Newsroom Roundup 11/11

On November 11th, Justavirgogirl and Tinydrag0n discussed the various local, national, and global stories: 

JMU has recently announced plans to pay Washington State $200,000 for a game season on November 22, 2025. This home game is expected to draw more attention to JMU as Washington State is a Pac-12, West Coast school with a large fan base. JMU Sports News released an article about this highlighting the large cancellation fee of $750,000. In discussion students expressed concerns that this home game may not draw enough people to Harrisonburg leading us to question its worth. There was a general concern over JMU’s student football experience getting left behind in the pursuit of money. Within recent years, specifically this past season, students find games largely unenjoyable with the overly packed student section, lack of engagement, and dissatisfaction with fan culture. Students agreed that more time and money needs to be spent on the fan experience.

The national news discussed Starbucks’ decision to drop charges on milk alternatives. This company has been in the spotlight as it has received backlash for its anti-union values, its support in the Gaza Genocide, and its unethical environmental practices in distribution over the past few years. Our class discussed the legitimacy of this change, and why Starbucks made such an easy change this late given their global influence. It was also mentioned that while large companies like Starbucks should be held accountable for its negative environmental practices, other coffee chains like 7 Brew, and Dutch Bros are generally left out of the discussion, which could be harmful when trying to hold accountability to corporate companies. 

“After the election, a call for women to swear off men” by Gina Cherelus from The New York Times was the first global news story we discussed. Taking inspiration from South Korea’s 4B movement we saw in 2019 where women rejected heterosexual dating, marriage, sex, and childbirth, the US is seeing a similar movement where people are calling for women to delete dating apps, get on birth control, and take self defense classes. We began this conversation discussing the distrust women currently feel with the government over reproductive rights and protections. Specifically, this movement comes across as a distrust between genders rather than an empowering notion of taking your protection into your own hands due to a lack of faith in our systems and institutions. We criticized the ideas of women individually withdrawing from a systemic, collective change as not all women are afforded the ability to do so. We agreed that this movement is not likely to take hold here in the US (or at least to the same degree) simply because the origins of 4B started from inherently different sociocultural issues.With that, we did not discourage women from supporting US’s 4B, but rather suggested further activism past “joining the movement” in order to account for all marginalized groups. 

The other global story was about the Bollywood industry, and how cultural media is often taken out of American media for various reasons. The movie Stree 2 has earned over $103M despite being a small-budget film, and its themes support feminism and societal issues regarding gender inequality. The main character, “who once targeted patriarchal men, now facing off against a monster that abducts free-thinking women” (BBC). Initially, our class was surprised to hear about how the genre of horror could differ so drastically in Bollywood, but the conversation quickly shifted to realizing there are many movies in America that tackle similar themes — like Heretic, Midsommar, and The Substance. It was discussed that American culture has a unique fascination with gore, but due to our larger budget, there are still many movies that are more psychological thriller than horror which reflect Stree 2 from Bollywood. We also discussed that it would be interesting to see more cultural media, but America’s need to caption and understand things from a US-centric perspective gets in the way of intercultural communication.