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?