You will write a 5 page paper comparing and contrasting news content
across organizations.
Choose three days (the same three days for all sources) on which to watch one national television newscast (e.g., NBC Nightly News, the News Hour on PBS), read one major U.S. newspaper (e.g., Washington Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times) and read one international English-language newspaper. Some possibilities in the last category are the Globe and Mail from Canada (www.globeandmail.com), the Guardian from the U.K. (www.guardian.co.uk), the Times from the U.K. (www.timesonline.co.uk), the Jerusalem Post from Israel (www.jpost.com), the Hindustan Times from India (www.hindustantimes.com)
and the Sydney Morning Herald from Australia (http://www.smh.com.au/). You are not,
however, limited to these suggestions.
Answer the following questions in your analysis:
– Describe the three news organizations in terms of their size, ownership and audience.
Answering this question may require some library research.
– Did the three news organizations emphasize different stories? What was the most prominent story for each? Did one organization cover a story that another completely ignored? What explanation do you have for any differences in emphasis that you found?
– How did coverage of the same story differ across the organizations? Why might this be?
– Did you detect any political bias in any of the media? What evidence leads you to this
conclusion?
– How did each news organization cover President Obama? What major differences, if any, did
you detect across news organization? What might account for the differences or similarities you
identified?
-In your opinion, which news organization did the best job conveying political information?
Why?
Be sure that you relate your discussion to the materials that we have read and discussed in class,
and cite all sources using a generally accepted standard of citation. I will grade your assignment
using several criteria, including the extent to which your paper:
1. Identifies, summarizes, and defines the issue or problem at hand
2. Clearly states purposes, objectives, or hypotheses.
3. Presents observations and results in a complete, logical and clear fashion.
4. Assesses, discusses, and reconciles the supporting data/evidence acquired from the
exercise in relation to the existing literature.
5. Identifies conclusions, implications and consequences.
