Week 13
Even if the Supreme Court blocks Trump's IEEPA tariffs, he has other ways to impose sweeping duties — including dusting off a century-old ta
For this assignment I chose to incorporate my major (political science) with the concepts we learned in this course. This article is about President Trumps trade strategy and the potential supreme court rulings that might come stem from this strategy. This article is indicative of how policy and legislation are now housed in extremely mediated environments. When assessing this article through McLuhans's lens which tells us that the "medium is the message/massage" we can see how tarrifs significance is not centered around economics but it's importance determined through how the stories are framed, circulated through media, and then consumed by people. This is important because it shapes public understanding and it does so a lot more effectively than the law itself.
Going a step further and viewing it from Shipka's idea of multimodality we can see how our modern political discourse does not rely solely on written arguments but sound bites (clip-farming), visuals, and the framing of legal narratives. Policy is now a mediated performance. Assessing this article through these lenses has allowed me to see that power is not distributed solely based on legislation and policy but through the media ecosystem and rhetorical form it takes. This allows me to analyze law and politics from a different standpoint.
