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Class Links and Resources Sources for Current
Events Commentaries IB
History of the Course web page with assignments Projects Projects forms from the
Eugene IHS web site Senior
paper citation resources General
Resources Contact me: |
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Identifying and Evaluating the Perspective
or Slant of a Source in Current Events Commentaries A
significant part of your grade on the current events commentaries comes from evaluation. Students often think
evaluation is simply an explanation of the article’s contents, but it is much
more than that. Evaluation means
not just taking what you read at face value; it means questioning an author’s
conclusions and arguing for your own interpretation. In order
to effectively evaluate the ideas in an article, you must first learn to identify
the strengths and weaknesses of those ideas. The tips below will help get you
started.
Is the source printed in a country with guaranteed
protections of free speech and the press? Is it from a country with an
authoritarian government? Undemocratic governments may be more likely to
censor the press, pressure reporters to emphasize certain facts over others
or even print outright lies. Check the CIA World Factbook
at https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
to find out what kind of government a country has. Keep in mind that the Factbook will present the views of the American
government. Don’t assume a source is correct just because it is
published in a democracy, however. In 2004 the editors of the reputable New York Times admitted in a letter to readers
that they had made mistakes in reporting Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction. These mistakes were based in part on false information that
U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney supplied to reporter Judith Miller. This
is just one example of how the government can distort news even in a democracy.
Some newspapers have an “about” link on their web page
that gives insights into the publication’s perspective. The People’s Daily of The National Review web
site proclaims under the “Donate”
tab that “the critics
(even the liberal ones!) agree: National Review
Online is an unqualified success.” One can infer that the publishers of the National Review consider it to be a
conservative magazine. Liberals would be more critical of a conservative
publication, so their approval would mean the site must be very good indeed.
Some “about” tabs will lead to a list of donors who
support the publication. Foreign Policy
magazine, for example, is published by the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. The endowment’s web site shows that it takes money from
at least two different weapons manufacturers: the Boeing company and General
Electric (Look under “sources
of funding.”) As a result, Foreign
Policy may be careful not to print stories that offend these corporations
for fear of losing funding. (Foreign
Policy also counts several prestigious non-profit organizations among its
donors, however.) Most publications will not rely on donors so much as
advertising to pay their bills. For this reason, many publications reflect a
pro-business perspective. Publications that are very critical of business
overall could lose advertising revenue.
One article may not tell you a great deal about the
publication’s perspective, but if you read the same message over and over again
in different articles you can start to make generalizations. Dollars and Sense magazine might
contain several articles advocating an interventionist approach to economics,
for example, but one article may advocate a free market approach. If you were
to read only the free market article, you would get an inaccurate picture of
the magazine’s overall perspective.
Reading the top stories from multiple sources on the same
day can provide a good sense of various publications’ perspectives. A plane
crash that killed 170 people in As you read, make a “reality check” against what you
already know and what appears in other sources. If a publication leaves out
an important fact supporting laissez-faire
economics that several other publications emphasize, you may have detected an
interventionist bias. You could then speculate that other information that
would support a laissez-faire
approach might also have been left out.
Does the author of an article use vague language, trying
to convince readers without providing evidence? Does she appeal to readers’
emotions without giving hard facts? Does she give all of the arguments for
one side of a debate and leave out arguments for the other side? Does she
attach a negative label to a viewpoint she disagrees with? Does she commit
logical fallacies? The following article from Wikipedia
on “weasel words” does a good job of explaining how authors can manipulate
language to persuade readers without offering compelling evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_words
It is not good enough to identify an article as “biased”
in your current events commentaries – it’s not even good enough to explain how you know the article is biased.
For the purposes of this class, identifying a perspective or bias is only
useful to the extent that it can help us take the next step and get closer to
the truth. Once you have figured out how a publication’s perspective
might distort the real story, make an educated guess and explain just what
the real story is. Go out on a limb and speculate a bit. How would additional
information conveniently left out of the article change the overall picture?
Would this hypothetical information support a free market or interventionist
approach?
Despite your best efforts, you may be unable to detect a
distinct perspective or bias in your article. That’s okay. You may earn full
credit for evaluation by applying the same techniques outlined above to the economic theories themselves.
For example, you might find that some economists have a pro-business agenda,
and that they have devised theories that tend to support free market
approaches. Give an example of how a specific theory could be wrong based on
evidence from your article and explain how revising it might change policy
decisions. Or you might explain why the facts in you article support the
relevant economic theory. If you cannot detect bias and you are uncomfortable
evaluating the validity of a specific theory, make a prediction. Reporters do
not have crystal balls, so information about the future will be missing from your article. Make an educated guess about a
future economic development based on information in the article and your own
knowledge of economic theory. Even better, demonstrate your mastery of theory
by arguing for a specific action that government, industry or consumers
should take to improve economic outcomes. The key to earning a high score on your evaluation section
is to think beyond the article itself. You can figure out how the author
tries to fool readers and explain the real situation. You can figure out how
some economists try to fool people
and lay down the truth. You can make an educated prediction about an economic
event that the author doesn’t mention. You can argue for a specific policy
using information not included in the article. The trick is to prove that you
understand economics better than the average journalist. Good luck! News Sources for Economics Current
Events Commentaries International
Newspapers The Daily
Star ( The Daily
Yomiuri ( The Globe
and Mail ( http://www.theglobeandmail.com/ The Guardian (U.K.) Ha’aretz (Israel) The Hindu
( International
Herald Tribune The Mail
and Guardian ( The
Nation ( http://www.nationmultimedia.com/ National
Post ( http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/index.html People’s
Daily ( Pravda ( Sydney Morning
Herald ( The Times
of http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ The Times
( Non-Print News Outlets AllAfrica.com British
Broadcasting Corporation Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation Al Jazeera http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ http://www.chicagotribune.com/ Christian
Science Monitor ( Los Angeles Times http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ New York
Times http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Oregon/Eugene
Regional Newspapers The
Eugene Weekly The
Oregonian ( http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/ The
Register Guard (Eugene) The
Statesman Journal ( http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage Magazines ( Atlantic Monthly Foreign
Policy Harpers Macleans ( Mother
Jones The Nation National Review http://www.nationalreview.com/ Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032542/site/newsweek/ The
Progressive Reason Time U.S. News & World Report http://www.usnews.com/usnews/home.htm The Utne Reader Business Press ( Business Week Dollars and Sense http://www.dollarsandsense.org/ The Economist ( Ask your teacher for
permission before using this source. Many articles already contain too much
economic analysis and may make your job too easy! http://www.economist.com/index.html Financial Times ( Forbes Back
to Mr. Yamada’s home page
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