Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Journalists, Numeracy And Cultural Capital, Steven Harrison

Numeracy

Journalists are tasked with holding power to account; often, that means evaluating and interpreting numbers. But anecdotally, journalists are ill at ease with figures. This shortcoming is worrying both in terms of the quality of news provided to the public, and the implications for informed democratic debate. This paper tests the assertion that journalism as a profession is numeracy-challenged through a small-scale study of the numeracy capabilities of journalism students. Some oft-cited reasons for these shortcomings are discussed, including the pressures of deadlines and the tyranny of the 24-hour news cycle, where the mantra of “never wrong for long” appears …

The Role Of The Press In Framing The Bilingual Education Debate: Ten Years After Sheltered Immersion In Massachusetts, Fern L. Johnson, Marlene G. Fine

New England Journal of Public Policy

In 2002 Massachusetts voters passed a voter initiative that changed the way children who are not fluent in English are taught. The initiative overturned the state’s requirement for “transitional bilingual education,” through which children are gradually transitioned, usually over a three-year period, from instruction in their native language to instruction entirely in English. Transitional bilingual education was replaced with “sheltered English immersion,” which places children with little or no English-language fluency in classes where almost all instruction is in English, with the expectation that they will move to regular English-only classrooms after one year.

We used frame analysis to examine …

Through The Linguistic Looking Glass: An Examination Of A Newspaper As Negotiator Of Hybrid Cultural And Linguistic Spaces, Anthony Spencer

Speaker & Gavel

I contend English-language media outlets could and should be viewed as minority-language media outlets as they are cultural negotiators for tourists, sojourners and other transnational migrants. To better understand the cultural and linguistic forces these English-language media outlets exert upon the host cultures and nations in which they exist, I performed three months of ethnographic observations at a newspaper in Costa Rica and conducted in-depth interviews with staffers. I particularly focus on the hybrid identities of the staffers as they in turn instruct their readers how to navigate this hybrid community. I identify and explain the themes, which emerged in …