Overall, this article is quite well done. The timeliness factor is incredibly easy to locate: Obama just won the presidency. And this article was actually not an AP article, it was done by someone with the Religion News Service.
There are great uses of statistics throughout the piece, such as "70,000 Muslims voted in Virginia, a state that had not backed a Democratic president in more than 40 years, and which Barack Obama won by fewer than 160,000 votes," or "Early estimates indicate that between 70 and 90% of Muslim voters supported Obama this year."
I found it interesting that Judaism came up in an article about Muslims supporting Obama, shown here: "about 78% of Jews supported Obama." I feel like that whole paragraph is unnecessary. Why are Jews being talked about, and why does it talk about their support for John Kerry? What does this have to do with the piece? Is it just showing minority support for Obama in general? If so, the title should indicate that. I feel like the 10-12 paragraph are unimportant, and like they had to be specifically tied in to the rest of the piece (instead of just flowing).
"After months of balancing their support for the presidential candidate with concerns that their allegiance could do more harm than good, millions of relieved American Muslims cheered the election of the son of a Muslim immigrant whose middle name is Hussein." Who is saying this? How does she know this? I want attribution or something to back up this claim... it seems opinionated to me. How does she know it was a balancing act? How does she know what the concerns were? And how does she know they were relieved?
I found it interesting that although there was overwhelming Muslim support (70-90%) for Obama, they were still frustrated by parts of his campaign, such as removing two woman with head scarves from the background of a picture of a rally. I didn't know that that had happened. And I had never thought about the fact that while Obama said he was a Christian, he never said there was nothing wrong with being Muslim.
I really liked the ending, "There's an emerging coalition within the Muslim community that will have significant impact in the years to come."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-11-06-obama-muslims_N.htm
Saturday, November 8, 2008
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3 comments:
I agree with you Elizabeth, this article is well done in my opinion. I see you're point about those paragraphs; if the writer wanted to play up Obama's stance on US-Israeli relations I feel like she should have made that connection clearer for readers. The use of statistics is nice, not overbearing and yet a healthy amount.
Towards the end of the piece I did notice that the writer tried to wrap up the whole story by saying that minorities as a whole seemed to be supporting Obama; I just don't know if I liked how she went about doing so.
The ending definitely gave me a sense of closure, all in all I liked it.
You rightly point out the flawed lead. Journalists love to identify societal trends. They love trends so much that they'll create them out of whole cloth. As in this article, reporters often draw illogical inferences from a set of questionable premises.
So many articles have been written about the large turnout of young voters. I like that this article was about something else. It provided a new point of view on this election instead of the same stories we've heard over and over. So many stories have been told about this "great victory for African Americans," but this shows different people who are celebrating his victory. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Obama a Muslim? Didn't he convert to Christianity?)
I did agree with your point about the Jews though. It didn't really seem necessary.
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