Our class started as usual, talking about what each one of us had done since the last time we saw each others; our teacher told us what happened and why he had to go to the hospital the week before; I think all of us were very concerned about his situation, so it was great to see him healthy and full of energy as always.

He told us about a book that he read during his stay at the hospital; it was written by William Boyd and tells the story of a man’s life; he found it very interesting and really got into the story, which in our teacher’s opinion it is more appealing if you are an old man.
Then we spoke about the situation in Haiti: the problems that have arisen from the earthquake that hit this island a few weeks ago, and the role of the international community in the reconstruction of the country.

Then we read an article to gain an insight into the situation, this article was particularly biased and presented many facts and opinions to support the writer’s idea that the real problem in Haiti was not the earthquake, and that the real catastrophe was not caused by nature but by men.
In this article we got to know many things about Haiti’s foundation and history; many facts were presented to explain why Haiti is the poorest country on the western hemisphere, and why people is showing such empathy for their situation.

It was said that the amount of the international aid reaches a few billion dollars, being the US, by far, the biggest donor. We discussed the interest of the US to do so, and some theories were proposed about it: Someone said that because of the proximity of the two countries, the intention to show the effectiveness handling a crisis, the fear to have an immigration wave towards its territory, to show their power, etc, but the truth is that it is pretty hard to know for sure.
Finally we heard a report from a famous commentator from CNN, and we tried to transcript it; it took us some time to get all the worlds, but in the end we got the whole idea, and it was very interesting what we could learn from it.

As the article, it showed many history facts that helped us understand a bit better the whole situation; it explained how it became the only country founded by slaves, and how the inside struggle for power lead it to what it is today.

Ok, so that would be all, see you all next class,

Gustavo,

January 8th

Our first class of the year began with a quick review of what every one of us had done during our Christmas break. The destinations were many: Athens, Morocco, the US, Rome, Versailles and even... Paris! Well, no matter how many miles we traveled, it seems that all of us have had very nice holidays. Knowing that everybody was in good shape to start the year, we got down to business, and started talking about the reports that we sent just before the beginning of the break.

Mr. Noble said that, even though he likes to be optimistic about things, he was somewhat disappointed with our work. As for the quality of the writing, they were rather average, with one or two exceptionally good and one or two exceptionally bad. As for the content of the reports themselves, he said that it could have been much better; it seems that we did not understand very well the whole purpose of the work, focusing too much on the "surface" of the news sources instead of highlighting differences in content and bias between the anglo-saxon medium and the other source we chose.

Our teacher then gave us a sheet containing some common mistakes that he had found in our works, and asked us to take a look and try to correct them. We then reviewed each phrase, and, as we went through each one of them, he gave us precious tips to improve our writing, which I will try to reproduce below:

• Use of the semi-colon (;): the function of the semi-colon is to connect two individually meaningful phrases that are somehow related. For example, the phrase

  'the subjects are diversified and elaborate, they are not just hard news'

  is incorrect, since it uses a comma to unite two independent sentences. Thus, it would be more appropriate to write it with a semi-colon: 'the subjects are diversified and elaborate; they are not just hard news.' Note: if the two sentences are not sufficiently related (such as in 'Apples are red.' and 'It snows outside.'), it is better to use a period instead ('Apples are red. It snows outside.');
• Use of the colon (:) and the comma (,): among many other uses, the colon introduces a list of items separated by commas, such as in 'There are three things I love in life: oranges, apples and tomatoes.';
• Use of the past tense: when you use the simple past tense, you have to specify the time in the past when the event you are talking about occurred. If there is no time indication at all, you should probably use the present perfect tense.
• Use of the genitive case (the -'s ending): when used as a possession marker, the -'s ending should only be employed when the possessor of the thing you are referring to is a human being. For example, you can write "Jones's legs" or even "Jones' legs", but never "the chair's legs" - in this case, you have to use 'of': "the legs of the chair." Another example of wrong usage is

  'the US' lack of commitment.'

  In this case, it would be more appropriate to write 'the lack of commitment from the US', or simply 'the american lack of commitment.' Note that 'the US lack of commitment' is not a good answer, since 'US' can not be used as an adjective here. However, there are some specific cases in English where a noun can be used as an adjective, such as in 'the Obama administration';
• Relative clauses: when you already have two sentences connected by 'which', it is not good practice to introduce a third one. Using too much nested relative clauses may make your text difficult to read and introduce unnecessary ambiguities. E.g.: 'About sports, we can notice some light differences in the kinds of sports, which is normal because CNN International is for Americans living in foreign countries, which explains the priority of basketball, hockey and baseball.' It would be better to rephrase it without the second 'which': "(...) for Americans living in foreign countries. This explains (...)".
• Vocabulary: take care with what you write - that is, make sure that your text is really in English (an example of a bad phrase from our reports: 'a photography of the visage' - correct version: 'a photograph of the face');
• Keep it simple, stupid (the KISS principle): although our teacher did not actually use this expression, I think it summarizes a lot of what he said about our writing style. The key to improving our writing in English is keeping things as clear and simple as possible. Using lots of qualifiers won't make your text clear and forceful; au contraire. Also, there is no need for large introduction sections in reports in English: instead of describing in detail what you are going to do, just do it! We have to keep in mind that writing in English is different from writing in French, Arabic, Spanish or Portuguese; each language has its own conventions and practices.

