No Current-Events Readings for this Week

Study for midterm; remember to review previously assigned current-events stories.

 

 

No Current Events Reading for Oct. 16

Review previous articles, please.

 

 

No Current Events Reading for Monday, Oct. 9, 2017

Instead, please start studying this midterm review:

 

Midterm Review: Distributed Oct. 9, 2017

The midterm will be held in class on Oct. 25.

It will consist of several short answers and two essays.  You’ll write the answers in a blue book.

Several of the short answers will be drawn from the current-events readings.  There may also be an opportunity to work assigned current events into one or both of the essays.  Be sure to take notes on the current-events readings, or copy them to your files, because there is no guarantee that those links will stay active.  Note, too, that if a question has been asked and answered during class it makes it more likely that the question will reappear on the midterm.

One of the essays will definitely cover one of the films.  You may also want to use what you learned from the films in analyzing current events – specifically, “Too Big to Fail.”

While I obviously can’t be too specific about the contents of the midterm, here are some other general areas to review:

• The role of pseudo-events in news; remember Boorstin’s four-part definition.
• Cycles of media history and in particular the eras of newspaper history.   (All this is laid out in the assigned reading as well as the PowerPoints on the website and will be covered today.)
• Economics of media industries and how specialization relates to profit.  (Pay particular attention to EPS and CPM. We will get to CPM…it hasn’t been covered yet)
• First Amendment and free-speech protections (from lecture and reading). Remember the Brandenburg Test.
• The way the “medium becomes the message” – a good example being the telegraph, as discussed in Chapter 1 and in class Oct. 9.
• Be prepared to answer a question about logical fallacies from How to Think About Information.
• The methods and techniques of reporting, as well as the ethical issues, from “All the President’s Men.” Pay attention to names during the film; you’ll need to know the major players.