The news article I decided to analyze came from MSNBC’s website, titled “Experts: Australia Warming All Over” from Monday, March 15 2010. It deals with issues in global warming in Australia and the argument over the study putting most of the blame on human’s impact of the environment.
The headline of the line appears to be fairly straight forward. At first glance it appears to simply highlight the topic of the article. However if there was any issue that I could pick from the head from this headline, it would be the crediting only to the so called ‘experts’, while giving no acknowledgement to the opposition on this matter, which seems to be a common theme throughout this whole article. Even the subhead is completely devoted to a quote by the expert.
The sequence of this article is very easy to figure out. It clearly presents the idea of the accuracy of the 2007 report as the most important point, merely mentioning the critiques of the study in passing at the end of a few paragraphs. The article appears to be promisingly neutral in the first few paragraphs, hinting at many issues the critics of the study present. However, it fails to follow through by going more in depth into that side of the story, instead devoting it’s time to summarizing the report and giving “expert” opinions to support their accuracy.
The scope of this article is interesting, because it gives the impression of both a good, professional article with useful and interesting graphics, while also showing what I see as unprofessional advertisements right between two paragraphs, breaking the reader’s flow of the article. At the top of the article is a photograph of a fire restriction warning in Australia, due to the near decade long drought they have suffered apparently because of global warming. I felt that this photo was very helpful, and really contributed to the article. However, the middle of the article is interrupted by a fairly large advertisement for online products. To me, this undermines the authority of both the article and the entire website. I understand the need for advertising to cover costs, but by placing it in the middle of the article, it tells me they value their advertisers more than the readers and the actual article.
I feel as though the structure of this article is not very well done. As I mentioned before, it initially at covering both sides in the introduction, yet fail to follow through on it later in the article. It does extensively use a variety of statistics from the study to support the claims of the expert. However it also seems to somewhat contradict itself when it states that many of the findings of the report were false or over exaggerated earlier in the article. This does not make for a strong argument, further allowing doubt about the validity of the article’s argument.
I found it hard to determine the style of this article. It seems like it is attempting to be objective, report the facts, and be unbiased. But at the same time it fails to present both sides of the issue, and towards the end seems to clearly favor the side of the experts. So it leaves me thinking it either tried to be impartial and failed miserably, or was trying to show support the expert’s opinion but ended up shading a little doubt. Also, the insertion of all the statistics near the end of the article seems out of place and unnecessary, they don’t really add anything to the article. It seems to me the only reason to add those is as extra support of the expert’s opinion, just in case you don’t take their words for it.
The statement and slant of this article have already been pretty thoroughly described throughout this analysis, but I will recap them. I believe the article had an initial intention to objectively report the facts of both sides of this debate. However, it didn’t completely and evenly show both arguments, and in the end appeared fairly slanted towards the experts. It didn’t give fair space to the opposition, most likely because they would fall in the minority on this issue.
The conclusion to this article is rather anticlimactic, although it does leave one resounding thought with the reader: it gives a prediction of the expected temperature increases for the next 20 years, and leaves it up to us to decide whether or not this is a significant problem.
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