1984

Why does George Orwell matter?

George Orwell

Cheat Sheet
The real George
Final warning

Why does George Orwell matter today in international media? Comment below by 5 pm Monday.

Midterm test, calendar

Contact with country, Feb. 28 or March 7
No class--March 2
Scheduling presentations--March 7
Midterm test--March 9
Press theories; Gutenberg; wire services; CNN; Orwell; Murdoch;  war correspondents; CPR; dangerous countries
Presentations start --March 23
No class--April 27

Which way is "up"? What does this effect?

Which way is up? 

From space, there is no up. Why do we view the world the way we do? Does this effect our attitudes and behavior?

Why do we say something "Went South?" What does that imply?

America's ethnocentric, eurocentric press

America's ethnocentric, eurocentric, zenophobic?  media

Consider these facts:

Why do Americans distrust the media? Is it Trump?

Why do Americans distrust the media?

Gallup Poll Results

(Read, discuss in groups. Why is this? Is there a danger in this view? If so why? What can be done about it? Is it hopeless?)

Trust in Mass Media Returns to All-Time Low

Six-percentage-point drops in trust among Democrats and Republicans

by Justin McCarthy

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- After registering slightly higher trust last year, Americans' confidence in the media's ability to report "the news fully, accurately, and fairly" has returned to its previous all-time low of 40%. Americans' trust in mass media has generally been edging downward from higher levels in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

Prior to 2004, Americans placed more trust in mass media than they do now, with slim majorities saying they had a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust. But over the course of former President George W. Bush's re-election season, the level of trust fell significantly, from 54% in 2003 to 44% in 2004. Although trust levels rebounded to 50% in 2005, they have failed to reach a full majority since.

Americans' trust in the media in recent years has dropped slightly in election years, including 2008, 2010, 2012, and again this year -- only to edge its way back up again in the following odd-numbered years. Although the differences between the drops and the recoveries are not large, they suggest that something about national elections triggers skepticism about the accuracy of the news media's reporting.

Among Democrats, Trust in Media at a 14-Year Low

Trust among Democrats, who have traditionally expressed much higher levels of confidence in the media than Republicans have, dropped to a 14-year low of 54% in 2014. Republicans' trust in the media is at 27%, one percentage point above their all-time low, while independents held steady at 38% -- up one point from 37% in 2013.

Sharp Uptick in Americans Who Think News Media Are "Too Conservative"

As has been the case historically, Americans are most likely to feel the news media are "too liberal" (44%) rather than "too conservative," though this perceived liberal bias is now on the lower side of the trend. One in three (34%) say the media are "just about right" in terms of their coverage -- down slightly from 37% last year.

Nearly one in five Americans (19%) say the media are too conservative, which is still relatively low, but the highest such percentage since 2006. This is up six points from 2013 -- the sharpest increase in the percentage of Americans who feel the news skews too far right since Gallup began asking the question in 2001.

Conservatives (70%) are far more likely than liberals (15%) to perceive the media as too liberal. Moderates' views are closer to liberals, with 35% calling the media too liberal. Likewise, relatively few moderates -- similar to conservatives -- think the media are too conservative.

Democrats -- with a small majority of 52% -- are most likely to think the media are just about right, while a mere 18% of Republicans feel this way about the news. More than seven in 10 Republicans say the media are too liberal.

Bottom Line

Though a sizable percentage of Americans continue to have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media, Americans' overall trust in the Fourth Estate continues to be significantly lower now than it was 10 to 15 years ago.

As the media expand into new domains of news reporting via social media networks and new mobile technology, Americans may be growing disenchanted with what they consider "mainstream" news as they seek out their own personal veins of getting information. At the same time, confidence is down across many institutions, and a general lack in trust overall could be at play.

Americans' opinions about the media appear affected in election years, however. Americans' trust in the media will likely recover slightly in 2015 with the absence of political campaigns. But the overarching pattern of the past decade has shown few signs of slowing the decline of faith in mass media as a whole.

Survey Methods

Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Sept. 4-7, 2014, with a random sample of 1,017 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 50% cellphone respondents and 50% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.

Samples are weighted to correct for unequal selection probability, nonresponse, and double coverage of landline and cell users in the two sampling frames. They are also weighted to match the national demographics of gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, population density, and phone status (cellphone only/landline only/both, and cellphone mostly). Demographic weighting targets are based on the most recent Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older U.S. population. Phone status targets are based on the most recent National Health Interview Survey. Population density targets are based on the most recent U.S. census. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Journalists must serve the party

The epitome of authoritarian thought

China's view

NEWS STORY with an "A"

Today's research day questions

1. Find facts about your country--population, political system languages, religions, races, culture, brief history-5 main points max with dates
2. Find facts about news media in your country--print-newspapers, magazines, broadcast-radio-tv, digital, other

• Include stats on number of media, circulation, audience, followers 

3. Find tourism video on country--you tube, etc.
4. Two online sources for each of above--with url and title
5.  Find map on country, showing main cities
6. Create Word document listing all of this, with your name and date--email to self, and print copy for Clark

Who is Rupert Murdock?

Murdoch

History

Why should you care? Read: Murdock/Trump; Today's Times: The struggle inside ; WSJ  Editor defends

In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, he consolidated his UK printing operations in east London, causing bitter industrial disputes. His News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989),  The Wall Street Journal (2007),  National Geographic (2015). He formed the British broadcaster BSkyB in 1990, and during the 1990s expanded into Asian networks and South American television. 

By 2000, Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries with a net worth of over $5 billion.

He owns:

 

TV: Fox Broadcasting Company, Fox News Channel, Fox Kids Channel, Fox Business Network, Fox Classics, Fox Sports Net, FX, the National Geographic Channel, The Golf Channel, TV Guide Channel

Radio: Fox Sports Radio Network

Books: HarperCollins (which publishes JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Lemony Snicket, JG Ballard, and Neil Gaiman)

Magazines: TV Guide, The Weekly Standard, Maximum Golf, Barron’s Magazine
Newspapers: The New York Post, Wall Street Journal, The Times (UK), The Sun (UK), The Australian (AU), The Herald Sun (AU), The Advertiser (AU)
 
Websites: Foxsports.com, Hulu (part ownership), Scout.com, The Daily

Film studios: 20th Century Fox (Avatar, The Simpsons, Star Wars, X-Men, Die Hard, Night at the Museum), Fox Searchlight (Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, 127 Hours, Black Swan, Little Miss Sunshine)

Sports (part ownership): Los Angeles Lakers, Colorado Rockies, Australia and New Zealand’s National Rugby League

War correspondents--why?

Do you know who Ernie Pyle was?

D-Day

NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 16, 1944 – I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.

It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. 

Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.

The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the center each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.

I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. 

You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.

The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. 

And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.

•

For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.

You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.

On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had been burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.

There were LCT’s (landing craft tanks) turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.

In this shoreline museum of carnage, there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.

In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.

On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.

On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.

We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.

•

A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crow’s-nest view, and far out to sea.

And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.

Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.

As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.

The prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.

They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.

If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.

War Correspondent

Who was Edward R. Murrow?

War Correspondent

Comment below, by 5 pm, Monday, Feb. 27,
1. One paragraph: Why do you think anyone would want to be an international journalist today?
2. One paragraph: Comment on what makes Pyle's writing  and Murrow's narration so effective?

News story assignment

Next week--our special guest, Mahir Zeynelov of Turkey--be here on time or don't come in.
You will take notes and write a 150-word news story, typed to hand in on Thursday, Feb, 9.

CNN makes news

Live from Baghdad