Thursday, April 15, 2004

Pining for the fjords

[have not been dead, just taxing.]

via Pure Land Mountain, Christian Science Monitor on critical thinking ("...a remarkable paucity of critical thinking taught at the undergraduate level - even though the need for such skills seems more urgent than ever...")

Recent Christian Science Monitor article on rural sprawl in the West, older (March 2001) article on us.

The bad old days -
On Poynter, looking at modes of coverage of environmental news in the American West:
...large majority of Western dailies rely heavily on the same two story formats to convey information and explain its significance. Just two formats - the same two, over and over. One is the Inverted Pyramid....

The other dominant story format on the West's environment beat is the Battleground Framework. No matter how revealing the issue's history or how relevant the freshest peer-reviewed science, most Western newspapers make a habit of reducing the story's central theme to conflict.

..In many Western newsrooms, the preference is for confrontational quotes. The more venom the better. We contend that this "quick-hit" approach runs the risk of slighting or omitting story elements that have the most usefulness for the audiences.

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