Like many of us who lived half our lives before Windows95, I still marvel at how easily we can flip through a half-dozen published accounts of the same event in less time than it took to walk to end of the driveway and pick up the daily newspaper when we were young. For me that paper was the New York Times, which to my eyes now is rapidly deteriorating in its ability to simply report reality in an authentic voice. This morning’s account of the President’s executive order about the Defense Department struck me as particularly alarming, but that’s precisely why it makes for a great lesson. All you have to do is close read it alongside the BBC’s account of the same event.
Readers of the NYTimes headline are much more likely to think that Department of Defense will be renamed with the signing of an executive order, while BBC readers are more likely to think that this is something the President wants to do.
Readers of the BBC are likely to have a different impression of the change from Department of Defense to Department of War because of the deliberate choice to use the term “rebrand”. The NYTimes reader has only been told it is a “renaming”
We already have two close reading points and interesting fodder for a discussion and we haven’t even made it to the text of the articles.
This lesson drives students into the text of each article, looking closely at the facts each decided to include in their reporting of the event and the words they chose to describe them. This wraps an information literacy exercise around the current event lesson using metacognition to frame the questioning about the effects of these choices on the reader.
- How is our understanding of a current event shaped by how we learn about a current event?
- How do people reporting current events change the impact of those events by the words they choose to use to describe the events?
- Is how you learn about a current event more important than the event itself?
There’s many ways to format this lesson. Some classes with quick readers and a lot of time can have students read, annotate and compare the articles. But most will chose to either split the class and have each half read just one article before a whole class discussion or jigsaw it into smaller groups after the first read. You could just use the slides with excerpted text.
Keep the focus on how the author’s deliberate choice to include some facts and exclude others while choosing certain words to describe them affect the reader.
I didn’t set out to prove that some articles in the NYTimes seem designed to alter their reader’s understanding of events rather than responsibly inform them as to what happened, but this lesson might do just that. Let me know if you don’t agree, our discussion will be what this lesson cultivates. It will work with students also.
NY Times – Trump to Sign Order Renaming the Defense Department as the Department of War
BBC – Trump seeks to rebrand Department of Defense as Department of War
