Journal Four

After having my interest in the Wall Street Occupation sparked in class, I've been closely following as many different articles and sources about the incident as I possibly can. Oddly enough, one of the best sources for coverage of the occupation isn't even a national newspaper; The Guardian has been supplying almost a new article every day since the protesting really got intense. One of the latest articles is about officer Anthony Bologna and the investigation he faces after videos were released of him questionably pepper-spraying some of the protestors.

This specific article, by Robert Mackey and Karen McVeigh, makes good use of sources to provide as accurate and unbiased of a view as they possibly can. The authors spoke to one of the protestors that was sprayed, as well as the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, to make sense of the news. However, the person that created the news - the cop in question - as well as the NYPD have not been interviewed. This doesn't seem to be from a lack of effort - many of the articles I have read on the subject seem to say that the NYPD has declined to comment on any of the situations.

What really struck me about this article was the use of video support as an additional source. The article is broken up by two videos, which the authors briefly analyze. These videos show two different perspectives of the incident, and the reader can really gain a sense of what happened from the visuals. Overall, I thought this coverage of the incident was admirable, as it paid a lot of attention to the sources to build the article.

The Baltimore Sun disappointed me this week. An article about loose potbelly pigs finally being captured headlined the website. However, it wasn't so much the subject of the news that had wishing for more, but the lack of sources in the article. While I understand that pigs can't really be interviewed, and therefore the "person" creating the news is eliminated as a source, the journalist only spoke to animal control. After reading the article, I am unsure of where the pigs came from (maybe a farmer is missing two pigs? house pets gone awry?), and I'm unsure what kind of effect the pigs had on a larger scale. There was no source to really make sense of the news for me, and the very brief article was severely underwhelming.