Media Evaluation Week 1

Savannah Alcala
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

The news articles I will be evaluating this week are “Jeff Bezos’ First Major Political Donation Is $10 Million to Elect Veterans” by Karen Weise for the New York Times and “Marquette Play ‘White Privilege’ Highlights Social Injustices Facing People of Color” by Teran Powell for Milwaukee’s NPR website.

I believe that Powell’s article about Marquette’s play “White Privilege” is highly beneficial to the reader, especially those in the Milwaukee area who are potentially able to see the play. While it is easy to write about such a controversial topic of discussion and show bias, Powell does a great job at keeping the article free of bias, stating only facts about the play and the playwright’s responses to the interview. Though there is slight bias in the statements that playwright Malania Moore make, the writer of this article makes sure to detach herself from the comments made by leading into her quotes with phrases like “Moore says…”

This article is also perceived as more unbiased and beneficial to those considering seeing the play because there are multiple people interviewed for the article. The other source Powell provides, Stephen Hudson-Mairet, is the head of the theater program at Marquette University. While both sources do come from Marquette’s theater department and those directly involved in the show, Powell places distance between herself and the statements made by the sources. Powell simply writes a general statement about the plot, where and when the play will be showing, and gives Moore a platform to talk about her hopes and intentions for the play.

Meanwhile, Weise’s article about Jeff Bezos’ donation to the With Honor Fund, an organization helping to financially support veterans running for government office, comes off as very cloudy and unclear.

At first glance, the article is very unbiased, as it seems to both show the generosity that Bezos shows in his donations to the fund while also showing each political party’s outrage, both past and present. But there lies the problem. The article is more of a negative article about Jeff Bezos’ past actions than an informational article about his donations and the effects of that donation. The article does focus on the donation at first, but once it gets into the past opinions of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the article goes on more of a tangent about how Bezos treats his employees. The title at this point seems to be clickbait in order to get people into the article so they can then read about Sanders’ legislation to make large companies like Amazon “reimburse the government for the costs of some of the federal benefits that their workers collect.” The topic of the article is convoluted, leaving the article harder to understand and hard to consider credible or unbiased.