CSUN On Point

Producers: Mario Saucedo and Natalia Vivino

Anchor: Tammera Magana

Social Media Editor: Sandy Chavez

Reporters: Ahmad Akkaoui, Sandy Chavez, Manuel Fuentes, Tammera Magana, Mario Saucedo and Natalia Vivino

CSUN athletics are on the rise, due in part to the success of the women’s basketball team, who won the Big West title last year. But this and other achievements often go unnoticed. Campuses like USC and UCLA have a reputation of bringing in tons of support from students and alumni at their games, but CSUN sports does not.

“I do believe there’s lack of school spirit on CSUN’s campus,” one CSUN student said. “Not everybody gets involved with what sports activity are going on. I personally don’t know when the volleyball season is or anything, so there’s no way for me to attend the games. I just feel there needs to be more advertisement for it.”

While UCLA may be defeating CSUN when it comes to attendance at games, the Matadors men’s soccer team defeated the #10 ranked Bruins on the soccer field this season. CSUN Athletic department officials say they hope the huge win might lead to a boost in attendance.

“I think students should be excited about anything that has the school name associated with it,” CSUN’s Women Basketball Coach Jason Flowers said. “We talk with our kids all the time about not only representing themselves well, but representing our University, every time they step on the floor and compete.”

Flowers said it is important for the athletes to build relationships with students on campus in order to see more fans in the stands. To build these connections, the women’s basketball team invited students to join them at a pool party where fans and students were able to meet players and staff. The Athletic Department is hoping to create a welcoming environment for students to attend games.

“We need to focus inwardly on who we are,” said CSUN Athletic Director Michael Izzi, “and where we can best create opportunities to be significant, and significant within our conference, as well as owning the area that we live in, and that’s the Valley.”

Flowers said he likes the new ideas Izzi is bringing to CSUN. Izzi spent the last 20 years at UC Irvine in the same position. “He has a clear plan of what he wants [CSUN Athletics Department] to be, what he wants it to look like, and what he wants it to do. Obviously with his history, with given time, we will get those things done,” Flowers said.

The women’s basketball coach says the athletic program is moving in the right direction.

“There are a lot of good things going on in our department,” he said. “I would like to see continued growth, and [I’d like to see us] continuing to shed light on the things going on at this University, whether it be academic research, or beautifully-run productions by students on campus. Hopefully we continue to grow and get better, and when people think of CSUN, they think excellence and a high level of performance.”

Moderator: Ethan Hanson

Producers: Veronica Barriga and Ethan Hanson

Anchor: Esteban Reynoso

Social Media Editor: Londy Sagastume

Reporters: Veronica Barriga, Bridgette Creamer, Ethan Hanson, Jasper Harris, Esteban Reynoso, Londy Sagastume and I’maiya Milan Wright

Moderator: Jade Davis

Producer: Sammy Shaktah

Anchor: Daniel Martindale

Social Media Editor: Jiani Navarro

Reporters: Jade Davis, Kaylee Kealani, Daniel Martindale, Jiani Navarro and Sammy Shaktah

Fire is a word Californians are all too familiar with these days.

Every year people anticipate fire season, however more and more fires are happening outside the seasonal norm. Human activity as well as climate change have caused this irregularity.

“We used to think there was a fire season,” CSUN Geography & Environmental Studies Professor Amalie Orme said. “In our traditional way of thinking, probably from mid-20^th century into the early years of this century, we always thought it was going to be sometime in the fall and maybe into early winter, but I think in the last two decades now, we’ve seen a very different type of pattern, where we can see fire year round.”

Data show that these fires are becoming larger as well. The most recent highly destructive fire in Southern California was the Thomas fire. It burned for more than a month, leaving thousands of acres burned and destroying nearly 800 homes.

In efforts to control fires, campaigns like Smokey Bear have been used. This wildfire prevention campaign educates the community on what it can do to prevent these fires with fuel management practices. Unfortunately, these efforts do not always work when Mother Nature gets involved.

“All these fires are driven by these natural things,” retired LAFD fire-fighter and FlameMapper.com co-founder Anthony Shafer said. “The real thing, that I personally think adds to it, is the buildup over the years of fuels, and the tons per acre of dry fuels on the landscape, and the fact that we haven’t figured out how to get rid of that, or decrease that.”

“You have this other dynamic in here,’ Orme said, “when you have this big fuel-loading, especially in areas that are difficult to access, because when you start to look at the way fires are patterned over time…we wind up with these mosaics of vegetation, which may not have the adaptive capacity to regenerate and prevent the understory from basically refueling itself.”

Climate change is another driving force behind these California flames. Temperatures are rising, causing landscapes to be drier for longer periods of time. The current California drought does not help the situation either, and experts say heavy rainfall may not even be enough to counteract the rising temperatures. These conditions leave certain areas more susceptible to catch and sustain fire.

