Media Monitoring Group Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to get you working in groups to expose yourselves and the class to the vast array of news sources available to you in order that you may develop a more critical sense of how news is shaped.

Form groups of four.  Try to find classmates with whom you can meet outside of class.  If this will not be possible for any or all of your group, you will need to rely on telephone, and e-mail for communication amongst yourselves.  While having no face to face might pose some difficulties, it shouldn’t be devastating to your project.

Each group will then choose a current event that is being reported in the news.  Your choice of news story is completely yours, though I will advise you to choose carefully.  Here are some things to consider: First, try to choose a story that is truly current rather than one that is stale, since the intent of the assignment is to get you to monitor, over time, how different media sources develop a story or choose not to develop it.  Second, choose a story that is interesting to all of you in your group so that none of your group members feels left out. Third, choose a story that your group thinks is either being over-reported or underreported in the media.  Finally, avoid choosing a broad topic, such as, politics or war or free speech.  Instead, focus on a specific story, such as genocide in Darfur or Afghan opium production or the murder of Lacey Peterson.

The group will then decide on five different media sources from the whole range of sources one has access to out there.  Your choices should include a variety of different media, such as internet, radio, newspaper, news magazine, television, or other.  The group will decide on one source they ALL will monitor for one week together and assign one each to the individual members of the group.  It will then be the responsibility of the group to monitor the development (or lack thereof) of the chosen story over the course of at least one week.

After reading monitoring the news for a few days, agree upon a summary of the story your group has chosen.  What is your least opinionated understanding of the story, in other words?  Then, analyze the differences and similarities of the representations of the story by the different news organizations.  Your purpose will be to determine what biases shape the telling of the story, what assumptions the news organization makes about its audience, and to what degree fact is delineated from opinion.

On the day of your presentation, try to have coordinated with the other members of your group.  You will be responsible for leading the class discussion for at least fifteen minutes.  (You will probably need more not less time.) Open with a summary of the story that brings the class up to speed and involves then in it. 

Answer the five Ws:

What?

Who?

Where?

Why?

When?

Keep the summary brief, so you will have plenty of time to explore the variety of different ways the story is being told depending on the source.

Here are some specific questions you should answer about the sources you are analyzing:

a) How much time is allocated to the story?  What does the amount of attention your story receives relative to another stories say about the biases of the editors or the tastes of the audience?   

b) In order to confirm your suspicions about potential bias, do some research on the Web to find out who owns the news source or who funds it, what reputation for political bias it might have, and what its typical audience is.  

c) How do the tone, diction, imagery, music, or other aspects of the way in which the story is told serve to shape the audience’s understanding? Answering this question should make up the largest part of your analysis.  We will discuss in class how to do this kind of analysis.  For now, note the images on this page of MSNBC’s and CBS’s icons representing the Iraq War and ask if this is cheerleading for our invasion or an objective deliberation as to whether we should go to war?  The answer is clear. In class we may discuss Wolf Blitzer’s reporting on the capture of Saddam Hussein to further illustrate how the description of the events shapes our understanding of them. 

For extra credit, you may create a web page, much like this one, which you will submit to me and I will post it along with all the other others produced in the classes.  This should contain your conclusions and the high points of your analysis.  You may include text, video clips, and images.  If  this is your web debute, what better way to get started...don't answer that question.

You will be given ten to fifteen minutes in class to present your project.  This should lead to discussion.

Media Watch