The paper should be a minimum of 7 pages, not including a cover page.
Topic: How do the American media cover foreign policy and war? And WHY do they cover
them in that way/those ways?
To answer this question you must do five things.
1) Discuss the Chomsky reading (chapters 2 and 3), which provides a theoretical perspective on how the media cover events in different
foreign countries.
2) Discuss Entman’s cascading activation model, which is presented as a contrast to Chomsky’s hegemony model).
3) Discuss AT LEAST ONE of the following case studies from the readings: the KAL/Iran Air case, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq.
4) Discuss AT LEAST ONE of the following readings: Graber chapter 6, 34, or 27 (on amateur journalism, censorship in war, or sanitization of war) or Haigh, “A Comparison of Embedded and Non-Embedded Print Coverage.”
5) Read and discuss 2 newspaper articles of your choosing that deal with US foreign
policy or wars.The articles can come from national or local papers, so long as they are AMERICAN news sources.
The articles you choose must be HARD NEWS stories, NOT editorials or opinion pieces. Ask if you are not sure. Non-hard news
stories often specify “editorial” or “opinion” or “commentary.” If it says “news analysis,” it is hard news.
Some suggestions for article topics: current situation in Ukraine, US relations with China, US fight against ISIS, international climate change negotiations. At the end of the paper, include a separate bibliographical page for your newspaper articles. It should list a) the author of the article, b) title of the article, c) newspaper name, d) date of publication.
You don’t have to put course readings in the bibliography. Only put books or articles if they are something you read outside of class.
** FORMATTING: You should use margins of 1.25 on each side and on the
top and bottom. Make sure to use a 12 point font, preferably Times New Roman.
The paper must be DOUBLE SPACED and the PAGES MUST BE NUMBERED.
If you cite from an assigned course reading, please use the following format:
“The media is a propaganda machine for the government.” (Herman and
Chomsky, p. 59).
If you cite from an outside source, use the same format and include the
source in your bibliographic page after your newspaper articles.
Below are some of my personal “pet peeves” when it comes to writing, to keep in mind when you write your paper. (I have conveyed these already on some past papers for this class). These are concerns other professors share, so it’s not just me you will be pleasing by focusing on these things.
1. Avoid paragraphs (and sentences) that run on and on. Find “natural”
places to separate your ideas, and give the reader a break before he/she starts
another paragraph. It is hard to follow someone’s ideas when they ramble on for,
say, two pages straight with no break point. My rule of thumb is no paragraph
should be longer than one page. And as you learned in K-12, you should try to
connect the paragraphs with a transition sentence, so that you don’t just randomly
leap from discussion of one topic to discussion of a totally unrelated topic.
2. Make sure your sentences are really sentences, not just phrases.
3. Pay attention to use of singular versus plural; make sure your subjects and
verbs correspond.
4. Use spell check and grammar check, but also read over the final version
once. Some mistakes don’t show up on spell check; a word may be spelled correctly
but be the wrong word for that sentence. It doesn’t take that long to proofread your
paper once and I promise you will catch at least one error, and the final product will
read better for your efforts.