Unfortunately, we did not have any time left neither to discuss our assignment, not to watch another extract of 'Food, Inc.' Nevertheless, it looked like no one had problems in doing the homework, which was a dictation based on a video about McDonald's in China. Well, I am looking forward to watching the rest of the movie, so I hope we will have some spare time next week.

See you all next Thursday, then!

December 17th

Our last class before the holidays took place on the penultimate day of the Copenhagen summit, which is what we talked about. First, we all wrote what we had heard on that subject in the media. Our pool of intelligence contained various information : China and the USA had critical and hard positions, it was the first time so many countries had to make a commitment on the environment, we heard more about the riots and the arrests than about the talks, probably because they were very unproductive, once the negotiations even stopped because some participants had left the room! We learnt that this summit was paradoxical because it entailed a great emission of greenhouse gases due to the leaders' planes, thanks to Alexis!

Then we compared three articles about the Copenhagen summit excerpt from three different sources : Mail and Guardian Johannesburg (South Africa), Times of London (England) and CBS/AP (USA). They all had different points of view. We noticed that the Mail and Guardian was more about the summit, as opposed to the riots, and especially about the effects it would have on poor countries. It was pessimistic and rather alarmist. The article from the Times of London was written as if it was a story, and was surprisingly funny. A British man had been interviewed about the arrests for the purpose of the article, which shows once again that "All news is local". The subject of Copenhagen had been made interested for the people in the UK. Finally, we noticed that the CBS/AP one was more human in its approach, and maybe less biased.

We eventually came to watch a rather disgusting part of Food.Inc about the chicken mass production! Not very appetizing before lunch…

December 10th

Our last class started with an activity around the International Herald Tribune. Each of us got a sample of the newspaper. After going through the three first pages we had to draw conclusions about the newspaper.

About the audience:

This newspaper was originally named the New-York Herald Tribune but changed his name when his audience changed. Although it’s an American style newspaper it’s not written for an American audience. People who read the International Herald Tribune are people who read English and they are spread all over the world. Given the type of audience we understand more easily why the news in this newspaper comes from all over the world. The luxury adds on each page allow us to conclude that the targeted audience is quite wealthy. Finally, the business section (at least three to four pages per sample) highlights the fact that this newspaper is more and more written for a businessmen audience.

About the layouts:

The two first pages are hard news which is a basic rule for all the newspapers. Although it’s for an international audience the first page is still focused on an American audience. The newspaper cut the articles of the first page to make us go inside and see the adverts. The adverts are taking an incredible amount of space, some of them even take one whole page (e.g. add for Omega watchmaker) but they are the investors of the newspaper so they have every right to do this.

About the contents:

At the end of the newspaper we can find the sport section and the business section.

On page two and eight we can find two kinds of editorial that help us guess the orientation of the newspaper and the author’s opinion.

Some articles appear to be biased but that doesn’t mean that the author is actually biased. In fact, reporters are in the field and write an article but the editors are the ones who put it together (subtitle, title, length, location within the newspaper…). The way the article is presented gives us the first impression on the subject and sometimes this impression might be slightly different from the one the real author wanted us to have.

Then, we moved on to a second activity; we watched the beginning of the documentary Food Inc.. This film was realised by Robert Kenner, and tries to unveil the truth about what American population eat. This film is divided in different chapters. We watched the beginning of the first one named Fast Food to all food. Nowadays most of the food comes from assembly lines where both workers and animals are being abused but companies don’t want anybody to know.

This part begins with the interview of Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation. He became aware of the fact that all his life he had had no clue of the origins of the food he was eating. That’s the reason why he decided to become an investigative journalist. At that time he had no idea that only a handful of companies had the power over the whole food industry.

The biggest change in agriculture came from the Mc Donalds brothers in the 1930s. They brought the factory at the back of the kitchen, simplified the menu and it became the tremendous business we all know about. Nowadays Mc Donald’s company is the largest buyer of beef, chicken, apple… in the US and because of that it can demand what they want from their suppliers. The company wants its food to taste the same everywhere so they have to hire really big suppliers and there is only a handful of them. The four companies that owned only 25% of the beef market in the 1970s now own more than 80% of this market.

And this is the same for the other kind of meat (chicken, pork…). Those four giants are: SWIFT, CARGILL, TYSON and National Beef.

This is where we stopped to watch, hope we will watch some more next Thursday.

