Therefore, throughout this exercise, this term will refer to completely objective news reporting that is absent of any discernible contextual framing efforts as defined above on the part of the reviewer.
Materials Required
Computers with Internet access (one for every three students); free online survey accounts for each team.
Suggested Procedure.
Opening. Students' interest will be gained by describing a current event that affects their lives as well such as the incidence of cell phone or Internet usage among young Chinese people today, drug use, or the profound environmental issues facing emerging nations that threaten everyone through global warming or otherwise, for example. In this lesson, students will learn how to analyze the content of such media accounts to discern any instances of the three types of media framing described above.
Development. Students will be divided into groups of three and assigned a computer and an online survey account using a service such as SurveyMonkey.com for this purpose. All groups will be required to visit a series of links to preselected timely online articles concerning Chinese culture and discuss these articles amongst themselves to identify any instances of these three types of media framing. Each team will then visit their online survey account and complete the related survey for each news story. Upon completion of the student analysis and online surveys, an aggregate comparison of the results will be conducted and the results reviewed by the teacher and students to identify any significant discrepancies in how the respective news accounts differed and how they were similar from each team's perspective according to the media framing factors described above.
Closing.
Students will be asked to describe any other examples of these types of media framing that they can recall, as well as being requested to keep these...
WebQuests have become increasingly popular in recent years for this purpose, and these become a "work in progress" that students continue to contribute to as additional research is completed and more news accounts become available.
Related Links.
WebQuest.org: http://www.webquest.org/news/index.html.
Overview of Chinese Culture: http://www.chinatown-online.co.uk/pages/culture/.
China Daily Web site: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/.
SurveyMonkey.com: http://www.surveymonkey.com/.
Free Web sites: http://www.freewebsites.com/.
References
Gitlin T. (1980). The whole world is watching: Mass media in the making and unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nelson, R.A. (1996). A chronology and glossary of propaganda in the United States. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Peterson, M.A. (October 2001). Getting to the story: Unwriteable discourse and interpretive practice in American journalism. Anthropological Quarterly, 74(4), 201.
