History of Journalism - Reflection on the reading and the class discussion
I learned a lot from reading this article, "History of Journalism." Before reading this, I thought that a newspaper is just informational, though it sometimes includes authors' opinions(but still informative). But one of the definitions of news that this article gave me was that we get it from anything that brings out our senses or emotions, and it happens when an event, action or circumstance has an impact on people or their way of life. And the importance of a news varies depending on the person reading it; news related to entertainment could be important for a person, and news related to politics could be important for another. One of the big ideas that this article presented was that the development of technology led to the dissemination of newspaper, which later influenced the politics and democracy. The spread of political information to citizens and the handing down of ideals and principles allowed the evolution of democratic rules and change of system from direct voting to representative democracy. The authorities did not like the spread of the media and the fact that people now had easier access to newspapers; they feared that the printing and the newspaper could be used as a tool to educate the masses, which would then lead to discontent, questioning of authority - they were basically worried that the citizens might start complaining and questioning what the authorities were doing. Even though this might not have been so pleasing to the authorities, this definitely contributed to making the society better. More and more citizens would have wanted to be involved in what's going on in their country in terms of politics and also have their voice heard. And now the more citizens were involved, the authorities could not really do anything just for their benefits; they had to have a government system that's favorable by citizens as well. This led to the improvement in democracy. While I was reading, where it said "In 1456 Johann Gutenberg 'invented' a printing press with moveable type in Germany," I started questioning this. Many people tend to think that the first printing press was invented in Germany by Gutenberg, even though it’s not. I researched about this so that I don't provide wrong information, and I found out that a system of printing from movable metal type was developed in Korea using Chinese characters a generation before Gutenberg's invention. Gutenberg just combined already existing technologies(printing press, type, paper and ink). Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible is known as the first metal type printed book, but Korea's Jikji(collection of Buddhist treatises and teachings) was printed with movable metal type in 1377, which was 78 years earlier. In general, I liked this article a lot, since I was able to learn a lot from it. Some information such as the development of technology leading to the dissemination of newspapers and governors not being in favor of this is pretty obvious if you think about it, but still, I wouldn't have thought so if this article hadn't told me that. I was able to get much out of the discussion as well. It was interesting to see how some people considered information that I considered insignificant significant.
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For the Language and Mass Communication unit, we were supposed to write an in-class commentary on a given ad. For this assignment, my class was given a Jeep ad that's shown below. And below the ad there's my commentary. In this Jeep ad, they are advertising Jeep Wrangler. The ad does contain elements that any ad would contain, except the image of the actual product is very small. So what the ad is trying to do is not just advertising the product; it's something more than just that. This Jeep ad brings out people's desire to come outside, perhaps get out of their cubes, and be active just like the kids. And the ad achieves this through the white space, pathos, and by having the woman in the ad.
First of all, the white space that takes up a big part of the ad contributes to ad conveying the message. The large white space reminds the audience of a field covered in snow, making them want to go to the place and run and play there, just like little kids do. The fact that the background is white sort of reminds the audience of innocence, like the innocence of children. Second of all, the repetition of "i" and the passage helps the audience understand the message behind the ad. The use of "i" instead of "I" makes the audience look at the text once more, since it's different from what they've been seeing. The repetition of "i" sort of gives the writing a childish look, since it's mostly children who talk like that. And as the audience reads it, they would keep thinking "i," "i," and later at the end they might think it's their story. Even the story is relatable by anyone who loves snow and is stuck at work working, which is pathos. As the audience reads the ad, they will be more engaged with the text, and agree and empathize with the ad. Finally, the appearance of the woman in this ad also contributes to conveying the message. She is wearing clothes for snowboarding, with gloves and all, ready for winter, ready to go outside and enjoy. To be active. And she's looking directly into the camera, which is basically the audience, as if she wants to tell the audience something, or as if telling them to come with her and snowboard together. The woman might be the audience's inner-self and she represents the audience's desire to get out of the work and go outside. And her innocent looking face brings out the child-like feature. This ad aimed to bring out people's desire to come outside and be active just like kids do, and it conveyed the message with the use of white space, use of "i" and pathos, and by the appearance of the woman in the ad. It also tries to say that people, specifically adults, need to get out of their ordinary lives and do something active, adventurous maybe, and that Jeep Wrangler could help them with it. Dr. Clinton's comment: Some insightful observation, but you take more than half the essay to get there. A quick outline would help you get right to the point. Reflection: What Dr. Clinton said is something that I already am aware of. I usually need a lot of time to process my understanding of a given text and then to write an essay, so I tend to skip the outlining part, so that I can have a bit more time for the writing part. And bunch of ideas come up while I write, so my first body paragraph tends to be very superficial and my last paragraph tends to be more developed. Maybe from now on, I should start making a brief outline, so I waste less time thinking about what I'm going to write DURING the actual writing process. Media bias is the bias of journalists and news producers in mass media in terms of selecting events and stories that will be reported and how they will be written. Bias depends on the perspective of a person, and media bias can differ depending on the perspective of the journalist who's writing it or of the news producer. Since lots of readers read the articles that the journalists write, the journalists’ perspective and bias might affect lots of readers and cause them to have bias towards the events as well.
There are different types of media biases that can be found in a news article: bias through selection and omission, bias by word choice or tone, bias through use of names and titles, etc. Some of them we can spot easily even before reading the whole article, such as the placement and by headline. If an article is placed in the center of the news website along with an image, then we would tend to think that it’s very important, more important than the other articles whose titles are written with small font in the corner. Some headlines could be really good hooks that are attractive, while some other might not be as interesting or attract the readers to read the articles. Some other biases can be spotted by simply reading the article, such as the tone of the writer, word choice, statistics and crowd counts, etc. If the writer has negative perspective towards the content of the article, he/she might use more negative words. One of the biases that are difficult to spot would be bias through selection and omission. It’s when a journalist chooses to use or not to use a specific information about the topic. He/she could choose not to include some details. This one is difficult to detect because we can’t really figure out what’s missing only by reading the article; we’ll have to read other articles on the same topic or event in order to find out the bias. I guess one way to report news objectively and impartially could be having 2 or 3 people with different perspectives write one article, even though it might be time consuming and more effort might be needed rather than just one person writing it. The article wouldn't lean towards one side; it would satisfy everyone with different perspectives. Another way to make the articles unbiased could be instead of sorting the articles and placing them in different parts of a website layout according to the news producers' tastes, they can just have list of categories as their home page and have the readers choose what they want to read. |
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