Home » English 101 Syllabus

Essay Two: Spin, Polticking and the Electronic Media

Submitted by bradb on Mon, 09/19/2005 - 07:47.
Be sure to follow and read the material at the bottom of this page, below the links to videos. Here's a sample of an early draft.

With this assignment, your task is to find a video online that is being used to shape (political) thinking in relation to notions of persuasion as touched on by the assigned readings, chapters three and four, in UnSpun. The primary focus of the assignment calls for you to analyze and examine how the various elements of the video you choose are used to construct opinion. To set this up, you are to use an idea (or ideas) put forth in the readings as a springboard for your discussion. As part of this analysis, you are to make a judgment about the video, touching on such things as whether it is overly manipulative, cynical, misleading or what have you and what this means within the context of contemporary American politics, democracy and/or life. You are also to discuss just how the manipulation, cynicism, or what have you is developed through the use of some analytical elements we'll be discussing in class.

Choose a video from one any of the presidential candidates, any political action committee, political party, or from one of the many political organizations (often referred to as "527's" because of the IRS rule that governs their behavior) that have sprung up as a result of recent changes in campaign finance laws (such as MoveOn.org or Swiftboat Veterans for Truth). A list and some links are provided, but they won’t be exhaustive by any means. The readers of essay will be me, your teacher, of course, but also your classmates, other SFCC English faculty in the portfolio process and anyone you might invite by our blog (they can create an account if they wish), or who wanders by, this website. Your ultimate goal is to get these readers to see that you have done a good reading of the ad, demonstrated its relationship to the assigned readings, and that you have made a clearly articulated point that highlights some "truth" about how the ad works, all backed up with evidence. We're looking for about 1000-1200 words, which works out to about a full three or four pages, typed and double-spaced in a 12-point font.

You are to use the following material and guidelines on dissecting political ads, essential for doing a good job on this assignment:

Here are some links to videos you might want to use:

Presidential Candidates

Washington Gubernatorial Candidates

Organizations

‹ Summary Response RubricupAssignment Goals and Expectations ›
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question

Submitted by crystalainardi on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 21:35.

So when we write this, do we give a link to the video we have dissected as cited work?

Thanks

Crystal

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naming the video

Submitted by bradb on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 11:18.

I normally don't call for a works cited on this assignment, but technically, I should. In the body of the essay, you'll want to provide the video title, which you can usually find. The example I provided is "New Energy" so you might write something like "In the "New Energy" ad produced by the Obama campaign and found on YouTube, viewers will see that . . . " or something like that. There's no need in the body of the essay to provide the URL (which is Uniform Resource Locater, otherwise known as the web address). That would be provided on the works cited page. Bradley

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Locke

Submitted by mar69_05 on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 18:06.

where do you find Locke, the Second Treatise?

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my stupid

Submitted by bradb on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 20:39.

I should have removed all references to Locke and replaced them with UnSpun. I'll fix that now. Bradley

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I went to Chris Gregoire

Submitted by kelllygirlll on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 14:38.

Her site has ads that play. Are we supposed to choose only one of them and write our essay evaluation on one alone or are we supposed to look at several and do it for a group of them. One seems short for how big the assignment is.
Kelly

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one is plenty

Submitted by bradb on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 14:59.

After I go through my lecture material, you, I hope, will see that there is plenty to work with for each video. For instnace, if you write about candidate mythology, you open the paragraph with some brief description of just what candidate mythology is and does. This will take two or three sentence. Follow that with a brief introduction of the video portion(s0 that show the mythology and describe those as fully as possible. Then explain why it all matters in relation to the essay's thesis and springboard passage the thesis builds on. If you cover several points in this way, candidate mythology, depicted actions, background locations, appeals, props or what have you, you should cover three or four points about a single video and you might be surprised how much there is to say. Bradley

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Video Ads

Submitted by kelllygirlll on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 14:30.

I am a little confused. I went on the Obama link and there are several video clips. I didn't see any that looked like a commercial. One was a speech by Obama, are we supposed to be looking for a commercial or a speech or other, like the festival in Colorado? Obama was not even in that one. I am not sure what to look at.
Kelly

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on ads

Submitted by bradb on Mon, 07/14/2008 - 14:56.

Dang, I just deleted my message.

Anyway, it seems the Obama campaign has changed this section of the site since I last looked, which hasn't been all that long. during the primary campaign, it was mostly short ads. However, despite the change from 30 and 60 second ads to longer videos, the same tools from the Savvy Voter site can be applied. Those I've looked at lack music for the most part, and slick editing, and the use of super-imposed words, but there are still emotion communicating faces, background locations, clothing/dress, depicted actions, appeals and mythologies. They are just less slickly produced and last longer.

To find some of the older ads, you can go to youtube and search using "obama." Here's one I found that has a lot to work with, though it lasts about two minutes: http://youtube.com/watch?v=AmUUYo9o9eg

Bradley

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I don't want to write about them

Submitted by terihd on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 17:29.

I would rather look up Ron Paul. Can I do that or do I have to report on those other two?

Teri
Keep Smiling, makes people wonder whay you have been up to.

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on ron paul

Submitted by bradb on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 19:17.

While Ron Paul is history as far as this campaign goes, I guess it would be okay to look at what he did. If you want to look at the Libertarian candidate, which is pretty much what Paul was when he was running, even though he was running as a Republican, you can look at Ron Barr, who is the official Libertarian candidate. Either way, you'll get what I'd like from the assignment if you look at a Paul video. Bradley

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