Aims:
• to develop your skills in analysing texts within contexts (c.f. Week 2 tutorial exercise)
• to help you understand the role of media in framing world events, including deciding what ‘counts’ as an event, and the discursive tools they use in doing so
• to train you to present clear analysis in a concise form
The exercise:
Choose a topic from the ‘micro issue’ list above, and analyse its treatment by five different international and/or foreign media sources accessible in English (including translations from other languages) and accessible electronically via the Web. You can choose to analyse written or audiovisual media but the AV media must be web-accessible and short. You are limited to one publication from an Australian source and one publication from a US or British source
Sources:
You should ensure the five sources are reasonably contemporaenous, and diverse in terms of type and origin: they should not all come from similar networks or the same country. They can include:
• an international media agency or transnational news network report (e.g. Reuters, AP, AFP, AAP, CNN, Al-Jazeera, France 24, BBC World);
• a major public national or local media source;
• a major privately-run national or local media source;
• an independent media report or opinion piece or blog (e.g. Indymedia, Crikey, Huffington Post);
• an NGO news or opinion/blog source;
• institutional reports, commentaries or blogs (i.e. government report, international institution report);
• a social media source—excluding gossip and other trivia: the source must contain news or news commentary and be long enough to provide a basis for analysis.
You must attach printouts of your five written sources to your report; for AV sources you must provide a weblink and the source should not be longer than five minutes in duration. You should not use secondary sources for this exercise, which is a report rather than an academic essay, but must scrupulously reference all your primary sources (weblinks, dates and so on). You may refer to media other than your five principal sources for the purpose of comparison or to demonstrate a point, but they will not be your main area of focus. When directly citing any media published in a language other than English, you must translate all cited passages into English and provide the original language in a footnote or appendix.
Analysis:
You should keep in mind the questions asked for your Week 2 tutorial exercise. Your goal is to report on what is framed as newsworthy in relation to your topic, and by whom (and where). In completing this task, you should discuss:
• what different types of information and commentary are put forward by the different sources: do different media foreground different aspects? what is left out? is the information supplied verifiable?
• the language used (style, vocabulary, emotive or otherwise, rhetorical devices used, and so on)
• interaction between language and (audio)visuals: webpage layout, photographs and so on, images shown in AV documents.
Style:
This is a short report, not an essay (but is a precursor to your essay, which will be on a related topic). How you structure the report is up to you, but the use of subheadings (either thematic or by source) could be helpful. You should compare the different sources clearly and your conclusion should provide a brief critique of the media framing of your chosen topic: is there a glut or a paucity of information? what biases or lacunae are in evidence?