Wesley's Orwellian Newsspeak Blog

In a story appearing on the BBC's website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6350651.stm
Portugal's Prime Minister Jose Socrates has decided that abortion will be legalized despite low turnouts at a recent referendum. Currently abortions are allowed in the predominantly Catholic country, but only in cases of rape or harm to the mother or child. The new proposal will allow abortions up until the 10th week of pregancy. Socrates wants to end clandestine abortions and he said, "The choice placed before Portugal is whether it resigns itself to staying in the group of the most conservative countries or if it embraces modernity and joins the most developed nations."

A challenge in reporting this story is to avoid bias, abortion is an issue with a hair trigger. It is a heavily divisive issue, the line between pro-life and pro-choice is stark and unyielding. The BBC story avoids bias by simply sticking to the facts and tossing in a quote from a Catholic bishop at the end.

I compared this story with a wire story appearing in The Australian: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21210725-1702,00.html
This story reads like a fact sheet and places the Socialist party impact much higher. In fact it is in the lead. The BBC edition places it much lower because I think it is not as important or newsworthy as the elections that occurred. The low turnout means that the vote was not legally binding, despite that the prime minister is pushing forward. I think that is more newsworthy than what the socialist party is preparing to do.

While the Reuters story has more raw facts, I think the organization is a bit chaotic, it reads more like a reporter's notes, something that should be rewritten.

Posted by Wesley Nelson at 1:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anna Nicole Smith is dead, I am writing this 3 days after the first wire stories appeared, but I am only going to deal with the information that was available then. I chose a wire story from the AP that appeared in the Star Tribune: http://www.startribune.com/484/story/990220.html

Apparently Smith, 39, was found unconscious in her Seminole Hard Rock Hotel room at about 2 p.m. by her nurse, her bodyguard was alerted he tried to do cardiopulmonary resuscitation, paramedics arrived shortly thereafter and rushed her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead.

There is an obvious challenge in reporting on Smith's death, there is little to report other than the glaring fact that she is dead. LIttle is known, much more is being speculated. These stories would be about three graphs long, so the writers thrown in her biography to provide a background to her life leading up to her death.

I chose to compare this story with a much longer and more in-depth biography story from the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/us/09smith.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
It starts out much the same, what little facts are known are provided and then it launches into Smith's "hardscrabble" life. Besides the longer biography, I noticed that the AP story included a longer quote from Smith's attorney Ron Rale. The NYT story omits words like underdog and besieged, focusing on a tighter quote that simply captures that she tried her hardest and he is grieving. I think the AP does a better job in providing a little more flavor to a story that is lacking in facts at this early stage in the game.

The AP quote from Ron Rale, "Poor Anna Nicole," he said. "She's been the underdog. She's been besieged ... and she's been trying her best and nobody should have to endure what she's endured."

And the NYT quote, “She was trying her hardest,� Mr. Rale said in a packed news conference at his law office in Los Angeles. “I grieve for Anna Nicole that she had to endure what she had to endure. I just pray that that’s not what precipitated this.�

While my lead may be callous I am wondering now why this is so consistently newsworthy. Soldiers die daily in Iraq. Who knows what is going on in Darfur right now. CNN especially is not putting this story down. I believe the tabloid nature of her life lends itself to sensationalist news and high ratings.

Posted by Wesley Nelson at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This story is from the BBC's sports section. Apparently an Italian policeman, 38, was murdered by a fan at a football game, so sweeping security measures have been enacted to combat hooliganism.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/6340537.stm

I think an initial challenge in reporting this story is translating Italian quotes into English. Another challenge is trying to find the nut of this issue. Iis it the new security measures, the re-opening of some of stadiums, the death of the policeman, or the loss of revenue from staging matches with no fans?

I compared this story with another version that was posted to the Yahoo sports section. Found here: http://sports.yahoo.com/sow/news?slug=reu-italyviolence&prov=reuters&type=lgns. Really this story is a wire story from Reuters. The BBC piece is sprawling and loosely constructed, quotes and facts and different facets of the event are thrown at the reader left and right with no clear cohesion. The Reuters story is more organized but much more banal. Both stories mention revenue loss, but the Reuters story takes a wider view of it citing the yearly loss, 6 billion euros, as opposed to the loss per day, 15.5 million euros, that the BBC notes. This seems to be a major issue which is relegated to the last line in the BBC edition. Reuters places loss much higher in the story.

This is sports journalism, so words like hooligan can go undefined. I don't know if this is a common term in Europe, in the U.S. you don't really hear this word often. I get the idea of what they are referring to, but a much clearer definition of the events would clear things up for me. I think describing the death of a police officer as hooliganism, falls short of the mark and kind of de-emphasizes the tragedy.

Posted by Wesley Nelson at 9:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently airsoft guns or small pellet air-powered firearms are being mistaken by St. Paul police for the real thing. This growing problem was large enough to prompt Mayor Coleman to ask that the large sports goods store, Gander Mountain, to pull the replicas from their shelves. Coleman held a press conference and asked attendants to identify out of 21 firearms which were real and which were airsoft models. My article appeared in the Pioneer Press, http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities/16628670.htm.

A challenge in this story is finding statistics for what appears to be a new trend. For example how often do the police confuse these replicas for the real thing, what are the repercussions for that confusion. The author does note that revenue from airsoft guns is only a year old, "Gander Mountain sold $3.5 million worth of airsoft products in 2005, the most recent full year for which figures are available," according to the Pioneer Press article.

I chose to compare this article with the Star Tribune verion, http://www.startribune.com/462/story/982248.html
This piece reads like a wire story, it is shorter and without context, for instance the author does not define an airsoft guns. The one thing I like about this story is the author's treatment of the press conference, he does a better job in describing the Mayor's real or not game. I think this is probably the most interesting part of the story, because it illuminates the difficulty for police in identifying an airsoft gun from it's lethal counterpart.

I think if the Pioneer Press article had lead with the Mayor's press conference it would have been a much better story. To me that is the most interesting, I think it is timely crux of this new issue. Also Gander Mountain is not the only chain store selling airsoft guns. Cabelas is a much larger sporting goods store and probably makes more money off these guns than Gander Mountain does, so the blow to their pocketbooks is probably more profound.

Posted by Wesley Nelson at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)