A whole lot of reading...

Chapter 22

This chapter, with the topic being media law, opened up by telling us that people listen to Oprah. I do not. I do not like Oprah. She says mean things about cows...that was not the point of why the book used this as an example was it...

This chapter is necessary in a journalism textbook. Journalists need to know their rights and how to protect the rights of others.

Libel is extremely important for a journalist to understand. People are very protective of their own reputations and don't want something to taint their image. The chart "Defamation" was extremely helpful in understanding what constitutes slander and libel. The fact that the book mentions it at the beginning and the end of the chapter tells you that it is very vital for a journalist to understand.

Some of the wording in this chapter was kind of hard to get through but after a few reads it mostly made sense. I'll probably give it another read-through in the near future.


Politics and the English Language

First of all, I love how this was written.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts," writes Orwell.

I guess what Orwell is trying to get to is that just like a cluttered desk makes a cluttered mind, so does an unclear language leading to an unclear thinking process. He finds it not only important for professional writers to write in proper English but for everyday people to do the same.

The five quotes he chose as examples of bad prose were difficult to understand and hard to even vaguely comprehend what point the author was trying to get across. He writes that authors are "almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not." This is something that I feel is very common in some text books and academic essays. In other classes, I have read many articles that have barely made any sense at first glance and where sentences had to be picked apart to understand. The first thing nearly everyone says as they enter the class is how hard the reading was. I believe that reading should be something enjoyable and that writing should not be something you have to decipher like it is a foreign language. Even if the subject matter may not interest you, you should at least find something inspiring in the writing style.

The following section helped me understand what makes writing not as effective as it could be. I commonly do everything that Orwell says not to do. If not in writing, I definitely say it out loud. I've been catching myself and others lately using dying metaphors and cliches. I caught a great contradictory metaphor yesterday while watching America's Next Top Model. "What you see is what you get. Don't judge a book by its cover," said one of the contestants. She was called out on this by one of the judges and told to stop contradicting herself.

I find myself wanting to quote every other line of this article.

"[Modern writing] consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug," writes Orwell

I now realize how bad of a writer I am. Hopefully I will be better now that I have read this article and know what all my faults are (and that they are indeed faults).

I bookmarked it.


Five Characteristics of Academic or Scholarly Prose

This is exactly what I was talking about before. Academic and scholarly prose oftentimes is near impossible for a regular person to understand. It can be wordy and use unnecessarily long phrases. It is not even effective many times.

The characteristics listed are exactly what I see when reading academic essays for school. I thought I was an idiot before for not understanding what the author was writing but it turns out that they are the idiots (kind of).


Assessment of Media Performance (in the Staff Report to the President’s Commission on The Accident at Three Mile Island)

Reading this assessment makes me feel that I need to double major in something like, say, nuclear power maybe? If I was in the situation of the accident at TMI, I would be like Paul Magnussen who had to cover the story just because he was back from lunch first.

I liked reading how many reporters each news outlet sent to report on the accident. I found it interesting that the Times sent enough reporters to fill an entire floor of a hotel while others only sent a few.

I also liked how they included why the accident was newsworthy in the assessment. The fact that "conflicting information" was one of the reasons why reporters covered the story was new to me.

The work that reporters went to to understand what was going is outstanding. They really wanted to know everything so they could report fully and accurately. The steps they took to obtain information were not easy ones. One of my favorites was: "Inquirer reporters had obtained names of the workers by matching up license plate numbers on cars in the Met Ed lots with the names of the vehicles' owners." Creeeeepy, but great.

"No amount of information is ever enough information."

There is no doubt that many reporters covering this story believed that phrase. They didn't want to get information from just one source either, they went all over the place.

The sensationalism portion was helpful in understanding what makes something sensationalized and why reporters would want to take this "angle". For example, it was intriguing to find that the press didn't report that no one died at TMI.

Concluding the assessment of the media was how the situation could have been handled better. This is something that needs to be looked into so that future stories won't have the same issues as ones in the past.