Core 1929H Week 1 Media Analysis

Kelly Colmone
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

For most people, retirement by age 30 or 40 seems like the ultimate dream. You would have another potentially 50 years of your life to do whatever you wanted and you wouldn’t have to deal with the typical stressors of the working life. In the New York Times article, “How to retire in your 30s with $1 Million in the Bank,” the way to do this is not only explained, but encouraged. Although the idea of such an early retirement seems more than ideal at first glance, in reality it would be less than feasible to live off of the amount you could save in such a short period of time for 50 years while maintaining a decent quality of life. The article suggested that people live off of only $40,000 a year in retirement, which would be just over $3,000 a month. This is truly an unrealistic amount for someone to spend in just one month when you include things such as a mortgage, car payments, sustenance, bills, and any other necessities that one may have, not even including any sources of entertainment. If you are stretching yourself so thin that you have barely any money for entertainment purposes, what is even the point of retiring anyway? Don’t people retire so that they can travel, have new experiences, find new hobbies, etc.? If you have no money to do this, would it not make more sense to work longer to save more money and have a more enjoyable retirement, even if it is shorter? Overall, this article was a poor representation of media as it is an unrealistic lifestyle for the majority of people, and the article also based many of its suggestions off of just one person’s experience, making it less credible. Had the article taken more perspectives into account or been more lenient on what it suggested, it could have been more reliable.

Adversely, the NBC news article entitled, “15 Prisoners Died in Mississippi. Their Families Want to Know why” is a piece of media that more accurately portrays society and acts more to inform, less to persuade. Because in ways this article was more so acting to raise awareness to a problem, it does a better job of answering the more essential, so the readers are more informed on this topic. What made this article so powerful was because it was about such a serious and heart-wrenching topic, that they did not have to make any of their facts out of context or proportion, the facts truly spoke for themselves. Even so, they acknowledged things they did not know as well, instead of covering it up or ignoring the unknown. What is happening to people in these prisons is truly terrible and proves that something needs to happen, and they show that actions are being put into place. Overall, they are creating awareness of a topic to glance into society and show its shortcomings. This was much more straightforward than the retirement article, and it just goes to show that you can’t trust everything you read or see because oftentimes things will be glamorized in media for effect, exaggerating the importance of needing to find trustworthy sources for media.

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