For Module 1, your assignment is to reflect on the importance of mediated communication in shaping our perceptions of race, crime, and class. The importance of mediated communication will come up in nearly all the readings we do in this course. For instance, in the readings in this module, the topic implicit bias is discussed and begs the rhetorical question, what role does the media play in creating implicit biases? The explicit (required) question I would like you to respond to in a few paragraphs, is what are your assumptions of the news media in how they cover the topics of race, class, and crime? Of course, the news media is not monolithic, but rather made up of contradictions, counter-narratives, and so on. So, in your response, it might be helpful to qualify your statements about what the media presents by discussing what media you are referring to. One way to do this is to put the various news sources on some sort of a spectrum, from alternative on the left of the political spectrum to centrist, to on the right of the spectrum. Then, of course, you would have to define all those terms. Another way of parsing the news media landscape is to dump the news into categories: corporate/for-profit; government/public; non-profit/NGO; community; etc. These two approaches could be classified as political orientation and source, respectively. We can see how combining the two approaches can give us a liberal or conservative-leaning for-profit news outlet