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

November 6th

This class started with a little presentation on Columbia's cocaine war by Gustavio. He had watched a CNN video on that subject, which he found was accurate and complied to the Columbian news. The video explained the situation in Columbia : before the government got really involved in solving that problem, there was a huge trafic of cocaine from Columbia to the USA and EU. Drug dealers got very rich and powerful, but the narcotrafic slowed down after the state invested to implement new and efficient measures. Nowadays, cocaine implies less profit and exportation decreases. The report then focused on a particular area : Medellin's suburbs, the second biggest city suburb in Columbia where gangs of drug dealers and/or thieves have the power. There is a war within gangs who want to control the region, causing 15 deaths per day in those suburbs!
As Gustavio is from Columbia, he is in a good position to be critical. He found that the video was accurate but warned us not to generalize. He reminded us that Medellin was a singular example and that a minority of the population faces that kind of problems. He himself was never related nor aware of drug war activities in his neighborhood when he lived in Columbia. As a comparison, Clichy-sous-Bois doesn't represent France, and a single district of Beirut doesn't represent Lebanon.

During the second half of the period, we studied an article from The Economist : The internet is killing newspaper and giving birth to a new sort of news business. The title says a lot in itself! Newspaper companies are having a hard time, people rely more and more on the Internet where they get the news for free. So the problem is obviously a money problem. Will newspapers eventually disappear? Will people accept to pay the access to newspaper websites?

October 29th

Hi all,
During the last session, we talked about the structure of the course. It would be focusing on two main areas:
* The media in general: What is the media, problems and potential
* How the medis influence us: At the end of the course, we should be able to detect the writer's bias and to be sensitive to any subjectivity.
After this presentation, we talked about the first part: What is the media? The answer was classical: Radio, TV, Dailies, newspapers and Internet. But we didn't make any distincin between these medias. For example, some of them are too general (Le Monde, Le Figaro) and others are specific (La Croix, Les Echos), we can also find some local medias.
These medias are facing a lot of problems, for instance in terms of advertising,licensing, coverage, sources and also a lack of staff.
After, we watched a video talking about recession in the adult industry. In fact, the video presents the effets of crisis on pornography and shows this industry only from an economical angle without any ethical reference.Then, we read an article which was talking about the same subject and had exactly the same view on the phenomenon.
To be discussed!

October 22nd

Hello everyone! Here is a summary of our third class:

We started off talking about the different media (radio, TV, internet, blogs, Twitter, newspapers and news magazines). We discussed about their 'freshness' (TV versus daily newspapers), their easiness of access (radio vs Internet), their biases (daily newspapers vs blogs). Also, our teacher commented on how Twitter can be a great source of instantaneous and very useful information - for example, at the protests in Iran, people would 'tweet' about where the police was, so as to alert the others of possibly dangerous paths; however, since it's impossible to know whether a tweet is true or not, the police could have spread false information on Twitter, to confuse and catch some of the protesters.

Secondly, we talked about the news video 'France Telecom suicides', from CNN:

We had been assigned to use it as a dictation; however, some of us did not know what a dictation was, so our teacher clarified that it was essentially a literal transcript. As for the video itself, we concluded that it was quite short and neutral compared to the French media coverage, which featured extensive reports on the subject. Finally, we talked a little bit about the types of stories that CNN covers: e.g., one can expect to find lots of 'hard news' from Colombia, but very few reports from France, which tend to focus on lifestyle aspects.

That's it! See you all next week!

October 15th

Hello, everybody! Here is a brief description of what we did in our last class:

First of all, we were given more details about the contents of the report that we have to do. For the medium chosen, we shall be able to tell: (i) what it does and does not cover; (ii) what they put an emphasis on; (iii) and wether it has any bias. We can also compare it to another source from our own countries. As for the size, it should not be longer than three pages - two pages are probably OK.

After those bits of information, we talked about the sources that we use to get the news. We found out that most of us read or watch the news in our respective native languages, and mainly not from the hard copies of daily newspapers. Our teacher, then, gave us a short presentation on the anglo-saxon way of writing a news report and organizing a newspaper. Basically, the main guiding principle is: "once you finish reading an article, you don't know the point of view of the journalist"; however, bias can still be expressed in a number of ways: by the headlines chosen, by the images associated with the article, by its placement on the newspaper. Even the very inclusion of a story reveals editorial choices - thus, when comparing different sources, it is important to look at what is left out.

Finally, to better illustrate the points made, we read the article 'Middle classes turn to car park handouts', by Sarah O'Connor. The class ended with a little 'contest': each of us had to summarize the article in just one phrase - the shorter, the better.

That's it! I'm sorry it took me so long to post it... But you know, 'better late than never'!

October 8th

During this first session, everyone was introduced to the class. It is a very international group with students from Morocco, Columbia, Brazil and France, students with an international experience and a teacher from New York.

We will have to individually choose a British or American medium to focus on during the whole semester, and compare this medium to another one from our country. Here are the choices:

• British media:

- Dailies : Times of London, The Observer, The Guardian, The Financial Times.

- Magazine : The Economist.

- TV channels : BBC, Skynews.

• American media:

- Dailies : The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times.

- Magazines : Time, Newsweek.

- TV channels : CNN-INT, HLN, MSNBC, FOX NEWS.

Remember to be late if you want to post messages on this blog :)

Camille

Welcome everyone!

Here's Richard Noble's English class blog.
We'll be studying "News and views" in American and British media and sharing our findings on this blog.