VOCABULARY:

Feature article: article de fond

Scraping the barrel : racler les fonds de tirroir

Spinning : filage, filature. To spin a yarn : débiter une longue histoire.

Ripe : mûr.

December 3rd

Last Thursday our class started with a discussion about thanksgiving. In fact M. Noble told us about the difficulties to find some adapted food in France during those days.

Then we saw how it is possible to manipulate information. For this part we read an article entitled Lost in Transmission. In this text we saw that a piece of information is most of the time distorted between the event and the reader. In a first time the reporter can’t see everything. So he has to generalize some facts not always representative of the reality. Then when he writes he inevitably give his mind in his text. So information can never be really exact.

To illustrate this we saw two different points of view by comparing two articles about a same topic: the implication of Iran in the nuclear. One was from The Jerusalem Post and the other from Al Jazeera. No one was lying but they related different parts of this conflict with different words. And those kinds of differences were enough to reveal some different points of view. And we saw that the second article from the Jerusalem Post was more objective.

To finish you watched the beginning of the movie Food Inc. And we took some memorable phrases and numbers which describe the American way to eat. This movie is a kind of denunciation of the new way to eat in the USA.

See you on Thursday

Tanneguy

November 26th

Hello everybody!

Our last class started with Camille reporting on the last debating competition she attended, which took place in Oxford. Although the Télécom team didn't make it to the finals, she thinks it was great to be there and compete with some of the best debating teams in the world, including people from Harvard and Yale (whose team happens to have won). We then discussed a little bit about the debating activity itself, and it turned out that, although there is a French equivalent, it is most likely to be an anglo-saxon concept.

Then, Anass gave us his opinion on a video he had seen on the CNN website, about Jihadi prisoners in Abou Salim detention facility. The video basically shows the efforts of both Jihadis, the son of the Libyan dictator, Khadafi, and Noman Benotman, a former Bin Laden ally and Jihadi combatant in the process of writing a new Jihadi code so as to reach peace in Tripoli. The prison itself is rather unique: prisoners have access to computers, CNN, Al Jazeera; their families can even come visit them. Anass said that, although he did know about the situation in Libya before, he did discover some things with the video. Finally, we also remarked that, although Khadafi's son had a good English, it would be taken for granted by an American audience, whereas if an American leader spoke, for example, French, some French people might be flattered.

After Anass' contribution, we moved on to our assignment, a dictation based on the CNN video 'The future of online news':

The video itself was very interesting, but, as a dictation assignment, we came to a consensus that it was way too long. However, it didn't prevent us from learning some new words and practicing our listening skills with different accents. In the video, there were British, Indian, East Asian and Australian speakers, so it was quite difficult to understand every word of what every one of them wanted to say.

After this quick look at our work with the dictation, we read an article titled 'iPod University', by Ginanne Brownell, which reports the experiences of some universities that are putting their content online for free. We then summarized it in two sentences, and discussed about the idea; while some of us thought that the Universities didn't really have any interest in doing that, some others viewed it as a form of free publicity. Our teacher then added that Universities are meant to spread knowledge, so publishing course materials online is indeed a very efficient way of doing it.

Finally (yes, we did a lot of things last class), we listened to the first minutes of the Food, Inc. documentary. We're going to get into it with more detail during our next classes, but this little preview already showed us what it is all about: 'The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you eat because, if you knew, you wouldn't want to eat it'.

That's it! I'm looking forward to our next class!

Novembre 12th

Hi everyone, here is what we did last time
In the beginning of this class joan and flavio summarized a article they had read about the new law proposition on the scholar system. The scholar system in Brazil is a 3 level system, but it it is hard for “colored people” to get access to universities. To try and solve this problem a new law project has been made to have a quota of “colored” students system quick in: it is clearly a positive discrimination law. Though this law seems an efficient way to solve this issue of small numbers of natives in Brazilian universities, there are problems encountered. The biggest is the fact that in Brazilian law you are the one who defines your color, so it seems hard to hold good quotas when people can easily choose their official color.
But is this article bias or not? Flavio thinks that it is because all the arguments in favor of this law are in the beginning of the article and it is only at the end that the journalist qualifies his speech.

We then read an article on President Sarkozy and President Obama, which made a comparison between the two characters. We had to skim the article and answer the question “ is this article bias?”. W should always ask ourselves “are we being manipulated? How?”. It appeared that this article was pro-Obama, that it gave a caricature of Sarkozy who appeared like a child. He gives non flattering images of the French president, they also appears to be problems with the figures who give wrong impressions to the reader. But he makes it up to Sarkozy in the second page, ends the article with “he’s not somebody you want working against you”.
We finished this class talking about another source of news: Movies!
Movies can be: fictions, documentaries to give use information (interviews, images filmed, archive images). We gave examples of 3 types of documentaries: 1- Gore 2- Moore 3- Food, INC.
But whatever type of documentary, there is always a process of selection of the information.
see you next class, Solène