ANALYSE THIS

An important part of media education is to learn how existing media across all platforms cover an issue or event or a person, and run a comparative analysis of such coverage. We call it The Week That Was, or simply TWTW, in this course. 

This year, as we all waited to get into the classroom towards the end of 2020, we did three rounds of debates on topics that were in the news. Each debate allowed students to learn the art of sorting information, using it without its baggage, building arguments for or against, using logic to analyse and so on. All this eventually went into TWTW. 

In TWTW, each of the three teams in the class select a news event or issue from the immediate preceding week, map how news media covered it and framed it, chronicle the quantitative coverage and analyse it qualitatively. The media include print, television, podcasts, online publications, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Comparing a slew of sources within each media, such as four newspapers or three television channels, sometimes in different languages, and comparing between the different media allows students to learn essential information about selection of an event or issue, selection of information about that, sources used, space or time allotted, framing and labelling, bias and slant, news and opinion, and more. 

A team’s presentation is followed by a question-and-answer session where all questions come from the audience that’s the rest of the class. This way, TWTW also teaches students to anticipate questions and respond to the ones asked with alacrity and quick thinking. The last segment in TWTW is when Smruti takes over to offer comments, point to the hits and misses (some Aha moments happen here), and fill in the gaps in the news on the chosen issue or event. 

The batch of 2020-21 presented six complete TWTWs, each team doing two, on a range of news events such as farmers’ protests, Covid-19 vaccine, and “love jihad”. Have a look.

-Smruti Koppikar