Teaching a Stealth Information Literacy Class on Reading The New York Times: Comparisons

This research paper compares coverage of the U.S. Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor in two leading United States newspapers, The New York Times and the Washington Post. The qualitative textual analysis examines news frames employed by the two papers and finds that they focused on the horse race, the nominees' personalities, their ethnicity and gender roles. The study concludes that the newspaper coverage failed to provide much useful information to the public about how the nominees would perform on the court, instead focusing on the politics of the hearings. It also concludes that coverage focused heavily on Sotomayor's ethnicity but paid scant attention to Alito's. As much as Sotomayor's "wise Latina" statement was played up in the news, Alito's statement about his ethnicity was played down. In addition, the newspapers cast Sotomayor and Martha-Ann Alito, Samuel Alito's wife, into stereotypical female gender roles. Alito similarly was defined in a stereotypical male gender role.

A study was conducted to compare how two U.S. newspapers visually portrayed the first week of two natural disasters—the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005. Data were obtained from a content analysis of 264 photographs related to the two disasters in the first week that were published in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Findings revealed that although both newspapers gave more space to the “lives-saved” frame in both disasters, both also showed more images of death and emotions in the case of the tsunami, while coverage of Hurricane Katrina included more depictions of relief work and survivors. Findings suggested that while the tsunami victims were unknown faces, the newspapers had to recognize that particular images of the aftermath of Katrina might cause outrage among the American public. Findings are discussed in detail.

Many scholars have attempted to understand certain aspects of translation and its fundamental role in constituting reality and representing the Other during media news coverage of international events. However, translation is often an invisible activity during such coverage. The relationship between translation and representation of the Other in the global media and news texts raises ethical questions about translation and textual manipulation. This dilemma is reinforced by the media's selection of specific quotations and narratives for translating and publishing. It also imposes the question of media responsibility and translators' ethics towards representing the Other, especially when the media deal with international events. The majority of media codes of ethics do not mention translation as a fundamental factor in ensuring and maintaining news accuracy and objectivity as well as fair representation of the Other. This paper scrutinizes media responsibility and translation ethics based on The Guardian and The New York Times' representation of the Syrian humanitarian disaster (SHD) as embedded in the translated quotations and narratives told by Syrian citizen journalists (residents, refugees, protesters, eyewitnesses, and activists). To do so, it draws on Mona Baker's narrative theory, on Stuart Hall and Edward Said's theory of representation, and on media responsibility and translation ethics theoretical approaches. Accordingly, the corpus consists of 326 news texts distributed as follows: 177 news texts from The Guardian and 149 news texts from The New York Times. This represents a three-year timeframe of the SHD, from March 2011 to February 2014. The findings provide further understanding of the media's responsibility in representing the events of the Other and translation ethical practices in the text

This paper examinesThe New York Times’ andWashington Post’s coverage of US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan to determine whether they have accurately reported on the number of civilians killed in drone strikes and the overall civilian impact, as well as whether they have placed drone strikes within their proper legal context. The author concludes that both newspapers have failed to report the number of civilian casualties accurately and have underemphasized the civilian impact of drone strikes, while also excluding international legal issues from their coverage.