These susceptibilities can change someone’s life overnight.

“When I was about 8-years-old, my family lost their home to the 1993 Topanga fire,” FlameMapper.com co-founder Shea Broussard said.  “I didn’t really understand how to process the feelings of emotion at the time. It was very strange and very odd. When you lose your house, you don’t realize you lose that sense of place, that sense of home… You’ve had the worst day that could ever happen to you, and you don’t have a place to go home to.”

Broussard said no one can really prepare for the devastation of a fire. Fires occur unexpectedly, and many people do not know what to do after they’re over, or how they can protect their homes against the scorching flames.

“[People] don’t have their to-go bags,” Shafer said. “They don’t have all their financial information; they don’t have all their insurance documentation…That’s where the devastation is, the fact that they get to [shelters], and they’re sitting there on this bench, and they realize the only thing they’ve got in the world is what they are sitting there with.”

No two fires are the same, but they have similar and lasting effects.

“A fire can really change a community,” Broussard said. “It takes years to try to recover, and it’s a bigger event than people can actually wrap their brain around.”

Moderator: Angela Bickmann

Producers: Angela Bickmann and Marissa Martinez

Anchor: Marissa Martinez

Social Media Editors: Karin Abcarians and Melanie Rosales

Reporters: Karin Abcarians, Angela Bickmann, Jesyka Dunn, Marissa Martinez and Melanie Rosales

The conflict in Syria has escalated into one of the century’s most deadliest civil wars. It started in March 2011 as a peaceful protest against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, but violence erupted and spread throughout the country.

Nearly 400,000 Syrians have been killed and more than half of the country’s population has been displaced, many of them fleeing abroad, according to the United Nations.

CSUN Cinema Television and Arts major Dilek Ince created the student film “AMAL”, about an American volunteer doctor who witnesses a tragic event that leaves a young Syrian girl named Amal without a family.

“I did this story for children that feel forgotten,” Ince said. “I knew I wanted to make this film because I wanted to reach as many people as possible.”

Ince said she wanted to tell a story about what’s happening on the other side of the world, a story that people may not know much about. She wanted to show how the war is affecting children’s lives, and she wants to make people aware of what’s going on.

“I researched a lot of articles and I spoke with people who went through this war, because I wanted to make the film as authentic as possible,” Ince said. “I also spoke with some organizations that help kids.”

Fadia Afashe, an artist, activist and a refugee who left Syria, said it wasn’t easy to survive in that country.

“The minute you start to question things, the minute they recognize you are out of order and you start to demand any human rights, you are on the list,” Afashe said. “[When you’re on that list, it means] your life, your family life, everyone you know will be in danger.”

Afashe said that when she was growing up, even before the war, her parents would discourage her from speaking up or voicing her opinions on certain issues in public. They feared there would be dangerous repercussions towards their family if she did.

“I started to be a women’s rights activist because I was witnessing horrible things happening in my society and I wanted to change it,” Afashe said. “Even just asking for women’s rights … was forbidden, and they put me on the list.”

Afashe said she couldn’t invite people over and didn’t have access to the internet to share information on women’s rights.  Instead, she started using art to share that information.

“I started to think maybe art is the solution, because that is probably how I can get into every Syrian home, because Syrians love movie stars,” Afashe said. “I created my first movie in Syria about women’s issues.”

Afashe said she wasn’t able show her film on television in Syria, and she said people didn’t have access to the internet at the time. Now that they do, activism can spread more easily.

Both Ince and Afashe agreed that art can be used as a tool to educate the public on social issues.

“Definitely it can be used to spread awareness,” Ince said. “Even though it’s a fiction story, [the audience] get inspired by the real stories.”

Ince said films can also show people what they can do to help.

Moderator: Savannah Palacio

Producer: Son Ly

Anchor: James Farr

Social Media Editor: James Farr

Reporters: Karen Elle, James Farr, Kelcey Henderson, Son Ly and Savannah Palacio

Although the United States makes up less than five percent of the world’s population,  31 percent of mass shootings happen here, according to CNN.

Law enforcement experts, mental health professionals, politicians and survivors continue to ask what the driving force is behind these mass shootings, and whether there is any way to predict or prevent them.

The Parkland Florida shooter told authorities he heard voices in his head giving him instructions on what to do to conduct the attack, and Nashville’s Waffle House gunman claimed Taylor Swift was stalking him. Many experts say easier access to mental health treatment would help, but warn against suggesting that all mental illness leads to violence.

“The connection between violence and mental health often [leads to a] stigma,” Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health program manager James Coomes said. “It’s actually counterproductive [because] it prevents people from accessing mental health services if they need them.”

