In my Global Media Literacy class I’ve been showing and talking about several videos I’ve had around for some time. Thought I would share them with you this morning.
We’ve been talking about how movie trailers can set an emotional tone for a movie through the choice of clips being shown and the music that accompanies the clips as a way of illustrating the emotional dimension of media literacy. So as pre-class video, we looked at a parody trailer of Pixar’s Cars 2set to the music of the Ridley Scott scifi film Prometheus:
We then went on to look at what Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince would look like as a screwball teen comedy:
Needless to say, the the 7 Words clip contains lots and lots of NSFW language (unless your job is talking about video clips containing harsh language…)
As I mentioned the other day, I’m teaching commentary and blogging this semester, and I’ve got an interesting group of students who will be commenting on just about everything over the semester. Here are their blogs!
Twenty-five years ago this week I started teaching college at Northern Arizona University. Among the classes I taught that semester was Opinion Writing.
Today, I’ll be starting in on a fresh section of that class, only now it’s called Commentary & Blogging. And all my students in the class will be working off iPads.
Instead of reading a paper version of the Washington Post weekly edition, they will be reading and viewing video produced by people all around the world.
What an amazing world we live in!
Be watching – I’ll be linking to my students’s work all semester.
A long-time friend of mine (and journalism grad) was bothered by the photo and questioned the need for the paper publishing it.
I tweeted about the photo and got an almost immediate response from a student in Iowa who also really didn’t think the photo should have been published, saying “I’m not good with seeing things like that — makes me cringe. I can’t look at it!
Me?
I agree with his comments 100 percent about the content – but I absolutely think it’s news. This photo tells the story of the game and what pro football is about. It’s a really disturbing photo without any explicit gore. I would definitely have run the photo.
But what do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
It is sometimes easy to forget how much danger reporters face to get us news from war zones around the world.
On Monday, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel and his crew were freed from their captors who had held them in Syria since last Thursday. The journalists were captured by a Syrian militia group while traveling with a group of Syrian rebels. Although Engel and his team were not physically harmed, they were subject to repeated mock executions.
The news team was freed when the militia members holding them got into a firefight at a rebel checkpoint.
Reporting on the kidnapping in the United States was minimal, apparently at the request of NBC News.
As you watch, listen to, or read the news, remember the the courage and strength that went into gather it for you.
It’s a long story, and there’s actually a book out on the subject. But here’s a link to The Atlantic’s short version of the comprehensive history of Leonard Cohen’s best known song (with videos!).
This photo (and cover headlines) from the New York Post earlier this week have been attracting an enormous amount of attention. Post freelancer R. Umar Abbasi took the photo of Ki Suk Han, who was pushed in front of the oncoming subway by a man who was reportedly harassing others at the station.
Reaction to the tabloid’s cover was immediate. As would be expected, the sensational headline was seen by most as inappropriate. But what about the photo? Should it have been published at all? Or should it have even been taken? Why didn’t the photographer try to save the poor man?
I first heard about this cover and the news that led to it from a UPI news service blog that raised many of these questions.
Ben Jacobs, writing for The Daily Download, argues that the photo was worth publishing: “The photograph’s power came simply from the sheer visual impact of the moment…. [T]his cover will linger through history and its arresting image will be remembered for decades to come.”
Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, writes that she often defends the publication of graphic photos but says that this one doesn’t pass the test.
Kelly McBride, who writes about ethics for the Poynter Institute, examines the question of whether the photographer should have tried to have rescue the man rather than taking pictures. She notes that while it is difficult to judge the actions of the photographer, it’s easier to judge the decisions made by New York Post editors to run the photo. Poynter photo faculty member Kenny Irby wrote in an e-mail that the Post had several good alternatives to choose from other than the incredibly disturbing photo that they published.
For what it’s worth, Abbasi (the photographer) says that he could not have rescued the man and that he fired off his flash to warn the train driver. And other tabloid photographers have defended Abbasi for taking the photo (though several of them raised questions as to whether the Post ought to have published it.)
So here are my questions for you:
Would you have taken the picture? Why or why not? If you knew for certain that you couldn’t rescue the man, would that make a difference in your decision?
Should the New York Post have published the photo? Why or why not? Did publishing the photo serve any larger purpose?
Could you construct an ethical argument for and an argument against publishing the photo?
GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? … Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? …
Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are? If you hadn’t come up with the recipe yourself, would you ever guess that the shiny tissue of breading that exudes grease onto the plate contains either pretzels or smoked almonds? Did you discern any buttermilk or brine in the white meat, or did you think it tasted like chewy air?
Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?
Now I will confess that I enjoy Guy’s show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and in fact I have eaten at a couple of the places he’s featured on the show and enjoyed them immensely – primarily because they are modest-sized, locally owned joints. (Laurer-Krauts is right outside of Denver, Colorado and serves an amazing hamburger/cabbage/sauerkraut roll; Red Iguana in Salt Lake City has some of the most interesting Mexican food I’ve ever tried.) And I suspect that I really wouldn’t be that enthused about Guy’s New York restaurant because it sounds suspiciously like the Hard Rock Cafe type places I try to avoid on principle.
But did Mr. Fieri’s restaurant really deserve that brutal drubbing Wells delivered?
The review is very mean and very funny and, of course, completely within the purview of the restaurant critic who, like all critics, has all the pleasure and all the pain that comes with the freedom to speak his mind.
She goes on to note that Wells will not be making a habit of such scathing reviews, quoting him as saying, “Negative reviews should be done sparingly.”
Left unsaid is what’s obvious: When you must write a negative review, make it memorable.
Did Mr. Wells accomplish that? No question.
The reaction to the review has been all over the place.
Time magazine’s TV critic James Poniewozik has a fun analysis of the review, noting that it’s enjoyable to read and may well be an accurate analysis of the food. He also makes the interesting point that Triple D (as Guy’s show is known) is more an “eating” show than a “cooking” show.
The New Yorker (one of my favorite weekly reads) sent a couple of staffers to Guy’s restaurant to see how bad things really are. Hannah Goldfield and Amelia Lester ask their own question: “How bad can a highly caloric meal in an air-conditioned environment really be?” Their conclusion is that it was a nice place for lunch with some hits and some misses, and that they might go back again.
NPR’s Scott Simon asks what I think is the key question– Why did Pete Wells bother trashing Fieri’s restaurant when it became clear the food was neither good nor interesting?Why doesn’t a critic hop the subway and find some unheralded spot in Queens or Staten Island that’s worth the attention?I asked Pete Wells: When you could tell that the food was so bad, why didn’t you just leave?”I’m struggling to come up with an interesting answer to your question,” he quickly wrote back. “I get paid to eat bad food.”
I think that this highlights the key issue in my mind. Wells is not paid to eat bad food. He’s paid to help his readers find interesting places to eat and avoid bad or boring places. And trashing a theme park of restaurant by a TV host does little to help the interested diner. The only good reason to do the review is to show how scathing and clever the writer can be. And Wells certainly accomplished that.
