Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Breeze

Ok, so I was sitting in feature writing today and our teacher decided to pull out The Breeze to look at relevant quotes. But as we were reading different stories, the class started talking about how bad our school newspaper really is. One girl went as far to say that she "couldn't get herself to read the SGA story." When out teacher asked her why she went on to say how she is friend with Eickel and a lot of other people in SGA.
On a sidenote...if you have no idea what issue I'm talking about with Brandon and the SGA then you really need to pick up a paper and get with JMU campus news.
Anyways. So she goes on to say how the entire article about Brandon resigning is basically total crap and that The Breeze has completely turned around all the information that they have researched dealing with Brandon and his plagiarisms. This really got me thinking how accurate our school newspaper really is. I mean, how can the news editor, of all people, get information wrong and twist the story. Even as a writer for The Breeze I had no idea that so much information in the article was wrong and inaccurate. This got me wondering how much large publications such as the Times may skew the information that they get to have a better story.
It's actually really scary to think that one of the only ways that students at JMU get their campus and local news is through The Breeze and that it turns out that The Breeze isn't really all that accurate with takes on one of the biggest stories. I haven't really had many issues with stories in The Breeze twisting information or being inaccurate, but according to my feature writing class it happens a lot. So why do you think a campus newspaper would twist information on a huge story and have you noticed this a lot in The Breeze?

1 comment:

Toni Mehling said...

Kristina,
You should read Erin's post in Politics and Media (or is it the other way around?). She writes about media bias.
I think it's really cool the way you are thinking about this and recording your thoughts even as they seem to be evolving.

TM