Silent News.

I was unable to catch any primetime news shows, so I had to settle for watching pop culture news filler on HLN, a station owned by CNN. While it wasn’t the prime specimen to examine for the assignment, I figured it would get the job done. The only problem I could think of with using this station and type of news versus a show like “60 Minutes” on CBS would be that there was always something on the screen telling what the story was about and all its major components, whereas in “60 Minutes” and most other news shows, the show is based on interviews and commentary, making the sound crucial to understand what’s going on.
The segments on the program were discussing Lindsay Lohan and her supposed stint in a psych ward at a hospital. It then showed a screen capture of her twitter page debunking the rumors and stating that she has been working on a new movie. While I am sure there was a bit more information given audibly by the newscasters, the video alone seemed to give me the whole story did not leave me questioning anything that was going on.
It could be argued that news shows centered around pop culture and celebrity gossip are made to give all the information straight up and are rarely so in depth that the facts are easily misconstrued. Probably the people who watch this portion of HLN are watching it because they want simple, up to date information on celebrities and nothing more. I continued watching the show a little bit with the sound on and they were basically saying the exact same things that the text on the screen said, only put into different forms. The audio was hardly ever more in depth or elaborate than the video, so I can only conclude that, from this “experiment,” some types of news programs can be completely understood by the viewers with no audio needed. Thinking back to episodes of “20/20” and the NBC “Nightly News” that I’ve seen, I would be completely lost of no sound were included with the video. I could probably guess that if they showed war footage that something bad had happened lately, but beyond that I would not really know what was going on. (I would also not be able to judge from the expressions of the newscasters what was going on, because most anchors have a semi-stoic face while presenting the news, probably to not offend anyone by smiling unprofessionally or something of that sort.)

Homework assignment #3

The lead to the New York Times piece titled “Stolen Art by Warhol is Sought in California” is very successful in reeling in the reader. While it is not guaranteed to hook everyone at first glance (because frankly, nothing in this world is 100% guaranteed), the lead has just the right amount of information in it to make a person want to know more. It answers the general questions, but isn’t oozing with so much information that it gives complete satisfaction and no need to read on. What is especially terrific about the lead is that it reveals the story as a mini-mystery waiting to be solved. Carl Vogel and Solomon Moore write that “[t]he theft of 10 silkscreen paintings by Andy Warhol has the Los Angeles Police Department searching for clues, but it has people in the art world scratching their heads, too.” The story is not conclusive, but this is not to the fault of the authors of the article, as no evidence has been found which points in any specific direction of a perpetrator. I find it fantastic that the story looked at two different sides of the story. It gave snippets of police information, but it also gave snippets of information from the art world, which apparently uniformly agrees that Warhol paintings are not something worth stealing in this day and age, as they are easily traceable and steadily losing their value. The article is in the active voice, a trick which could bring life to even the most boring of subjects. On the whole, the article was well written, giving the straight facts in the beginning of the story and giving the less crucial information towards the end. There were quotes from a few different sources, both from the Los Angeles Police Department and from various people in the art world, giving this story credibility on top of everything else.

CMJ236 first article

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/technology/09distracted.html?_r=1&hp
Above is an article which, in summation, lists American universities as a whole to be inefficient at properly educating students. One of the major reasons stated for the constant inability of American students to graduate is the focus by colleges on the enrollment numbers rather than the graduation numbers; "the fact that colleges are not held to account for their failures" is a major problem with the education system (David Leonhardt).

The article states that half of enrolled college students in the United States don't graduate within six years. I researched this online and was only able to find sources from 2000 and 2001, which may be all that is available. I think, though, in order to correctly make a statement about the amount of students dropping out rather than graduating, the article should also tell from what years they got their data from. I understand that usually there are trends when it comes to high school and college drop outs and graduates, but the article states up front that "only half of students who enroll end up with a bachelor’s degree".

The article lists colleges who have a high graduation rate, which is great, but they list a lot more that have low graduation rates. The article also seems to take the bulk of its information from a few studies, one of which took a random sampling of only 68 US colleges. I couldn't find an exact number of colleges that are in the US, but this link http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ/alpha/ sure has well over 2000 colleges listed. To me, 68 out of 2000 (and possibly more) is not an accurate sampling.

While the author did not pull figures out of nowhere to use in his article, he did seem to use either outdated or inconclusive data to form his opinions. I do agree that the education system is going downhill, I simply just believe he could have presented his argument a bit more concisely.