“Sometimes people think if someone is hearing voices that is somehow criminal, and someone should be locked up for that,” Coomes said, “[but] people live with psychosis every day.”

Many suggest that people be encouraged to speak up when they suspect a friend, classmate, or family member is contemplating violence.

“I definitely do believe there are signs,” U.S. Department of Justice investigator Sgt. Rod Clayton said. “Whether we adhere to them, or report them in a timely matter, is our biggest question.”

“The reality is one and every four people experience a major mental health issue at some point in their life,” Coomes said. “The vast majority of people who are experiencing mental health issues are not prone to violence. So, if we’re trying to predict who is going to engage in a violent act and who isn’t, there might be signs, like a collection of weapons, or aggressive behavior, [but not always].”

Others say parents should limit exposure to violent video games and movies.

“I would attribute a lot of it, in my personal opinion, to what we see or what we see our kids do on social media and video games,” Clayton said. “Anytime you can see where a person is becoming desensitized by what they see on the internet or the video games, there needs to be some intervention.”

Some say that if the mass media and social media users would stop reporting, sharing, reposting or retweeting the names, faces and detailed histories of killers, there might be a reduction in mass shootings, and some studies do suggest that ‘media contagion’ may be a factor.

“Media makes people copycat what they see,” Clayton said. “Now we see it more [and] people want to do it more. [It’s like] what we experienced in the late 90’s with vehicle pursuits. We saw it on the news so everybody wanted to do it.”

Crime statistics suggest society is not actually more violent overall, even as these mass shootings increase. But Americans don’t feel safer.

“In a public opinion poll, it was asked how much violence is out there in 2016,” CSUN Communication Studies Professor David Keating said, “and 70 percent of Americans thought 2016 was more violent than 2015. But the crime rate has been steadily declining for a couple of decades now.”

Law enforcement experts and mental health professionals said awareness can help.

“Learning to engage each other, and accepting each other a little bit more, and having more tolerance for each other [can help],” Coomes said. “Being open to a family member or friend that might be experiencing something they may not feel is normal or acceptable, and giving them an opportunity to talk about it, and then engaging support around them [can help].”

Moderator: Sammy Shaktah

Producer: Jiani Navarro

Anchor: Kaylee Kealani

Social Media Editor: Daniel Martindale

Reporters: Jade Davis, Kaylee Kealani, Daniel Martindale, Jiani Navarro, Sammy Shaktah

Nowadays, some young girls are living their lives through their social media pages.

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram, these teens and pre-teens are updating their pages and hoping they get likes, comments and follows. Sometimes there are great comments, a lot of likes, and thousands of follows, but there may also be bullying and degrading going on.

“Now I think students are getting more savvy with technology,” high school counselor Jessica Estrada said. “And they’re getting more brave, and they’re being meaner, because they’re able to hide behind a screen, [and] say what they want to say.”

Some teens are also relying more heavily on social media to create images of themselves that they may think are the images people want to see, but those images may be based on traditional and limiting stereotypes of women.

“I think that it’s really empowering, on some level, to be able to have the means with which to produce yourself, and distribute yourself to the world,” said CSUN Communication Studies Professor Gina Giotta. “But on the other hand, I think we’ve been compelled to produce ourselves and to author ourselves in ways that are often times consistent with those previous representations that were produced for us by the mass media…We don’t have a lot of other scripts besides those media have offered to us.”

Some educators said social media are also affecting the way young people write.

“A lot of the English teachers in my school are complaining about…text language, [for example] putting LOL [for ‘laugh out loud’], and IKR for ‘I know, right’,” Estrada said. “They’re using little acronyms, [and] we’re supposed to be graduating these kids to be college ready.”

But educators and parents said it may be impossible to take social media away from young people at this point.

“I think they’d eventually learn how to live without it, but it’s such an addiction that I don’t know that [you could abolish it]…I think they’d struggle with that,” Estrada said.

“I’m not a doctor,” Giotta said, “but I do know that people can survive without social media. People did it for centuries, so I think it’s a possibility.”

Moderator: Melanie Rosales

Producers: Angela Bickmann and Marissa Martinez

Anchor: Jesyka Dunn

Social Media Editor: Karin Abcarians

Reporters: Karin Abcarians, Angela Bickmann, Jesyka Dunn, Marissa Martinez and Melanie Rosales

Producers: Karen Elle and Son Ly

Anchor: James Farr

Social Media Editors: James Farr and Savannah Palacio

Reporters: Karen Elle, James Farr, Kelcey Henderson, Son Ly and Savannah Palacio

Astrology has been a mystical topic of interest since the earliest of human civilizations.

In today’s day and age, more skepticism is surrounding the field, fueled by better reasoning, newer feats in science, and more knowledge of astronomy.

