Analyzing and Critiquing a News Story about Religion

Steps for Analyzing and Critiquing a News Story

Assignment: Analyze and critique a news story about religion. Steps: 1) Find an appropriate news story that deals with any subject matter that touches on religion. The story in question need not be especially earth-shaking (though it could be), as long as it presents some assertions or claims about some kind of religious data. I know that many people in this class can read and speak languages other than English, but the news story in question must be derived from an English-language source. The news source does not need to be a respectable one (though it can be). The Enquirer is as good as the New York Times for this assignment. The news source can be from a newspaper, an on-line news source, a TV news story, etc. The news source need not be especially lengthy, though it should contain enough material for you to engage with. Finally, the news story does not need to be from the immediate present — older stories are just fine. 2) Read the story carefully and take notes on it, paying particular attention to such things as: what specific religious tradition or traditions are covered in the piece; what factual claims are made about those religious traditions; whether those factual claims are accurate — do they provide information that is wrong (e.g., “Muslims worship Muhammad”) or over-generalized (e.g., “all Christians believe in purgatory”) or impossible to verify (e.g., “religious feeling is especially intense among Hindus”)? whether any specific religious roles or offices are mentioned, or if the people involved are all laity; what attitudes are taken to or implied about the individual beliefs, practices, traditions, and religious offices and actors mentioned in the piece; what implicit ideas there are about unity or division in the tradition(s) under consideration; what implicit definition of religion seems to be operating — what kinds of things are deemed religious in the story, and on what basis? (note the importance here of the word implicit — it is very unlikely that your story will actually offer a definition of religion; instead, you must tease out, from what is assumed in the piece to be religious (or not), what kind of definition is being taken for granted; whether the facts described as religious by the article fit better into what we would identify as type 1, or type 2, or both; what attitudes toward religion are implicit in the article: is religious implied to be good or bad, interesting or boring, important or irrelevant? how are these attitudes conveyed? 3) Write a paper that analyzes and critiques the news story on the basis of the details noted above. While this assignment will not be graded on its word-count, your paper should be about 6 pages long. The assignment should consist of a title page and content, as follows: The first paragraph of your paper should simply introduce the news story and give a fairly even-handed paraphrase of its content. The last paragraph should draw general conclusions from your analysis about the treatment of religion in the media. The remaining paragraphs, making up the bulk of the paper, can be organized as you see fit, but should answer, in some fashion, all of the following questions (as applicable): Is the news story accurate in its presentation of the religion(s) in question? Is its information accurate, and is it adequate? What does the story assume or imply about religion, and how are those assumptions communicated? How adequate are those assumptions and implications? What attitude toward religion is taken by the story, and do you think that this attitude is well-founded? Who benefits from such a perspective on religion, and how? How might the treatment of religion in the news be improved? The paper may be organized around a central thesis or argument. If it is, the thesis should be stated explicitly in the last line of the introductory paragraph. You may, however, instead organize the paper more as a report, providing information and analysis, but not necessarily a single argument. The paper must have a title page, as described below.