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Rats Bite Baby
Imagine this headline in the metro section of a major urban daily newspaper:
“Rats Bite Baby.”
A local single mother left her baby in the crib while she went down to the corner to cash her unemployment check. The door was left open so her neighbors could hear. While she was gone, the baby was bitten repeatedly by rats. A neighbor responded to the infant’s cries and brought the child to Central Hospital where he was released in his mother’s custody.
How is this story being framed? Who are the bad guys?
Not the rats. Not the city. Not the owner of the apartment. It is the mother who left her baby alone to go and cash her unemployment check. The bad guys are people who don’t have a job and unwed mothers—especially people of color. The good guys are citizens who work and politicians who say the poor are not responsible people.
Now let’s look at another variation:
“Rats Bite Baby: Landlord, Tenants Dispute Blame”
This version includes information from other tenants who claim that their repeated requests for rodent extermination had been ignored by the landlord. Angry and concerned residents of the building are interviewed as they protest. The landlord blames the tenants for improperly disposing of their garbage.
In this version, the frame has changed considerably. Now it is an investigative story about conflict. There’s more than one reason this situation happened. And the facts present a different set of values and responsibilities to the reader.
The frame can go even larger. Consider this:
“Rat Bites Rising in City’s ‘Zone of Death’”
According to this version of the story, the woman’s baby is only the latest victim of a “rat epidemic” plaguing inner-city neighborhoods in the “Zone of Death.” City Hall is implicated. Elected officials, urban policy and affordable housing become part of the story. The whole inner-city context is under fire.
The good guys and the bad guys have changed places. The mother, the villan in the first “Rats Bite Baby” story, has now become a spokesperson for families victimized in the urban “Zone of Death.” She becomes the emblem of the story.
The frame of the story—its focus, its underlying values—has changed. Meanwhile, the story has moved from page 5C to page 1A of the local paper and is the lead TV story.
Edited version of text from Robert Bray, SPIN Works!, San Francisco: Independent Media Institute, 2002. Example from Charlotte Ryan, Prime Time Activism (South End Press, 1991).
Identifying Perspectives in News Articles
Main Point of Article:
Does the story fall into a type?
o Oh No : Disaster o Yes! : Improvement o Wow! : Extreme o I said: Announcement o Trend : It’s becoming popular o Ha! : Funny o Hmmm : Thought provoking o Ritual : Anniversary o Useful : Helpful o Other?
How is the event framed in this article?
What are the main ideas, values, and/or points of view are overt?
Is there a villain or victim?
Objectivity: Who are the sources in the article? What are the perspectives? Can you see a bias or point of view?
chicagotribune.com CPS to lay off hundreds of teachers from closing schools By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Chicago Tribune reporter
June 15, 2013
Chicago Public Schools said Friday that 663 employees at schools the district is closing, including teachers, teaching assistants and bus aides, don't qualify to follow students to their new schools and will be laid off.
The total includes 420 teachers, more than a third of them with tenure but rated either unsatisfactory or satisfactory. That allows them to be let go under the teachers union contract, which protects only teachers with excellent or superior ratings.
The cuts are a result of the district's decision to close 49 elementary schools and a high school program that CPS says are underenrolled. More cuts are likely as the district implements its controversial plan, by far the largest school shutdown effort ever attempted in Chicago.
The threat of additional layoffs for teachers at the schools that are closing remains. About 600 teachers from closing schools meet the criteria to move with their students to CPS-designated receiving schools. But it's not known how many slots will be open to them. That will be decided by principals at the receiving schools as they finalize staffing plans
for the coming school year.
Also to be determined is how many principals, clerks and other employees will lose their jobs as a result of the school closings, said CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll.
The district also Friday announced layoffs at five underperforming schools slated for overhauls, known as turnarounds. In an effort to raise the performance level of those schools, almost all employees are let go and new staff is hired.
CPS said 192 employees, 125 of them teachers, will lose their jobs as a result of those turnaround decisions, which, like the closings, were approved in May.
