Good writers have a world view and an opinion. Opinions give a writer an angle and often encourage the writer to find the story. Yet these opinions and world views can sometimes come across as biased if the writer is not careful. Articles covering the death of the Georgian luge athlete at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics did a decent job of keeping bias out of articles while still presenting different views of the accident. Stories taken from The Seattle Times, The Vancouver Sun, and Time Online all talked to the Olympic organizers as well as other athletes at the games who use that track either for luge, bobsledding, or skeleton races. Vancouver is the host for the Olympics this year, they have a bias is wanted to present Vancouver as doing a good job of organizing the games. The Seattle Times has advertising from Budweiser which is supporting the Olympics games, the Vancouver Sun has numerous Olympic advertisements showing a strong opening for biased opinions from advertisers. Within the stories themselves people who disapproved of how Vancouver has run the games, or didn't want the games in Vancouver stand to gain; however, presented with the other bias VANOC (Vancouver Olympic Committee) stands to benefit from good press. The Seattle Times articles judges the Vancouver Olympic games, later the articles turns around and becomes better balanced. The Vancouver Sun presented an article that was based from the Olympic committee perspective. All three articles are written by different people and the opinions of the writer flow out through the order in which they put the information, the sources and the word choices. All the articles end in a balanced matter having presented both sides of the story and shown great respect to Nodar Kumaritashvili, however the opinions driving the writer to investigate the article are present.
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"Within the stories themselves people who disapproved of how Vancouver has run the games, or didn't want the games in Vancouver stand to gain; however, presented with the other bias VANOC (Vancouver Olympic Committee) stands to benefit from good press."
ReplyDeleteThe biggest problem I can see is a verb tense change. It seems that the first part of the sentence is in past tense, while the rest of the post is in present tense.
"Vancouver is the host for the Olympics this year, they have a bias is wanted to present Vancouver as doing a good job of organizing the games."
To begin with, the comma should be a semi-colon, but the sentence really makes no sense. It would read better with "They have a bias as they would want to show that Vancouver is doing a good job organizing the Olympics
I really liked the article Jen, you did a good job in writing it. What I noticed was in the sentace: "Vancouver is the host for the Olympics this year, they have a bias is wanted to present Vancouver as doing a good job of organizing the games," The words "is wanted" seem to be out of context. Perhaps replacing it with by wanting?
ReplyDeleteAlso the picture at the top is a bit to big and has some issues fitting into the space provided.
Over all, though, I really liked it. It was well thought out.