Astronomy is the study of celestial objects, space, and the physical universe. This field of study may be seen as a rival of astrology, since they share some of the core fundamental concepts, but astronomers don’t consider astrology to be the same kind of science.

“I don’t believe in astrology,” CSUN Physics and Astronomy Professor Damian Christian said. “It’s fun to see your horoscope, but most of them are pretty vague and …a little bit too positive maybe.”

“I personally don’t subscribe to it,” CSUN Astronomy Lab Associate Michael Artinian said. “But at the same time, different people get different things out of astrology. The thing is, there’s no scientific value in it because it doesn’t predict anything. There’s no hypothesis you can test; there’s no ‘hey we found this result, and it matched with our prediction’.”

 The National Science Foundation reported in 2016 that fifty-eight percent of Americans consider astrology a science.

“It’s actually one of the world’s oldest sciences,” Santa Monica astrologer Austin Muhs said. “It’s an enduring representation of man’s fascination with cycles, along with fascination with nature and how that nature interplays into personal lives.”

Based on a fantastic read, it is mentioned that people’s interest and belief in astrology has definitely been an amalgam of fascination and a longing for answers.

“There’s certainly been a long tradition in astrology, that the positions of the heavens and the planets and the stars have some influence on our personality and our futures,” CSUN Communication Studies Professor Peter Marston said, “and that’s largely the component of astrology that I think most skeptics are struggling with.”

The National Science Foundation considers astrology a pseudo-science, and astronomers agree.

“Astrology is not [a science],” CSUN Physics and Astronomy Professor Wladimir Lyra said. “Astrology has been shown to not have any validity, either directly or when it comes to the data.”

“Those people [who believed the stars determined human behavior and fate hundreds of years ago] also believed that the earth was the center of the solar system, and that life generated spontaneously from filth, and all sorts of other things, that fortunately we’ve gotten past believing,” Marston said.

“Astrology is a relic from the time we did not understand well enough how the universe works,” Lyra said. “We’re a species that likes to find correlations in things. We try to connect the dots even when the dots are uncorrelated.”

Still, for many, astrology is a journey of self-exploration and deeper understanding.

“Generally speaking, people come to me seeking some sort on analysis of their life,” Muhs said.  “Where they’re at; where they’re headed; how to get there. I generally work with them within whatever spiritual or theological framework they’re coming to me from … I try to help them accept, understand, and breed happiness within themselves.”

While stances vary on astrology, both astrology and astronomy provide contributions to understanding, culture, and the way we view the universe around us. Agreeing to disagree may always have a place in this ongoing myriad of interest for both astrology and astronomy.

“[Astronomers and people who believe in astrology] are interested in completely different things,” Lyra said. “If [astrologers] want to make people happier, great; everybody can use more happiness.”

Moderator: Jiani Navarro

Producer: Daniel Martindale

Anchor: Jade Davis

Social Media Editor: Kaylee Fagan

Reporters: Jade Davis, Kaylee Fagan, Daniel Martindale, Jiani Navarro and Sammy Shaktah

Activism is defined as the action of using campaigning to bring about political or social change.

These days, activism seems to be on a rise, with people coming out as a powerful force, to raise awareness about different topics like gun violence, immigration, women’s rights and more.

Could this era of activism be because of the Trump presidency?

“Yes! A thousand percent,” said CSUN Communication Studies Professor Amanda McRaven. “When you have something to push against, you fight harder.”

“In the eight wonderful years that we had Barack Obama as president, we thought ‘finally, we made it; we’re okay now; we’re on the right track; it’s okay’; and then Trump was elected, and it was suddenly: ‘we’re not’,” said Maria Collis, a representative of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

These days, young people are also using social media as a tool for activism, and, particularly in the areas of gun control and immigration, many see young people as a driving force for social activism.

“Who else?” Collis said. “Absolutely, young people are the future.”

Voter registration drives are present at marches and protests, and many believe an increase in voting among young people may cause a shift in the political world, with more officials having to pay attention and address issues that often were ignored in the past.

“You have to constantly keep your elected officials accountable for what they are doing,” Collis said.

“I think…the youth are galvanized in a way,” McRaven said. “They’re signing up teenagers to vote, which is awesome! That hasn’t happened before. Teenagers signing up teenagers.”

“The most important thing you can do: if you’re old enough to vote, register to vote, and vote,” Collis said. “And vote for candidates that support the things that you support, and educate yourself, so you know who they are.”

Moderator: Jesyka Dunn

Producer: Jesyka Dunn

Anchor: Karin Abcarians

Social Media Editors: Karin Abcarians and Angela Bickmann

Reporters: Karin Abcarians, Jesyka Dunn, Marissa Martinez and Melanie Rosales