked”. From that point on, she knew that the theater life was the life for her.

Additionally, Joey is minoring in Mass Communication. She can be heard in not one, but TWO radio shows broadcasted on Fusion 93. One of those shows, entitled Musical Mondays, reflects her love for the theater, as she mainly plays songs from musicals on the show. Her second show, entitled Culture Shock, places her with good friend and fellow Morningsider Jared Marten as they discuss the pop culture news of the week.

When not on stage or on the radio, Joey enjoys collecting and listening to vinyl records and dancing. When her time at Morningside is complete, she hopes to work at Walt Disney World as part of their college program. When she finishes there, she then hopes to work with regional playhouses and eventually hopes to work her way on to Broadway.

The Vox piece “After Charlottesville, How do We Cover an Immoral President” has really had me thinking about how the news should cover events like what has taken place since the election of Trump. As someone who generally believes that a news outlet should be balanced and needs to publish the whole truth in a situation, news outlets should not shy away from condemning the actions of the president. While many will cry that there’s a liberal bias or that it is fake news, I no longer believe that this is an issue of politics, but an issue of morality. Trump’s refusal to condemn the acts of the White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to me isn’t an issue of being on the left or the right, but an issue of knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. To me, it is important that a news outlet doesn’t sugar-coat his actions and makes it know just how wrong his actions can be.