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.

nahmed@tribune.com

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