Brianna Lyle

Entry 2

The first article I looked at was titled Mayor Curses the Beast, and it Didn’t Even Bite Him. This was written on February third and taken from the New York Times. This article sums up Mayor Bloomberg’s experience with the groundhog on groundhogs day. Although this article is not necessarily a hard news report, it does have some qualities of one, such as quotes and sources.

This piece is a public interest piece because citizens are inherently interested in what is going on with the people they’ve elected. One could say we deserve the right no know how they react to situations. Specifically, in the article, I can tell it is a public interest piece because the author is giving us a “play-by-play” of the events that happened before Bloomberg was bitten. The author is not lying about any of these things, because we can reference back to the video attached, knowing that what he writes in fact truth. The author also touched on what the zoo did after the woodchuck bit him. This shows public interest because the zoo is not funded by larger companies, but by smaller donations from the public.

I did see a lot of cynicism in this article, however. Towards the end (and even with the title) the author is almost trying to make Bloomberg look horrible. It’s true, the woodchuck did bite him and he did swear but the author extends this fact a little too much. He seems to be cynical of Bloomberg’s denials that he said anything “wrong.” Thu author quotes the mayor as saying “That was so much better than having to reach in and let the little son of a bitch bite you.” Later the author says that Bloomberg responded to last years incident with the groundhog as, “When asked about the epithet this morning, Mr. Bloomberg said he could not recall using any salty language, but added, ‘On the other hand, I think it’s also true that you really don’t have standing to talk about this unless you have been personally bitten by a groundhog.’” Phrases like “salty language” make the author seem a little too harsh on the mayor and also overly cynical to a situation that really is not breaking news.

The second article I read was titled The Real ‘CSI’: How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk. It was publish on ProPublica on February 1^st. This story is really interesting and completely geared toward public interest. It is about mistakes made in morgues around the country, leading to innocent people’s deaths.

This piece is geared toward the public interest because we inherently want to know what is going on behind crime scenes, especially if our loved ones could be falsely convicted. I think this article is also inherently filled with skepticism. The article could have not even of started if it were not for skepticism within the system. They were also skeptical enough to have a gigantic report conducted, “In a joint reporting effort, ProPublica, PBS "Frontline" and NPR spent a year looking at the nation's 2,300 coroner and medical examiner offices and found a deeply dysfunctional system that quite literally buries its mistakes.”

The article continues to be skeptical of doctors, giving examples such as failed test scores and sections labeled “A Series of Errors and Oversights.” The article is not cynical by any standards, it really is aimed towards discovering why these doctors are making mistakes, which involves much skepticism I think.

I thought this was a really great public interest piece because it really grabs listeners in to something that hopefully most of us find important, innocent people being killed!

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