To claim to be comprehensive is dishonest, and stunts the intellectual growth of readers. It is important to bring historical context to new events- how else can you understand why ISIS exists, and has gained such power in a few short years? But that’s just a thumbnail. History is wine- full of variation and changing over time. News is like soda- produced to exacting standards, each unit identical in quality and makeup. Journalism has neither the space nor the context to accommodate deep complexity. If there is anything that history teaches us, it is the complexity of events, even those that seem straightforward. One thing that history guarantees us is that more significant events are around the corner, and it will take time to see if this news reporting supports or conflicts with prior history. Israel-Palestine is still unfolding, so is the war on terror and the Eurozone crisis. Detail, in two to three paragraphs, your experimental methods. Go back, when writing your final draft, and specify the brand names of any science equipment you used, as well as the company supplying your compounds. Any deference to history would see “everything you need to know” stricken from article titles. Write a paragraph summarizing the materials you used. What many data-driven news sites attempt to do (538 is another, though narrower in focus) is explain historical issues within the style and vocabulary of news. Still, they run into a wall when it comes to big, long-standing issues. In contrast, Vox is more free-flowing and creative. WonkBlog was a place for very smart people to analyze really dumb, ineffective legislation. When media outlets go big-scale, they run into the maxim: journalism is not equivalent to history, rather they are two points connected within the same space but quite different times. In some cases it comes off as empty swagger does anybody really think that this article explains everything you need to know about the Israel-Palestine conflict? This attitude about big issues has received criticism (examples here for fairly apolitical and here for a conservative response). Several red flags come from titles like that. One news trope that has emerged, most egregiously at Vox, are articles about big issues stating that they are “everything you need to know”. I thought this quote had an obvious origin in former Washington Post president Philip Graham, however a feature on Slate pointed out that it comes out of the 1940s and has been said by many people in the same era that Philip did. It connects what explains unfolding events with events that have unfolded and must be explained. This line has over time become a maxim within the industry as a whole. “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”
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