Article Analysis

Article Analysis (Jana and Tala)

URL: http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=480054&version=1&template_id=37&parent_id=17

Personalisation:

Personalization is where most stories focus on individuals rather than institutions, and emphasize human-interest angles and emotional impact over and often at the expense of broader social contexts and political perspectives.

In short, the story would be written more on a personal level. The article that we had picked on the situation revolving Mubarak included some personalization but not all of it. The personalization in the article mostly comes from different quotes in which people had said revolving around the issue. It was mostly Mubarak who was the center of attention in the article, and what he thought, and what he said. So Most of the quotes coming from the article are from Mubarak’s personal thoughts and words. There weren’t really any different quotes coming from different people, so there were no different personal biases included in the article of what peoples different perspectives were on the situation.

Dramatisation:

Dramatization is where journalists mainly focus on the most shocking parts of a story. They do this in order to heighten audience interest. This usually occurs for example where the article would begin with the worst of what happened instead of giving an introduction, sometimes it’s the images on the article, which attracts the whole story to the reader. Or sometimes statistics are included like the one in our article, different statistics were included in our article to draw the reader to just how dangerous the protests that took place in Egypt was, and how strict the police was with the weapons, which Mubarak had ordered them to have in hand. Statistics such as “160 police officers had been armed with automatic weapons and 4,800 live rounds”. As well as “50 police men had been supplied with automatic weapons and ammunition”

Fragmentation:

This article in particular was extremely biased with regard to this particular factor. It only considered the view of the protestors who were shot. Although this is what has been gathered by the news all over the world, since most of the worldwide agencies found that the events occurring in Egypt at the time of the revolution were crimes against humanity, it is also ideal for articles to include both sides of the story, in this case a justification by Mubarak on the actions that he took. It was evident that the news was true due to the statistics that were mentioned in the article, however it is also important for the reporter to state both sides of the story instead of focusing on the lawyers of the protestors and their claims.

Authority-Disorder:

Talking about revolution and authority change, I felt the article was directly related to this part of the analysis as well. Mubarak was unwanted by more than 80% of the country, he was accused by the rapidly growing population of Egypt of crimes against humanity and evident dictatorship after ruling Egypt for 30 years under what was perceived to be a democratic government. Regardless of the truth behind this issue, it is the role of the news agency to not publicise this authority-disorder, to ensure that situations in Egypt do not get any worse.

Did the article follow the prescribed list of types of information bias?

Yes the article that we have chosen did follow the prescribed list of information bias as you can read above. The article applied more of some of them than others. For example there wasn’t much personalization but there was more of authority disorder and a little bit of dramatization as well.

How did ‘informational-bias’ affect the way you perceived the news story?

I’m always on the humanitarian side of a story, however this especially brought out the details of the shootings and direct quotes said by Mubarak which only proved the corruption and deteriorating situation in Egypt even more. If Mubarak’s position were justified in a valid manner, this would have decreased the level of bias perceived in this article.

How do these parameters affect those stories that make it into print and those that don’t?

There are two extremes to answering this question, either not having enough bias not getting an article into printing or an article having too much bias, preventing its printing. If a story is completely neutral, it wont appeal to as many people since the political view of the citizens of a country tends to really be the same. An example of this is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, an article published in the Middle East would need to show the view of the Palestinians for it to be printed, never would it be printed if it described sufferings in Israel, should there be any. On the other hand, in the case of Syria for example, what would occur if there were too much bias and the other side could be offended, is that the article would not be sent to printing.