The article “U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna” talks about the details on rejection of bluefin tuna and protect of Polar bears, with statistics and the “experts’ opinions”. It is one of the typical environmental issue articles. With basic truths, and won’t grab much attention from readers.
Before taking a close look at the article, let’s just think one basic question: What is the news values showed in this article? Prominence?—not really. Proximity—maybe, it depends. It may make Canadian people take more attention when talking about polar bears. Continuity? Yes—but at the same time it will made the article less interesting and will make fewer people pay enough attention to it.. People nowadays prefer “popular news” rather than serious news with lack of novelty in it. Negativity?—yes it is. However it also made itself less interesting, for the reason that people are easier to get fed up with such not good news.
When looking at the headline, it shows the topic in an objective tone, and we can obtain the information that this article is going to talk about rejecting exportation of tuna. But the truth is not. The article in fact was not only talk about the tuna but also polar bear, as we can see in the lead. In addition, it even talked about the sharks and elephants at the bottom of the article, tries to show the effect of “news package” as we talked about in the class. In my opinion, on one hand, it is the typical pyramid model for news. The least important information is at the bottom of the article; on the other hand, the article doesn’t do well in having a clear topic in one piece of news. Readers, who concern on this specific issue, cannot get much useful information as they wish to.
The lead is good and precise, it has “what, where, who” and “when”. Readers can get basic ideas soon enough after they read the lead. However, when I read the following context, I found that the following context doesn’t strongly support the lead. For me, it is more like the combination of two separate news stories. I guess that’s another problem for environmental issue articles. The newspaper needs the article to fill in the space, but usually the reporters cannot find the real “experts” to give strong evidence, for the lack of enough time or money. Even if they find some real experts, it will only cost them more time to simplify the words and opinions the experts gave them. So they just write the story in a very plain way, with basic facts and few strong evidences. They do it because they know such articles will not grab as much attention as those “hard news”, not mention the “popular news”.
Take a look at the sources, the Statement and Slant. The reporter offers two pictures which contain relatively high levels of “conflict”, the conflict between human desire and animals. The sources are “a spokesman for the United Nations organization”, “American officials” and “assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks”. Basically they could tell nothing but their own opinions. When the “American officials” tries to give his “official opinions” on both tuna and polar bear issues, they can just do it in a very vague way, such as “expressed disappointment in the vote, but said they would keep trying in various international forums to protect the tuna and the bears.” which really didn’t make much sense here. And the passage also showed a little bias on Japanese here in some way. Such as when they described the rejection, it used the phrase like “a clear victory for the Japanese government”. There is only one source with his name and title, which it “Masanori Miyahara, chief counselor of the Fisheries Agency of Japan”, but later I found out that it is not a first-hand source. As the reporter for this article simply used the sources from AP, as he claimed “the AP reported” before quotation.
The ending of the story is even a little sloppy. They began to talk about another topic, elephants and sharks. And I don’t really see the connection with the previous information they gave about the tuna and polar bear. There have four animals in one passage, with weak connection, which sounds a little ridiculous. I chose New York Times as my news outlet because at least it belonged to the “Elite media”. But sometimes, especially on environmental issues, it seems elite media doesn’t do it in a good enough way as well.
link of the passage:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/science/earth/19species.html?ref=earth
