Assignment 5

For this assignment, I watched the ten o'clock news broadcast on Kare 11 in the Twin Cities on June 18, 2009. Please refer to the log below for more information about the segments I will refer to. 

This news cast was pretty much completely ridiculous from the start. The first segment had to do with the severe weather that we have been experiencing in the region in the past 24 hours. It involved two live segments, one from the studio with lots of radar graphics and one from a field in Milaca, where it appears there has been a thunder storm. This reminds me of the segment that Beach refers to in Chapter 9 of Michael Moore's documentary Bowling for Colombine. This weather story felt sensational and unnecessary, since there is clearly nothing that anyone can do about the weather. I think that a tasteful description of various warnings and ways to protect oneself would have done the trick, but these guys decided to indulge their audience's craving to know exactly how exciting and terrible thunderstorms and tornados can be. At one point in the field weather segment, the reporter said "Amazingly, no one was hurt" just after reporting that only one structure was really damaged. 

The newscast then continued to talk about the stories of the day, leading with Walter Cronkite's apparent sickness. This is probably because Walter Cronkite is member of the news community, so his sickness is very important to the news channel. Then, they go on to tell us about other current developments, have a commercial break, and then come to a story about news coverage of swine flu. Now, at the outset this story appears to be a useful critique of news media in general, which would lend an air of credibility to KARE 11. That is, until you hear that they are mostly criticizing every other news outlet and public health official for raising the alarm about the swine flu, and only wryly pointing out their own bottle of hand sanitizer they placed in the office. I guarantee that the swine  flu led their news cast for about two weeks a month and a half ago, but they failed to mention that. 

In the end, the local news cast was low on information and high on sensational reporting. 

Possible News Critique Lesson

For my seventh grade students, news critiquing would require that they actually understand the news. I think that the first project we did would have to focus on methods to gain information and make it relevant to their lives. First, I would teach the kids the conventions of a newscast, such as the definition of a lead story, human interest story, media convergence story, the difference between a local, national, and international story. Then, I would have the kids watch the news for a week and choose a story to follow. I would have them keep track of the story both on the news cast and in one other type of news publication (web, print, or radio). Then, I would have the students write about any differences they noticed in the way that each outlet reported the story, when the story happened in the broadcast (and what that says about its importance), and whether they would have reported the story differently and why.