Ex 1: The Journalist in Fact and Fancy
Rescheduled from Sep 17. Submit along with Portfolio 1.
Draw on the assigned course materials and your own experience to make a significant point about cultural stereotypes regarding journalists. In old movies, newspaper reporters sweat and smoke and call women "broads" or "dames." They seem more likely to get in a fistfight than to look up whether the alcoholic haze in which they live is making their career "founder" or "flounder." TV journalists have become TV personalities, with the function of the journalist blurring with talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno, and comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. If I said, "And I, for one, welcome our new ____ overlords," would you get the reference? What does all this say about the future of journalism as a profession?
You need not address the TV news example I gave above... but feel free to do something creative in this essay. You may write a conventional short essay, poetry, or a "fake news" story (see The Onion, "Actual Expert too Boring for TV," "Unspeakable Happens in Area Town," or "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever" for inspiration).
Draw on the assigned course materials and your own experience to make a significant point about cultural stereotypes regarding journalists. In old movies, newspaper reporters sweat and smoke and call women "broads" or "dames." They seem more likely to get in a fistfight than to look up whether the alcoholic haze in which they live is making their career "founder" or "flounder." TV journalists have become TV personalities, with the function of the journalist blurring with talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno, and comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. If I said, "And I, for one, welcome our new ____ overlords," would you get the reference? What does all this say about the future of journalism as a profession?
Tonight! on Channel 5 Action News!... Verbs.... disappearing from the vocabulary of news anchors! Our Slick Goodhair, live with linguists investigating an explosion of participles, cluttering the speech of newscasters. Verbs in TV news... a vanishing breed?Write a 2-page informal essay, quoting brief passages from assigned readings and/or materials you find online, that addresses a single, specific point about forces that have shaped and continue to shape journalism.
But first, footage of Action NewsTeam's Perky McWideteeth going undercover at a local TV news station... that wants to abuse your trust by wasting your time! What does she find about how TV news manipulates your emotions in order to sell your time to advertisers? About getting audience members riled up and offended, and then suddenly cutting away to a commercial, leaving them hanging? That and more, after the break.
You need not address the TV news example I gave above... but feel free to do something creative in this essay. You may write a conventional short essay, poetry, or a "fake news" story (see The Onion, "Actual Expert too Boring for TV," "Unspeakable Happens in Area Town," or "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever" for inspiration).
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