MEDIA REPORTAGE IN THE NETWORK ERA Please write an essay of at least 3 pages (typed, double-spaced, in times new roman 12-point font, and respecting MLA format for layout and citation of sources) on the following topic: Each student will be assigned a historical event that took place in the world during the period from 1960 to 1989, and was considered by major media outlets to have been immediately news-worthy. Daily newspaper subsсrіptions remained high in this period, yet this is also the period in which most Americans began to rely on broadcast media (particularly network and local television newscasts) for information about late-breaking events. On the other hand, this periodization culminates immediately prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web, exists well before the mass distribution of camera phones and widespread digital crowd-sourcing, and takes place in an era without multiple competing 24-hour cable news networks. The object will be to locate and analyze a single news report about the assigned historical event. This can be either a print source or an audio or video recording of a broadcast source. The report must be completely contemporaneous with the event itself; this means it must have been published or broadcast within one day of the event having taken place (absolutely no later than 24 hours after the event occurred). Establish the provenance of the source, as the news report itself should be the primary object of analysis in the paper, NOT the historical event upon which it focuses. In the essay, first describe and define the news source as specifically as possible: Is it an article in a specific daily newspaper? Is it a particular network television newscast from that night? What was the reputation of the news source, if any? Second, analyze how the news report is framing the news event: What about the event does the report stress and why? Conversely, which elements of the event are not emphasized and why? In retrospect, are there facts relevant to the event that seem to be ignored by or perhaps even completely unknown to the news report? (This may require a bit of additional outside research) If so, what does this potentially reveal about the reporting practices used or the technological means of information-gathering employed?
