Short Assignment # 3

   The overarching problems with Mark Leibovitch's essay for The New York Times Magazine "Let Us All Bear Witness To The Conversation!" are a lack of focus that leads to meandering into topics that don't appear relevant, word choice that gives the essay a biting and almost too-mean tone, and a lack of clarification on important facts, like names of places and the chronology of events.
In Killingworth and Palmer's essay "Transformations", news is defined as the presentation of something that the audience doesn't already know. What Leibovitch seems to be struggling with and in fact reacting to is discussion or conversation about a news event being presented as news.
   However, in his eagerness to condemn his fellow journalists, Leibovitch makes several mistakes.
He begins his essay with a topical event: the shooting of Michael Brown. Unfortunately, he fails to include the fact that Brown was shot fatally, and does not include the name of the officer, who was the shooter. By doing this, he fails to give his audience a full picture, which is why I edited the first paragraph to include this information. He also adds prefixes like "so-called", "ostensibly" and "unsurprisingly" to several of his claims, which not only muddies the water for readers, but also creates an argument in Kaufer's fourth level of policy argument. It is clear from his tone that Leibovitch applies different local values to certain aspects of public discourse. But Caitlin! This is an opinion piece! He's allowed to do that!
    That's true, but when Leibovitch uses these prefixes, it's not in reference to his main topic,the news reporting on Ferguson, but in reference to his fellow journalists and public discourse as a whole, like the sentence that begins "In their lofty self-assessments..." In his essay, Leibovitch also includes a smattering of negative adjectives, like insipid, cheap, debacle, and even at one point compares Ferguson to a 'roiling cauldron'. I felt that these had to be removed or toned down in order to give the essay a firmer sense of authority, rather than a sensationalist piece, as it initially appeared to me.
   His other problem was meandering into irrelevance, as he does in his last three paragraphs, where he talks at length about the 2008 presidential primaries and subsequent elections. He even mentions Bill Clinton's presidency, 'Brangelina', and, for some reason, Johnny 'Football' Manziel, who he refers to as only Johnny Football, which is his nickname. I removed the paragraphs about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, following the "Cohesion and Coherence" section in the Style handbook.
I tried to give the essay a sharper focus on the over-all topic of the reactionary trend in popular news media, or what Leibovitch calls 'bearing witness', and to give more depth to the facts as Leibovitch presented them, in the paragraphs about the Brown shooting and the Foley beheading.