Kare 11 News Broadcast at 10:00 pm, 11-11-09

News broadcast analysis:

The first segment was on a woman, Monica Say, whose picture was shown and who was arrested after having been caught with her two children, ages two and four, in a car that was swerving. She was dignosed to have twice the legal limit of alcohol and she had marijuana in the car as well. Her children were not buckled in their car seats. They showed her arrest picture as well as they had a clip of the public safety director giving his opinion on the case. This was Kare 11s lead story and it lasted about two minutes. They attempted at making it really shocking to grab viewers attention and to create outrage and interest so that the viewers would keep watching.

The next segment was on two horses that got shot in two separate pastures, but owned by the same person. They used really good photo and video shots and you got a good sense of what happened to the horses, you saw the bullet wounds, and you felt sympathy for the horses. The shooter ended up being a thirteen-year-old autistic neighbor of the man who owned the horses. This segment was around 2 minutes as well.

After these two longer segments, the following were a bunch of quickly mentioned news:

* U of M football player accused of assault by a woman who says he hurt her after she spoke to his girlfriend
* Calvin Collum is a teacher who was arrested after having sex with a student at a high school
* Governor Pawlenty and Mike Jungbauer and the governor's race
* Unofficial winners of the election
* President Obama made an unscheduled stop in Arlington Cemetary
* ROTC vets had a vigil for Veteran's Day
* Lou Dobbs of CNN gave his last broadcast. He is quitting to pursue other interests

This next segment was longer, 1-2 minutes:

Minnesotans are watching more television due to the economy. They had clips of people watching tv and people giving their opinions

This segment was also longer, 2-3 minutes:

High school students were learning about money management in what this station calls its "Take Care of Your Money" report. The students were at a clinic where they went around to stations with a new identity and had to figure out how to live on a budget. I liked this segment, it was well shot and had good interviews.

Next is two short segments, about 30 seconds each:

The first was about a sandbag calculator for the Red River Valley to help figure out how many sandbags would be needed for flooding purposes.

The next segment was entitled "Before we go" and was a cutsie segment to end the show with, California skydivers.

Analysis:

I thought it was interesting that they were all young, attractive, and white. They began with a shocking story and the scary news first. Next they ran short political news, and then they ended with local and cutsie stuff.

News that I watch: I do a lot of internet news through yahoo and various other sites. I also watch Meet the Press every week.

One paragraph activity:

I would have my students in political science watch a few different news programs and their goal would be to record the topics and the angle they were presented in. Their goal would be to look for media bias. After they collected this information from various sites we would analyze it as a class, or they would write an essay explaining and analyzing their findings.