For your final exam, you must write a five-page summary and analysis of one of the major topics included in the list below. The listed hyperlinks will take you various newspaper and magazine articles, but you must also find at least one additional article on the topic you have chosen and include information from that source. You can select an article from the UMASS library archives or found somewhere else on the Internet, but you must provide a working hyperlink to any materials you use. Since you will not be able to cover all aspects of these complicated stories in such a brief essay, you should first summarize the main events or most significant dimensions and then either comment on the way the story was handled in the press or analyze a specific aspect of the topic. Be sure to include names, dates, and other concrete details throughout your essay. In commenting on media coverage or historical developments, always cite concrete examples and support all of your conclusions with solid evidence. Unlike weekly summaries, your final exam should be sent as an attachment and should be formatted in Microsoft Word. An exception to this rule: If you possess sufficient skills, you may create a web site in lieu of writing a summary and analysis, but the site must include enough text to convey salient developments and details. Although you may use visual evidence and, consequently, include less text, all of the text included in your web site must conform to the rules of college-level prose. If you choose to make a web site, please send me the URL by December 1, 2006. Your web site does not have to be entirely finished by then, but should contain enough material so that I can specifically advise you on what you need to add in order to turn in a polished and complete assignment. In either case, please consult The Term Paper Checklist to avoid common mistakes. Also, since you have plenty of time to complete this relatively brief essay, please do your best to submit carefully organized, thoughtfully argued, and error-free work. The best way to maximize the quality of your work is to write the paper, put it away for a couple of days, then reread and revise it to make sure that every sentence is as accurate as possible. Do not plagiarize! If you copy from sources or try to pass off anyone else's work as your own, you will receive an "F" for the course. If you have any questions, please email me. Review of Course Themes and Topics (Please keep these issues in mind as you write your final paper.) In our brief review of the historical evolution of news reporting in the United States, the inter-related issues of technological innovation and the pressure to scoop the competition stood out as constant themes. During the twentieth century, the newspaper industry was forced to respond to the emergence of radio and television news broadcasting, then cable news programming, and, most recently, the advent of the Internet as an increasingly central medium of news reporting. Since these modes of transmission moved the news faster to more people, print journalists were obliged to take a more creative and investigatory approach, develop more extensive networks of contacts, and find other ways to get important stories first. The pressure to scoop the competition proved especially counter-productive in the case of Jayson Blair, whose name has now become synonymous with dishonest journalism. However, we can see similar pressures at work in New York Times reporter Judith Miller's concerted efforts to stay ahead of the pack in reporting on the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Miller's ambitions now appear to have made her extremely vulnerable to manipulation by her government sources. Specifically, revelations related to the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff seem to indicate that Miller knowingly published doubtful information about weapons of mass destruction thanks to a special arrangement with the White House and the Times that allowed her to conceal her sources from her own editors (See Source Watch: Judith Miller). The public seems weary of the Miller story, but it now appears a star reporter from what was once regarded as the most trustworthy newspaper in the country turned out to have been spouting dubious government propaganda while her editors looked the other way. Since Miller's false reporting helped to rush the country into an unpopular war, the scandal has already had a much more momentous impact than any of Jayson Blair's fabrications. To put this into perspective, keep in mind that Blair made up atmospheric details such as the sight of tobacco fields in West Virginia to embellish his stories, while Miller suggested that Iraq was on the brink of developing weapons that could lead to the deaths of countless people in the U.S. and Iraq. And unlike Blair's stories, which generally went nowhere beyond the pages of the paper, Miller's articles were repeatedly cited by top governments officials to build a case for launching an unprecedented pre-emptive invasion of another country. While the bad news here is that the Miller case has profoundly damaged the credibility of the Times, which was a venerable icon of American democracy, the good news is that neither the Times nor Miller managed to conceal the flaws in her reporting or to cover up the paper's cooperation with the Bush administration's pro-war PR machine. First, as pointed out by countless bloggers, Miller's prize-winning articles were poorly sourced and peppered with obvious inaccuracies. In other words, careful readers could detect the problematic aspects of her reports long before her misleading assertions were explicitly revealed. Second, even though the paper's public editor, Byron Calame, failed to follow up on his own misgivings, he raised questions about her relationship with the government that pointed the way toward later revelations about the deal