As I was reading through Cicada Hoyt's media critique, I couldn't help but shake my head in agreement as I read line after line of her work. All of her main points excellently portrayed how the article she decided to critique violated the Nine Principles and Seven Yardsticks of Journalism.
Her explanations were very analytic and helped me understand why certain aspects of the article violated the Nine Principles and Seven Yardsticks; for example, instead of just saying something as vague as "the article violates the explanation yardstick", she actually explained how there was a violation. She did this by using evidence that she discovered and collected, such as saying-
"... the reporter only said what happened and not why it happened. For example, he could've explained about what had happened with the shooting and after the shooting... Perhaps if the reporters reported the facts they wouldn't have been so quick to judge..."
This short breakdown of what she explained was used to support the idea that the article was violating the Explanation Yardstick, and overall, this allowed for me to better understand her critique and for me to understand her views on the topic.
Another thing that I was impressed with was the use of photos as a visual aid to show violations. Cicada used a picture of police aiming weapons at a man who had his arms in surrender as a way to show the violation of the 5th Principle (Watchdog), which supported her explanation of how instead of keeping an eye on the people with power (in this case, the police) the article was directed to keeping the attention/keeping an eye on the citizens of Ferguson (in this case, the people who don't necessarily have power).
I also think it's pretty great that she took on the daunting task of finding violations in an article with a very controversial, commonly talked about (at the time) topic.
I did notice one little error; there was a lot of usage of first person words like "I" and a few opinions here in there in the article, which shouldn't really be used in media critiques (it should be in 3rd person), but nonetheless, nothing can distract from the fact that her critique was very factual, relevant, understandable, and overall superb.
Go check out her media critique by clicking on the following link: http://cadylandia.blogspot.com/2014/09/article-critique-ferguson-shooting.html
Picture: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8379/8672563295_9c270cbc79_b.jpg
No comments:
Post a Comment