16.A08 - Analyzing the News

Fall 1997

Instructor:       Prof. Hugh McManus    33-311   x3-0672   hmcmanus@mit.edu
Course Secretary: Deb Bowser            33-309   x3-3876   bowser@mit.edu
Seminar        M              7-9       Rm. 33-309

This Freshman Advising Seminar is an informal thing. It's based on critical analysis of the media, with an emphasis on numbers­right, wrong, badly or well presented, hiding in verbiage, figured out for yourself­but the seminar has ranged pretty widely during the four times I have given it. This year, we tried a rather timely twist: at the end of the last seminar (Fall 95) I found that ALL of the students were using on-line media rather than old-fashioned paper ones. So we concentrated on these this year, and established a home page where we link to the materials we are critiquing. Everyone participated in building this interesting little web resource.
Student work: These links connect to a short essay, which are in turn linked to the sites in question.

First round critiques, mostly done the week of Oct. 14, 1997: Alan Chen on CNN Interactive, Lauren Erb on ABC News Interactive, Staphanie Espy on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Krista Niece on the Chicago Tribune, Iqbal Shamsul on The Star Online, Prof. McManus on the Nando Times, intended as an example critique.

Some essays on an interesting phenomena we noted: The surprising lack of graphically presented information on web media sites. Still, there is some good stuff out there: Lauren Erb finds that the Irish Times does election results in an innovative way; Stephanie Espy plots some stock prices; so does Charles Horton, with the help of Quicken.com; Krista Niece looks at photos on CNN; Alan Chen explores agriculture in Texas (?!), and Iqbal Shamsul checks out CNN's InfoGlobe.

Attempts to find fairness and accuracy in media CRITIQUES were of mixed success; Alan Chen found Media Watchdog to be an excellent resource, with many links from a wide variety of sources and even a few relatively neutral articles; on the other hand, Lauren Erb rips Accuracy in Media for its right wing bias, and Krista Niece catches FAIR playing politics from the opposite end of the spectrum. Charles Horton likes Media Research Center's conservative take, and is particularly amused by their extensive use of direct quotes to make their points. I found similar amusement from FAIR's Media-Beat; check out the P.U.litzers.

Useful links: Traditional Media having a go of it on the Web:

Web based News summaries (mostly from the above traditional sources): Infoseek , Netscape, Lycos

Web based magazines: Slate, Salon, Hot-Wired

Thought provokers: An MIT symposium, a valid thought

Iqbal's picks: Home runs, Toys, and and a good example of bad numbers.

Comments, questions, suggestions? Hugh (hmcmanus@mit.edu)