The Chicago Teachers Union has expressed concerns that budget cuts will result in additional layoffs.
There is a process for teachers who are let go to get their jobs back, and officials said 60 percent of teachers who lose positions often find new ones in the district.
The district faces a budget deficit for the coming year of nearly $1 billion. CPS on Friday said it will cut staff at its headquarters in an ongoing attempt to address the shortfall, eliminating 100 positions that the district says is part of an effort to save up to $52 million in operations and administrative costs.
While individual school budgets have been sent out to principals, CPS has yet to release details on its overall budget, which must be approved by the end of August.
Copyright © 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
The New York Times June 28, 2013 Facebook to Shield Ads From Offensive Content By TANZINA VEGA Facebook said on Friday that it would remove ads from pages that contain controversial content, as it tries to protect advertisers from appearing next to offensive material beyond their control.
In a message posted on its Web site, the company wrote: “Our goal is to both preserve the freedoms of sharing on Facebook but also protect people and brands from certain types of content.”
“We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously. While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action.”
Facebook said it would begin the manual review for pages containing sensitive content next week with a team of hundreds of employees in offices around the world.
The action comes a month after feminist groups campaigned for an improvement in Facebook’s process for identifying and removing pages that glorify violence against women. At the time, Facebook acknowledged that its procedures had not worked effectively. Activist groups sent more than 5,000 e-mails to Facebook’s advertisers and elicited more than 60,000 posts on Twitter, requesting the removal of pages featuring women who had been abused.
The protests caused Nissan and a number of smaller advertisers to temporarily withdraw their ads from the site. Other advertisers, including Zappos, Dove and American Express, stopped short of removing their ads but issued statements on digital media saying they did not support violence against women.
“The way you allocate your resources identifies what your priorities are,” said Soraya Chemaly, a writer and activist who was involved in the digital media campaign.
Ms. Chemaly said that since the protests in May Facebook had been “great” about
removing content the groups flagged as offensive but that the procedure for removing such content had not been systematic. “Before you can remove the ads, you need to have an accurate assessment of what counts as controversial and that’s not happening now systemically,” she said.
Elisabeth Diana, a Facebook spokeswoman, said dealing with offensive content was something the company handled on a daily basis. “We take it really, really seriously,” she said, adding that the goal of the new procedure “won’t be as much content policing as there will be advertising policing.”
Removing the ads from such pages also removes a pressure point that activist groups have used to get media companies and advertisers to listen to their concerns. “They are hoping to dismantle the leverage,” Ms. Chemaly said. “From a business perspective that makes perfect logical sense.”
The company expects to automate the process of identifying such content after a manual review of thousands of its pages.
Good Chicago News Sources Englewood Portal
• Your local news source • We’ll learn how to participate
http://www.englewoodportal.org News Tips
• Project of the Community Media Workshop • Two or three stories weekly on what’s going on in Chicago’s neighborhoods
http://www.newstips.org DNA Info Chicago
• New(ish) website with coverage around the city • Providing reporting in neighborhoods that major media did before
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago EveryBlock
• Put in neighbohrood name or zip code for very local news • Gathers news stories, public records like police reports and building permits,
local resident posts • Had gone for about a year, but is back
http://chicago.everyblock.com Crain’s Chicago
• Business news but more than investing • Big picture of what impacts Chicago, where the power is
http://www.chicagobusiness.com WBEZ
• Online version of Chicago Public Radio • More than crime, entertainment and news conferences
http://www.wbez.org The Gate
• Covers Pilsen and parts of Englewood • English and Spanish
http://www.thegatenewspaper.com Gaper’s Block
• News from around the city, off the beaten path • More willingness to get beyond the North Side and food, entertainment,
shopping http://www.gapersblock.com
The Weekly Citizen • African-‐American newspaper group
http://www.thechicagocitizen.com The New News
• Report on where people get their news in Chicago • For a deeper dig on smaller, local and/or indepedent local news
http://chicagonewnews.org