D Block Criminology 12 - Remember Schadenfreude? Russell Williams was a heavy weight in the Canadian military. He was a powerful person who "fell from grace" which is part of what made his murders of Marie France Comeau and Jessica Lloyd a "newsworthy" crime story. But what about another person with power...one who was completely opposite of the character to Williams. What of Rob Ford?
What is the difference between Russell Williams and Rob Ford? They both got an enormous amount of media coverage, but look at how Ford was lampooned in the media as opposed to Russell Williams. Rob Ford was treated more as comic relief as opposed to news. CTV posted an article that claimed:
The Rob Ford saga has received more intensive media coverage in the United States than any other Canadian news story since the turn of the century, newly released media-monitoring figures suggest. "No story in the 21st century has given Canada this much exposure," said Jean-Francois Dumas, president of the Montreal-based media monitoring firm. "It's not just the tabloids. It's not just People. It's the New York Times, the New York Post. All sorts of media covered this. It became a social phenomenon.... It's truly exceptional in terms of coverage."
Ford, of course, became internationally notorious last month when he admitted having smoked crack cocaine, "probably in one of my drunken stupors," while apologizing and insisting he's not an addict.
According to the Influence calculations, Rob Ford was mentioned in 14,385 stories on U.S. TV, radio, websites and in newspapers between Nov. 4 -- the day before his fateful admission -- and Dec. 1. Dumas said the story appeared in 75 countries and was the third most-covered story in the world on Nov. 6, while nearly 80 per cent of the foreign coverage occurred in the U.S.
I have three questions for you to answer:
- Do you think the news coverage of Col. Russell Williams' sentencing was too sensational? Do you think the court was right to release so much information and that the Canadian press were right to publish it all, or do you think that there is such a thing as too much information, and that there are some details we really don’t need to know? (Watch the following CBC story to help...
- How did the Canadian and American coverage of the Russell Williams case differ? Use the NBC Dateline episode "Conduct Unbecoming" as well as the Fifth Estate episode "Above Suspicion" as your sources of information.
- Why did the Rob Ford story garner so much attention in Canada and the United States? Was too much information revealed about Rob Ford's problems? Given the different socio-economic backgrounds of Williams and Ford and the different crimes they committed was the Ford case more media worthy than Williams? Why?
C Block Human Geography 11 - Today we continue with our key issue, "Why Do Services Cluster in Settlements"? The process by which the populations of urban settlements grow is known as urbanization. Urbanization has two dimensions: an increase in the percentage of people living in urban settlements and an increase in the number of people living urban settlements. These two factors have different global distributions and occur for different reasons. So, Vancouver?
Would you live in the downtown of a city or out in the suburbs?
B Block Physical Geography 12 - Today we are going to make sense of ecosystem evolution and community succession (thrown in will be the terms establishment and extinction). We'll try to understand how species co-evolve and adapt to create complex communities (self regulation and emergent properties) and then we'll look at Mount St. Helens to understand primary and secondary succession. We'll watch the last portion of the DVD "Fire Mountain: The Eruption and Rebirth of Mount St. Helens" in order to better grasp the rates of recovery for ecosystems around the volcano. The embedded video below from PBS is also a very good (specifically chapters 3 "The Blowdown Zone" and 5 "Bouncing Back") You'll need to complete questions 21 and 22 from page 662 of your Geosystems text along with a question on fire ecology and the effects of modern fire suppression. For more on ecosystem services and conservation see the National Geographic Earth Pulse website
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