Exercise 1.3: Positive and negative spin

November 20th
I'm still struggling to complete this exercise as I can't find any commonality between any tabloid newspaper and a broadsheet.  Not only have I looked online but disrupted the news stand at my local newsagents to try to find the dame story in both newspapers.

Look at some different newspapers and note how racial issues are covered in the modern press.  Don’t just look at stories that specifically involve race – look, too, at stories where one or more of the people involved just happen to be black (or Asian, member of a traveller community, etc.).  concentrate particularly on the photographic imagery used to accompany the stories.  Is there a difference between the ‘quality’ broadsheet press (eg The Guardian) and the tabloid press (eg The Sun).  Make some notes in your learning blog.

Next, compare an image from a broadsheet newspaper with a tabloid image.  If possible, choose two images portraying the same (or similar) person or event.  The story you choose could involve race, but it doesn’t have to.  The idea of the exercise is to show you how public perception of a person or event can be influenced by the photographic imagery used.

Read the commentary and the headlines to see how the person or event is being portrayed in words, then study the images carefully.  For example, look to see whether the images have been cropped differently.

• Where different images have been used for the same story by different papers, what do you think is the editorial basis for each choice?

• Is each story positive or negative, sympathetic or sensational?

• If a reader was just given the headline and the image for each story, what different conclusions might they draw?  Or is there no difference?

• How has the imagery been used to influence/manipulate the reader?

Place the images and your analysis in your learning blog.