Third Year Winner: Media Coverage of The Billionaire Space Race: The Case of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Democracy Now!

WRIT 3011, Reading the News. CD: Karen Ruddy.

Abstract

“Media Coverage of the Billionaire Space Race” is the very picture of a formal academic essay. The writer of this well-researched and convincing paper carefully employs a variety of critical lenses while analyzing both the CBC’s and Democracy Now’s media coverage of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson’s recent extra-terrestrial exploits. The paper is written in fluent academic style and its composer makes excellent use of media theory to explore the tone, framing, and visuals behind both networks’ reporting on the two vanity projects. The author has done particularly well to pack so much cogent and telling analysis into only a few pages—no space is wasted and no stone left unturned either.

The paper concludes by noting “how commercial pressures to generate ad revenue, practical pressures to allocate limited resources, and professional pressures to remain ‘neutral’” are frameworks applied to both the CBC and Democracy Now. A quick and interesting read, the writer’s argument was clear and convincing: the CBC, a so-called bastion of “public broadcasting” is not nearly so effective in challenging dominant narratives as are alternative sources of news like Democracy Now!