This is the website for the senior-level Journalism Ethics course required of students in the Journalism Minor at the University of San Francisco. We are delighted that non-minors are among us this Fall.
Though I don’t agree with everything Obama has done, I have to say, he is remarkably adept at controlling his image within the press. Policies notwithstanding, the media never seems to cast his character in a negative light, one that permanently sticks, anyway. Smoking, “complimenting” Kamala Harris, calling Kanye West a “jackass” – these are all social gaffes that have managed to increase his likability rather than dampen it. I wonder how much of that is our fault. Maybe we enjoy the novelty of having a young, contemporary president so much that we don’t respond to any real criticism of him.
Yes, this is a great term paper topic! Question is how do you break it down to talk about it. There's the question of just which news sites you are talking about. Fox News? Salon? New York Times? New Hampshire Union-Leader? To do a useful content analysis, you'd have to narrow your quest down either to a time period - the last six weeks of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign - or an issue, such as the treatment of the birther issue. And then you need to have a clear set of criteria for labeling coverage as pro or con. My gut feeling is that Obama was treated gently at first by much of the MSM but that treatment has gradually changed. Meanwhile, Fox, etc., have been quite unrelentingly brutal and unscrupulous. But let's not trust our gut. Let's do some research.
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Though I don’t agree with everything Obama has done, I have to say, he is remarkably adept at controlling his image within the press. Policies notwithstanding, the media never seems to cast his character in a negative light, one that permanently sticks, anyway. Smoking, “complimenting” Kamala Harris, calling Kanye West a “jackass” – these are all social gaffes that have managed to increase his likability rather than dampen it. I wonder how much of that is our fault. Maybe we enjoy the novelty of having a young, contemporary president so much that we don’t respond to any real criticism of him.
Yes, this is a great term paper topic! Question is how do you break it down to talk about it. There's the question of just which news sites you are talking about. Fox News? Salon? New York Times? New Hampshire Union-Leader? To do a useful content analysis, you'd have to narrow your quest down either to a time period - the last six weeks of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign - or an issue, such as the treatment of the birther issue. And then you need to have a clear set of criteria for labeling coverage as pro or con. My gut feeling is that Obama was treated gently at first by much of the MSM but that treatment has gradually changed. Meanwhile, Fox, etc., have been quite unrelentingly brutal and unscrupulous. But let's not trust our gut. Let's do some research.
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