This unit finishes up our consideration of the practical problem of inquiry in the contemporary media environment.
Reading:
Finish Blur by Kovach and Rosenstiel. If you need to prioritize I would say:
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are the most essential. (But in Chapter 8 the section called “To Find Reliable News, Look for a Method,” pp. 152-164, is not so helpful. To be clear: the advice in the section title is good, I think -- we should look for a method. But the grab-bag of examples of good reporting doesn’t add much to what has come before.)
Chapter 4, 5, and the epilogue are the next most useful for our purposes. Please read these if you possibly can.
Chapter 9, because it is about what journalists ought to do and not about what we, the news consumers, can do, is definitely skippable.
Writing:
1. Do the exercises recommended on page 166 of blur. Specifically:
a. Make a list of the ten issues or topics that are most important to you as a news consumer. Try to put the list in order, with the most important topic at the top, followed by the second most important, and so on. (Note: as I understand it, this question, unlike the next one, is not about how you actually spend your time. It’s a question about your idea or conception of what is important to you.)
b. Then answer: How often do you actually consume information about these topics?
c. Looking back at just the last 24 hours, answer the bullet-pointed questions in the bottom half of page 166 (“What new did I get about what topics?” Etc.)
d. Considering your answers to these questions, how well is your “information diet” serving you?
2. (For a bit of serio-comic relief) watch the Daily Show video linked here:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-october-12-2009/cnn-leaves-it-there
What point is John Stewart making here that is also made by Kovach and Rosenstiel?
3. Kovach and Rosenstiel claim to be offering us helpful advice about how to cope with the confusing new media environment -- how to find and recognize sources of reliable information and of insightful analysis. So, two questions about this:
a. What is their advice: What do they tell us we should do if we want to be ‘smart consumers’ of news and information? (Write a page or two. Be specific.)
b. How good it this advice? Breaking this down a bit:
i. If we followed the advice in Blur, would we in fact learn what we need to learn from the media? Or are they pointing us in the wrong direction in some way?
ii. How feasible is it to do what they are advising us to do? Have they given us a set of principles that we can actually follow? Given our biases and limited rationality, can we do what they are telling us to do?
c. How likely are you to follow this advice? (Explain.)