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Estimated time to complete: 10-15 minutes

Supported Objective:

CO2: Demonstrate an ability to find, evaluate and integrate academic sources into your research papers and presentations in a manner consistent with US academic culture and UW-Madison’s policy on academic integrity.

Scholarly sources provide original research and can give excellent evidence to support a claim; we all know that. But where do you get the claim in the first place? One good source of arguable claims is the mass media.

When researchers publish their findings, it takes a lot of time. Even to do a study takes a long time. If I wanted to do a study on what international students think about college life in America, for example, first I would have to make a proposal, submit my research ideas to the Graduate School, take a 5-hour training course on how to do research ethically using Human Subjects, and wait for approval from the Graduate School. After getting approval, I could begin trial studies. If they went well, I could do the real study. It might take years. If you guys wanted to participate in my study, too bad! You'd probably have graduated before I even began the actual trials. Then, after I completed my study and wrote my paper, I could submit it to a journal, or several journals, and wait for other scholars to peer review it. It might come back for editing several times, or they might ask me to do more research before they'd approve it.

However, if I'm a reporter and I want to interview international students about their opinions on American universities, I can go out and ask international students lots of questions and it might appear in the newspaper the very next day!

Newspapers and news magazines are about current issues. They reflect popular opinion as it changes. Politicians want to know what the people think of them now, not three years from now.

So why use popular sources? Here are a few possible reasons.

To introduce a topic that people care about right now.

For example, I see the following headline from The Guardian (August 21, 2014):

“Ebola quarantine in Liberia's capital sparks violence in slum" (This is about the reaction of people in the West African nation’s capital when their movements were restricted in an effort to contain the worst effort outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus).

But this kind of timely issue might not be something you can investigate. It's difficult to make a claim about specific or event, but it's possible, if the purpose of your paper is to write about the conditions in certain developing countries which allow a disease like Ebola to become an epidemic.

To give background information about a topic or help you learn the non-technical, everyday language used to discuss a current topic.

The article, "Nearly 65? Time for the Medicare Maze" gives simple information on how the U.S. Medicare system works. It could help you explain the system using non-technical English terms, if you were writing a paper on the recent US health-care reform legislation.

To give very recent but easily verifiable data that hasn't been analyzed in a scholarly journal yet.

For example, suppose you are trying to show that the cost of public universities has gone up dramatically since 1980, but the most recent data from a scholarly source you can find charts the cost increases from 1980 to 2005.

Then, you discover in today's newspaper an article that says, "At Public Universities: Less for More". This article describes recent tuition hikes at the UW and other places. It's okay to use that information to show that a trend is continuing. This kind of information is generally factual, and you can usually trust a well-known newspaper to get the facts right. If you have any doubt, you can always go to the university's web page to corroborate the new tuition cost anyway, so it is easily verifiable.

To give examples and illustrations of a point you already have scholarly data for.

For example, suppose you are writing about women in the military, and you already have a lot of scholarly sources that show raw data about what kinds of jobs women are doing in the military. But the data you have is very dry and uninteresting. To make your paper more interesting, think about this newspaper article:

"Threats and Responses: Intelligence Sergeant; A Woman Serving on the Blurred Edge of Combat." This article is about a woman named Sgt. Jennifer M. Raichle, who may soon become the first female soldier to see combat in the US Army.

Also, you are more likely to find pithy, vivid, quotable comments from people who have firsthand experience with your topic in a newspaper or news magazine.

Can you think of other reasons?

Take a look at the following headlines, and write down what kind of thesis this article might be used to support. For each one, write down whether the article might be useful as a) background information for an issue, b) to give up-to-date information, c) as support for a claim, d) as a claim itself, e) as a way to show why a claim is relevant, or f) other reasons (explain).

"23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million"
"REALLY? The Claim: Men and Women Differ in Their Tolerance to Cold"
"Pushing Fresh Produce Instead of Cookies at the Corner Market"
"Britain Sets Tough Laws for Texting While Driving"
"An Application to Help Scrub Those Regrettable Photos From Facebook"
"Findings on Mysterious Haze at Galaxy’s Center"
"Sweden Focuses on Cutting Fuel Emissions"
"Children Watch More TV Than Ever"
"Time Inc. Is Expected to Eliminate More Jobs"
"Immigration Rally Draws Thousands"