that she had apparently made with Scooter Libby to promote the Bush administration's spin on pre-war intelligence. Third, in her own account of her grand jury testimony, Miller either inadvertently let slip or deliberately suggested that her sources were actively controlling what she could and could not keep secret from her employers. The positive upshot of this is that readers can detect bad and misleading reporting. Thus, we do not have to trust reporters simply to tell the truth or give way to the cynical assumption that we can't believe anything we read. Moreover, the decentralized and interactive nature of the Internet has provided readers, not only with new ways to check facts, but also with new means to make their responses known throughout the world. Along these lines, the lesson that you can take away from this course is that our capacity to gain an accurate understanding of the world, like our ability to write well, depends on our ability to investigate and evaluate information. As evidenced throughout the Miller case, inaccuracies, half-truths, and misleading statements usually betray their own lack of integrity in vague terminology, illogical constructions, unjustified assumptions, unsupported statements, and unnecessary abstractions. This lack of integrity can usually be uncovered irrespective of the mode of delivery, that is, the same principles may be applied to evaluate an academic article, a radio broadcast, a press release, or a web site. In short, while many lies do not stink to high heaven, almost all of them can be sniffed out to some extent. Even though there is no sure-fire formula for detecting misinformation, we can ask specific questions to ferret out whether we are being misled. For example,
In the following list of links, not all of the stories and topics included require you to read as if you were a private detective. However, no matter which topic you choose, you must illustrate your ability to locate and convey accurately all of the major details that are relevant to the topic at hand. Moreover, you must construct an analysis that does not go beyond the facts included in your essay. For example, if you choose to write about Dan Rather's misreporting on George W. Bush's record of military service, you must be careful not to confuse the problematic aspects of the story with what is or is not known about Bush's record of attendance during his tenure with the Texas Air National Guard. Likewise, if you choose to write an essay criticizing New York Times reporting on Steven Hatfill, you must separate what is or is not known about Hatfill with your evaluation of the journalistic standards adopted in the paper's approach to the case. Note: I earlier thought that it would be helpful to require you to focus on the role of the Internet in all of these stories, but having reread all the materials, I think that this perspective might be too confining. Consequently, you should mention the part played by the Internet if that strengthens your essay, but don't feel obliged to bring the issue in if it seems off the mark. 1. New York Times Reporting on Steven Hatfill Tips: A good way to approach this topic would be to start by identifying unsupported statements and incomplete comments made about Hatfill in various New York Times columns and news stories. After describing several examples, specifically explain the problems involved in this kind of media coverage. Paying particular attention to the inclusion of irrelevant information in various Times pieces would be especially useful in this case. Also, be sure to explain what we know or don't know about Hatfill at this point. Finally, if you can identify logical reasons why a columnist would take this approach to the the Anthrax poisoning story, please note them in your analysis of Times coverage. Tips: A good way to approach this topic would be to start by summarizing the original reports on gaps in Bush's military service, then turn to the controversy over the documents that Rather drew from in his CBS News report. Be sure to distinguish between doubts raised about the authenticity of the documents Rather relied on in his story and doubts raised about Bush's fulfillment of his duties. Also be sure to indicate where the story came from in the first place: one of the interesting aspects of this drama is that the story originated in the Boston Globe, which made misjudgments similar to those of Rather's news team. However, the Globe's major role in providing support for Rather's conclusions received hardly any attention in the press. In your analysis, do your best to account for this fact. 3. Looking Back at Stephen Glass Tips: A good way to approach this topic would be first to read the links and commentary provided on David Callahan's web site, The Cheating Culture, then read additional articles from Forbes.com, which first uncovered Glass's fabrications, and the other publications included on the page. Having read these materials, you can choose to focus on Glass as symptomatic of wider moral problems in contemporary American culture, as Callahan does, or you can focus on the role of the Internet in bringing Glass down. You may be able to incorporate both angles, but concentrating on one angle would probably work out better in such a short paper. 4. Blame It on the Blogs: American Journalism Gets Caught in the Web Tips: A good way to approach this topic would be first to read Richard Sambrook's column on the ways in which the Internet is transforming global journalism, then to read the rest of the linked material in order to determine which aspect of this transformation you would like to feature most prominently in your essay. Rather than drawing general conclusions about whether the Internet is good or bad for news reporting, try to be more specific about the historical, cultural, political and/or economic consequences of digital communications in news gathering.
|
||
